The Question Paul Asked
There is a question that Paul asked twelve disciples in Ephesus around two thousand years ago that I suspect most believers have never been asked. I had not been asked it before we recorded this episode. And I think that says something important about the state of the modern church.
Acts 19:2 is the verse at the heart of Book Two of Dan Murphy’s New Blood Covenant series, and it is the doorway into the Entering the Covenant podcast series. Paul arrives in Ephesus and finds a group of disciples, twelve of them, who are sincere, faithful, and, in one specific way that mattered enormously, incomplete. His first question to them is not a theological quiz. It is a pastoral one: did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?
Their answer is one of the most revealing in the New Testament. They had not so much as heard whether there is a Holy Spirit. They knew repentance. They knew belief. They had been baptised, into John’s baptism. But they had walked most of the journey without reaching the destination. And Paul’s response is what struck me most in our conversation. He did not simply inform them and move on. He walked them through each element of the covenant step by step, right there in Ephesus, until they spoke with tongues and prophesied. The covenant was complete. Dan described this as one of the most important passages in all of Acts, not because it is dramatic, but because it is diagnostic. It diagnoses something that is still happening today.
There are sincere, faithful, genuinely loving believers in churches all over the world who have heard the question Paul asked for the very first time in this podcast. And the reason, Dan argues, is not that they rejected anything. It is that they were simply never shown the full picture.
That is what this series is. It is the full picture, offered warmly and without condemnation, to anyone who is ready to look at it.
I found myself quietly moved in this episode by the image of Paul walking those twelve disciples through the covenant step by step. There is something deeply tender about it. God did not look at their incompleteness with disappointment. He sent someone to walk them the rest of the way. I think that is still how He works.
Has anyone ever asked you the question Paul asked? Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? If not, what would it mean to sit with that question honestly?
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