Feeding the Lambs - Holy Spirit?

Paul in Ephesus

"and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”
Acts 19:2

[26th message of the New Believer Series]

In the preceding message we tried to shine some light on the Holy Spirit being a believer's ever present help.

Although like the gift of salvation, if a believer does not accept this help, then nothing comes out of it.

Worse is when a believer does not even know (or heard) about the Holy Spirit.

Holy Spirit? Never Heard of That!

There is a little incident that was recorded by Luke in the Book of Acts and it goes like this.

"While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

So Paul asked, “Then what baptism did you receive?”

“John’s baptism,” they replied.

Paul said, “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.”On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. There were about twelve men in all."
Acts 19:1-7

Lack of Knowledge

Like some new believers, these early believers in Ephesus (an ancient Greek city of Asia Minor, in what is now Western Turkey), knew nothing about the Holy Spirit.

Some of us new believers today may have already heard of the Holy Spirit but knew nothing much, or what little we do know is not even biblically true.

Second Baptism?

We have discussed in a previous message about water baptism being one of the church's ordinances -- this is otherwise known as the baptism of John (the Baptist).

Now the bible speaks about a second baptism (as described by Luke in that passage we just read above taken from the Book of Acts). We will not touch on this yet, as we need to go over a few other things before we would go there.

For now, we just need to be completely conscious of the fact that it is not uncommon to be unaware of the Holy Spirit and many other things written in Scriptures, such as a second baptism and be a believer especially if no one will ever tell us about these.  This sad reality is true of many believers around the world because there is no one to teach it to them. 

An Old Testament passage records the Prophet Hosea  saying:

God's people perish from lack of knowledge.

The same is true today. This lack of knowledge and even wrong teaching (intentional or not) that we have today is a bane to all new believers.

As we have come to know, the sign of new believers is their eagerness or their passion to know more about Christ and their new found faith in Him. The reverse is also true, casual believers (if there is even such a term) have no drive to know more, and worse believe that what they do know is enough. This is not true, Peter, James, John and all the other disciples of Jesus were with Him day and night for several years but still didn't know enough. It was the Holy Spirit who taught them the things that they still needed to know after Jesus had finished His redemptive ministry.

We will continue this teaching next time. (Yes, there is much to learn even for seasoned believers).

New Believer Series