The Doers, the Helpers, and the Gawkers

By David Hobbs

It was "Seek Week" and we were having special evening prayer meetings at the church. It was Wednesday and I was feeling pretty much out of it, though quite a few seemed to be actively engaged with the Holy Spirit. Toward the end of the meeting we circled up and held hands to pray together. The lady on my right, a very spiritual woman who has graced this blog before, was in the Spirit and began bending double, jerking or convulsing as different people prayed.

Finally, about the time the meeting was over, she went down all together and lay on the floor moaning and crying out. Cheryl was praying over her. She looked like she was birthing something in the Spirit. She got especially animated when someone prayed out evangelistically for souls. Realizing this, I stretched my hands toward her and prayed in tongues, which felt like the most spiritual thing I had done all night. Others standing around gawked at her and the “spectacle” she was making of herself.

The next morning the Holy Spirit instructed me. “There are three groups of people in the world,” He said, “everyone must pick which group they’ll be in.”

The story he reminded me of was when Jesus was going to heal the girl on her deathbed (Luke 8:40). But on the way He was stopped by the woman with the issue of blood. By the time He dealt with that woman, the original girl had died. When Jesus came to the house and saw the outpouring of mourning, He proclaimed the girl was not dead, but sleeping, which raised an instant reaction of scoffing, mocking, doubting and unbelief.

Has it ever occurred to you that maybe Jesus did this purposely, to identify the crowd who didn’t believe? Then He put out everybody from this crowd. This was the first class of people: the unbelievers, or the gawkers. He didn’t give them a chance to “exercise their ministry” but put them out before they could sabotage His.

He let stay the parents and His three top disciples. The parents were more concerned about seeing their girl healed than gawking out a miracle. They became part of the second group, the helpers. These are people who can’t do the miracle, but their prayers and presence help create the atmosphere for the miracle to occur. In the prayer meeting I was talking about, I was in the crowd of helpers, as was Cheryl. We were not able to accomplish the work, though Cheryl was midwifing it, a subcategory of helpers. And I was lending my prayers to set the spiritual atmosphere to help it come about.

The third group is the smallest, the doer, often just one person with the faith, the gift, or the power to bring the miracle forth. In the Gospels that person is Jesus; after Pentecost, the apostles; in the Old Testament, a prophet. In my experience it was the woman lying on the floor, travailing in the Spirit to birth something.

The Holy Spirit was saying, “There are three groups. Each person must choose which group they will be in.” Do they want to be a gawker, which is pretty much the same as an unbeliever? Do they want to be a helper, in which case they will be part of the miracle? Or do they want to be a doer, in which case they will spearhead the miracle?

When David Hogan visited our church a number of years ago, we had gawkers come out of the woodwork and from across the country, swarming the church, hoping to see him raise someone from the dead. It was embarrassing.

To be a gawker requires nothing but the natural man. To be a helper requires an openness and obedience to the Holy Spirit. To be a doer requires a high level of yieldedness, and an advanced ability to hear the voice of the Spirit and flow in His anointing.