Sometimes it is the shortest of Bible passages that carry the most important  messages for us. Today’s gospel is short but its implications are big. In this passage, Jesus, just before his death, makes two things clear to his followers. The first is that they don’t know everything. They don’t know everything about God. They don’t know everything about how to live. They have much still to learn. “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” But they are not to worry, because when they no longer have his visible presence with them, they will not be on their own. They will have the unseen presence of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit will help them wrestle with whatever they will need to know in the future for the living of their lives. And this is something quite open-ended. Jesus doesn’t say, the Holy Spirit will tell you all you need to know within six months, or a year, or a decade, or a century. Guided by the Holy Spirit, there is no time limit to discovering and learning new things. So this is a message for us, latter day disciples, as well. Learning, discovering, understanding afresh, is something we will go on doing all our days and Christians will go on doing down the centuries. And it’s not hard to see why. Because times change. And what we need to know now may not be all we need to know in some other part of our lives. It may not be all the human race needs to know in some distant future. Guided by the Spirit, we will go on discovering and learning. So for the Church, yes, the early centuries are important. These are the centuries when, guided by the Spirit, the first Christians set down in writing the key things they recalled from the life of Jesus – the gospels. These are the centuries when they worked out who Jesus was and what his coming meant. As people who believed in one God, they had to understand how you hold together the notion of one God, yet a God who makes himself known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – the idea of God as a unity yet a trinity of persons. And in those first centuries they eventually formulated the creed – which we will say in a moment – and which has guided all our thinking as Christians ever since. If that’s the first thing about this little passage – that guided by the Holy Spirit, we will go on learning – there is a second point which follows directly from it. It’s not always understood and it’s more controversial. Learning is not always a straight line. In fact it’s not often just a matter of adding something new to our stock of experience and knowledge, while everything else stays the same. Learning leads to a shift in how we think, a shift in our attitudes, a shift in our behaviour when we discover more about the truth of things. To learn is to change. We can see how this works if we think for a moment about how the Spirit guides us. One of the most important ways is through the scriptures. Even if we have got out of the habit of reading the Bible, we hear it read each week in this service and the Spirit will guide us into all truth when we understand scripture, the Bible, in a certain way. The bible has many functions. It coveys truths about God. It inspires us. It comforts us. But -and this is what is often missed or forgotten - it also provokes us – if we let it. Truths, insights can lie there in biblical passages for many years, even for generations, until something makes us look at passages anew. Then the Spirit can lead us to new truth. Think for example of the way for centuries Christians accepted the institution of slavery without a thought, until some Christians said, Wait a moment, are there not passages in our scriptures that speak about all people being made in the image and likeness of God – not some people, but all people. Don’t those passages provoke us, challenge us to think again about slavery. To say. We have got this wrong. These are our brothers and sisters in Christ. We must change our attitudes and behaviour towards them. Scripture provokes. You could say the same about our attitude towards women. There are passages that have always been there in scripture, but only now have we begun to let them provoke us. Only now have we allowed the Spirit to guide us to new truth. “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all the truth...” That is the promise. But it is open ended. That guiding into all truth has not come to an end. Being open ended, therefore, the promise is that there will be more truths to come.