What You Don’t Know That You Don’t Know

Acts 19:1-10
It was in Ephesus that the Apostle Paul encountered some disciples whose knowledge of the faith was limited. “(Paul) said to them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?" They replied, ‘No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit’” (Acts 19:2). According to Acts, Paul quickly shared the gospel with them, and when they were baptized in the name of Jesus “the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied - altogether there were about twelve of them” (v. 6b-7).

It seems significant that the number of these “disciples” was twelve. That of course is the number of the original disciples called by Jesus. It is also the number of the tribes of Israel. The number twelve also shows up in accounts of the feeding of the five thousand as the number of baskets needed to collect the leftovers (Matthew 14:20, and John 6:13). This is a fairly common number associated with the Christian faith, and not to oversimplify the point, but when the author of Acts tells us there were “about twelve” of these disciples it would seem to indicate that they, as a group, are representative of the gospel enterprise as a whole, all those who have been called, set aside, and tended to by God through Jesus Christ. In other words they represent you and me as people of faith. If this group of twelve had more to learn about what they believed (in their case, the existence of the Holy Spirit), then it appears that all of us have more to learn.

What is it that we need to know? Sometimes the only way to answer that question is to pay attention. A friend of mine is fond of saying, “It’s amazing what you know that you didn’t know you knew.” The reverse of that would also be valid: it’s amazing what we don’t know that we don’t know. The best way to deal with this lack of knowledge is to study, and to ponder, and to pray, and to share, and to consider, and to ask, and to compare notes, and to attend church and Sunday school, and to read, and to reflect, and to do all sorts of other things in order to learn what it is we didn’t know we didn’t know. Then we, like the twelve disciples of Acts 19, may live more fully for God because we, like them, will have more of the tools we need to do the work of God’s reign.

Prayer: God, help us to open our hearts and minds to your word, humbly receiving its truth for our lives. In Jesus’ name. Amen.