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.

God's Greatest Challenge

By David Hobbs

4/30/2009

Not long ago I had a unique experience with God at our Wednesday night prayer and soaking service at the church. Things started out tough. There was no anointing and no desire inside me to pray. It looked like it was going to be a long, dry night. But I entered in anyway.
Soon, I became aware that there was a difference about the night. Duane was playing the piano, but instead of playing like usual—banging it out with driving beat and high volume (“erecting a musical wall” is how I think of it)—tonight he was more about finesse. He was changing the volume, sliding into songs and out of them, going from a song into free worship, then seamlessly back into the same or another song. I’d never heard him play any better or more breathed on by the Holy Spirit.
The level of anointing in the room rose rapidly, as did my own anointing along with it. Soon I was on the mountaintop, a complete turnaround in about 20 minutes!
The level of anointing got so heavy that I began to be awash in the love of God. Then I reached a place I get to every now and then—more so in the last 6 months—where I was overcome and conquered by this same love. What do I mean by “overcome?” To be overcome is to be filled to such an extent that normal functioning is impossible. It’s to make somebody incapacitated or helpless, or break down somebody's normal self-control (Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.)
Usually during prayer I have to battle against distracting thoughts. But when overcome by God’s love there is no room for those things—they can’t even enter. I can’t think rationally, I can’t function normally. God’s love has filled me and taken over. It’s a most wonderful experience. In this state I realize that God’s love has conquered me. He’s overcome all my resistance, all my questions and reservations, all my desire to be in control and in charge, all my fears about things…. There’s nothing left but His love.
In this state I felt 2 questions surface from the Holy Spirit. The first went like this: “What do you think was the hardest thing God ever did?” It turned out to be a multiple choice test because He gave me three possible answers: 1) Create all the worlds, seen and unseen, by speaking them into being out of nothing? 2) Raise Jesus from the dead against all the powers of hell, death, science, militaries, precedent, history, natural law, and whatever else you can think of that opposed it. 3) Conquer the stubborn and rebellious heart of man by His love?
I couldn’t really answer the question, even though I thought I knew what He was driving at, because they all looked equally impossible to my human eyes.
Then He asked the second question, which drove His point home. “Taking those same three answers, what single accomplishment is God most proud of? Which one does He regard as His single greatest achievement in all time and eternity?” Then it hit me. The first two accomplishments, stupendous as they may be, can be accomplished by power alone. Granted it’s a power beyond anything I can imagine, but still, with enough power, either one of the two could be done. But the third one, oh but the third one! Not all the power in the world can win a heart in love! You cannot will someone, or force someone to love you, even if you’re God. God could have cowed my heart by fear, bribed my heart with endless blessings, manipulated my heart with flattery, rejected my heart in total justice, or created my heart like a robot that responds on command. But instead He wooed and won my heart over until I totally surrendered. “Lord Your love has overcome me. I resist no more. Do with me as You will. I am yours forever.”
“For love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like a mighty fire, like a blazing flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away. If one were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly scorned. (S of S. 8:6-7, NIV)

The "Normal" Christian Life, Part II

By David Hobbs

(Events took place Feb. 9-10, 2009)

(Please read previous post first)
The next day, Monday, in spite of my memories of the wonderful service, nothing went easy. I spent a large part of the morning on the phone to the DSL guy from AT&T and my own IT guy trying to get my laptop connected back to the internet. It was my first day of fasting, which is usually the hardest. Nothing about the day was easy or pleasant. But that’s often the way it is in the spiritual walk—mountaintops are followed by valleys and we have to learn to take them in stride.
By Tuesday morning I felt I was ready to get up early and go out to the church early again to pray. It was cold inside as well as outside. I never took my jacket off. The spirit was heavy at first, full of the weight of God’s glory and incredible holiness. It was all I could do to whisper (even in the deserted church) and kneel quietly.
After awhile however, I felt if I didn’t get more active I might give Satan an opening to either put me to sleep or play with my mind. (Because the spirit and the body are connected, if the body gets too slow it can pull the spirit down.) So I began to walk and sing. A song popped into my mind we hadn’t sung in years:

“Lord I want to tread a path to You.

I want to know You better than I do.

I Want to hear Your voice today in a clearer way;

Lord I want to tread a path that leads to You” (repeat).

And then the bridge, “I want to tread a path, that will last; tread a path that leads to You” (repeat).

Soon I was belting it out with all my heart because it was exactly what I did want. I didn’t want to just walk through life. I wanted every step to bring me closer to Him. And I did want to hear His voice more clearly. And today, not some far off time in the future.
Soon my hour and a half at the church was over. There was only time to heat up some leftover coffee in the kitchen and head to Cheryl’s for the morning prayer meeting.
At Cheryl’s the Holy Spirit came again like Sunday night at the praise service. We were praying about portals and the Holy Spirit showed me that I was a portal. There was no getting around it. He had made me a portal already and I didn’t have to ask for it. My part came in choosing what I would be a portal to. I could be a portal to hell and let it flood through me to pollute the earth (and I remembered many times when I had allowed that to happen, and flooded the earth with anger, rage, criticism, doubt, or any number of other hellish spirits); or I could choose to be a portal of heaven and allow the Holy Spirit to flood through me into the earth. Either way I was a portal and could not help be anything but.
Strangely, the angst at the revelation of the many times I had been a portal of hell was more than offset by the revelation that I was a portal and nothing could ever change it. To that my spirit soared. Now, armed with that knowledge, it should be fairly easy to say “no” to hell and “yes” to the Holy Spirit. I was a portal! I was a portal!
The prayer meeting kept going and people took turns praying out. I sang the song the Lord had given me earlier and the Holy Spirit began to zap us. We were all standing holding hands in a circle. I had Cheryl’s hand on my left and my friend Terri’s hand on my right. My spirit was so lightened by the revelation of my portal-ship that I started laughing which others picked up on. Soon about half of us were chuckling or laughing.
Then the prayers turned from portals to lightning rods. I saw our group, which had prayed together for 2 ½ years, as the inner hub of a wheel, like a wagon wheel or chariot wheel. As others were drawn to us wanting more of the Holy Spirit in their lives, they were like spokes from the outer wheel plugging into us in the inner wheel. But as they made contact, lightning shot from heaven into us (because we were lightning rods and open portals), zapped right through us into them, then continued to travel through them out into the world. I immediately thought of Jesus and the woman with the issue of blood who came up to Him in the crowd and touched the hem of His garment. As soon as she touched Him, though He didn’t see or feel her, a surge of power shot through Him from heaven into her. Jesus was the great lightning rod from heaven! That’s what got Jesus’ attention: He felt the burst of power through Him which was strong enough to heal her instantly.
By this time I was so overcome it was hard to stand, so I went to my knees still holding hands with Cheryl and Terri. I was laughing and shouting praises as were the others. Both Cheryl and Terri were getting zapped by the Holy Spirit, which they indicated by shouting out and doubling over. I could literally feel the current pass through my body from one of them to the other.

So there you have it, parts of three days in the prayer life of a believer. Is this the normal life and experience of a Christian? Would to God it was!