Angelic Visitations: Real Stories

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Angelic Visitations

People have been known to see and hear angels in visions. It is also possible to have a real physical visit from an angel. When this occurs, you are not having a vision "in the spirit," you are having a direct encounter with one of God's messengers. They come to where you are physically and they manifest to you and they interact with you. It is sometimes a frightening experience. There is often a sense of God's glory or of His holiness in the visitation, as angels tend to reflect God's glory. But there are also times when God causes the sense of His presence to be masked and you may not realize that an angel is appearing to you. Hebrews 13:2 says, "Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it." But, most of the time, you will know it if you are visited by an angel.

Scripture is filled with angelic visitations to God's people. In most cases the person was very frightened when they saw the angel and the angel's first words were "Fear not," or "Do not be afraid." It is not surprising that angels are scary, we know that they wield great power and great authority. Tradition has it that God sent a single angel who slew all of the firstborn in Egypt on the first Passover (Heb 11:28). We know that God sent a single angel to kill thousands by plague when David sinned and numbered his soldiers (2 Samuel 24). It is clear that angels carry a great deal of power. And since angels come from the very presence of God, it is not surprising that they would carry some of His glory. We can see that they radiate God's glory from Rev 22:8-9, where John was overwhelmed by the angel's glory and wanted to worship the angel. John was corrected and told to only worship God, not His servants. Another example is from when Gabriel visited Daniel to interpret a vision he had been given. Daniel shared his experience, where he said in Dan 8:16-17, "And I heard a man's voice between the banks of the Ulai, who called, and said, 'Gabriel, make this man understand the vision.' So he came near where I stood, and when he came I was afraid and fell on my face..." Daniel was a very godly man, but he found the angel's presence very frightening. That is a common experience.

There are many incidents of angelic visitations recorded in scripture. An angel appeared to Gideon in Judges 6:12, bringing him a commission from the Lord. An angel appeared to Samson's mother in Judges 13:3 and gave her instructions on how to raise her son. Samson's father missed the original visitation and prayed for God to send the angel back to instruct him as well, and God honored his prayer and did so (Judges 13:8-21). An angel appeared to David at the threshing floor of Araunah the Gebusite just after God had released a plague on Israel as a judgment (2 Samuel 24:15-17). An angel appeared to Zechariah and spoke to him in Zech 5:5. An angel appeared to Mary to tell her she was going to be Jesus' mother in Luke 1:26-38. A great company of angels appeared to the shepherds to announce Jesus' birth in Luke 2:8-15. Angels even appeared to and ministered to Jesus while He walked on the earth as a human (Luke 22:43). An angel appeared to Cornelius and told him to send for Peter (Acts 10:3). An angel delivered Peter from prison in Acts 12:7. Scripture is full of stories of God sending angels to interact with His children.

Sometimes when angels appear to people, they just show up, as the angel that suddenly appeared when Zechariah was doing his priestly duty in the temple (see Luke 1:8-20). The Lord, accompanied by two of His angels, appeared out of thin air before Abraham as he sat in his tent door (Gen 18:1-2). Other times, angels choose to appear to people in dreams instead of physically appearing before them. The angel who spoke to Joseph (Jesus' step-father) did this several times. This is recorded in Matt 1:20, Matt 2:13 and Matt 2:19.

And angels might also walk up to you (or away from you) in a natural way. We see this in Gen 18:16 and Gen 18:22.... "Then the men [e.g., the two angels] rose from there and looked toward Sodom, and Abraham went with them to send them on the way." "Then the men turned away from there and went toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the LORD." The angels did not suddenly disappear, they simply walked away from Abraham towards Sodom until they were out of sight, just like a human person might do.

I must emphasize that the presence or absence of angelic visitations is not an indication of an individual's holiness, anointing or call of God on their lives. Some people with only minor roles in expanding God's kingdom have experienced them while others with very major roles and anointings have never had this type of experience. For instance, the shepherds on the hillside received an angelic visitation when Jesus was born. The bible records that they came to see the baby Jesus, but after that they drop out of the story.. they did not have all that important of a role, but they still received an angelic visitation. Angelic visitations are solely from the sovereignty of God for His purposes. We must not judge a person's spirituality or anointing based on these experiences or the lack of them.

Angelic Visitations Today

Until a few years ago, I had not had an angelic visitation. I had a few odd experiences in the past, where others saw angels but I did not. One time I was with some prophets in South Africa. They claimed that an angel was in the room. One could see the angel and the other sensed it and knew where it was in the room. Personally I could neither see it nor sense it's presence. I had seen angels in open visions, but I had not had one visit me in "real life" until November of 2000.

I thought I understood how angelic visitations should work. They seemed quite straight-forward. I figured it would go like I always seemed to read about it in scripture. Suddenly an angel would be standing there, visible to the naked eye. I figured that maybe the glory of God would reflect off of them in some way. Maybe they would glow like the "actors" on "Touched By an Angel," or shine like Moses' face shined when he came away from God's presence. I figured that an angel would be roughly the same size and shape as a person, probably be clothed in white robes and may or may not have wings. First a person would see the angel and then it would speak to them and bring them a message from God. After the angel was done, it would suddenly disappear into thin air. That is how I thought an angelic visitation should work.

In November of 2000, I had my first angelic visitation. And I was in for a bit of a surprise. The angel did not conform to any of my expectations. The encounter did not go at all like I expected. For starters, I could sense the angel's presence and I could hear it's voice, but I could not actually see the angel. I could see a bright light around me. (We were in Italy at a hotel at the time, and my husband was sound asleep on the bed. I thought the light from the angel would wake him, but he continued to sleep soundly through the whole episode.) I had another surprise. I assumed that angels could only hear you if you spoke audibly, but I found that this angel responded to a question I had thought but did not voice verbally. The angel began to instruct me on some stuff related to a prayer journey I was doing through Italy. Some of what the angel instructed me on was related to things the Lord has set me to pray about. I did not think angels were sent to instruct people, so that experience set me to searching Scripture. I found that an angel had been sent to instruct Daniel in response to his prayers for understanding.

I have since had additional visitations from this angel. There has been some supernatural revelation that it has given to me (very detailed and accurate) but mostly the angel has instructed me or come with the answer to something I was desperately seeking God about in prayer. The first time I saw a bright light, but on the other visitations, I could not see the angel at all.. I could hear it's voice. I don't think I was hearing it with my physical ears, but the voice was sharp and clear and distinct and unmistakable.

For the first three or four weeks, I was afraid to tell anyone about my visitation because it did not happen the way I expected. Who would imagine hearing the angel but not seeing it? I kept very quiet about this because I did not want anyone to think I had gone "off of the deep end." But when I was in India, I shared this with my teammate. He knew of another person who had an almost identical experience with angelic visitations. It was reassuring for me to find that I was not totally alone in this. About four weeks later, I spoke to one of the prophetic school leadership core members, Jim Paul. I was incredibly encouraged to learn that he has also had angelic visitations in which he heard the angel but did not see it.

Sometimes we let our culture give us expectations of what a given supernatural experience should be like. But where we have the actual experience it may not line up with our expectations at all. If you have an angelic visitation, don't assume your experience will be like mine. Both God and angels appear to have a wide variety of ways that they do things. For instance, I know one person who has seen and spoken to angels. While he could see the angels with his physical eyes, they were translucent.. e.g, you could sort of see through them, they were not totally solid. Others have seen the angel just as though they were a physical person, modernly dressed (jeans and polo-shirt, not a white robe).

Teresa's Angel Stories

We have spent the last nine lessons looking at some of the roles angels play in God's kingdom and in the realm of man. Most of this has been gleaned directly from Scripture. Two lessons shared information about angels taken from the Book Of Enoch -- which must be viewed as a historical secular writing detailing several of the ancient Jewish traditions about angels. I also shared a couple of my personal experiences with angels as God's messengers in lesson 9.

For this last lesson, I would like to share some more of my experiences with angels. I would like to start by sharing two things that I learned about angels from an angelic visitation. Please do not take this as authoritative or with the same credibility as Scripture. But here are a couple of things that angels taught me about angels when they were instructed to come teach me in certain areas...

The first is that the angels are God's servants. They are sent by God and their main priority/objective is serving Him. While they interact with us, their main focus and priority is serving God. They do not become emotionally attached to us to the point were they want our good over God's will. An angel that had been protecting a person for years would not hesitate to strike that person dead if God so commanded. Their main focus is on serving and honoring God and obeying what He tells them to do. While they work and interact with us, they see themselves as God's servants and they focus on God's agenda.

The other thing I learned is that angels sometimes have a latitude in how they do their job. They may get an assignment, such as delivering a message to a person. The angel may choose to appear directly to the person (as an angel appeared to Mary in Luke 1:28). Or the angel may choose to appear to the person in a dream (as it did with Joseph in Matt 1:20, Matt 2:13 and Matt 2:19). In some aspects, angels are very similar to prophets, because they are given a message from God to deliver to someone. The big difference is that the clarity and accuracy of an angel's hearing is always 100% accurate. There are times when God dictates a message from a prophet word for word, leaving the prophet no choice in how to deliver it. But many times God will deposit a message in a prophet and give the prophet leeway to decide how to deliver and phrase that message. It is similar for the angels. They get their assignments and their messages from God, but God will often give them leeway to decide how to carry out that assignment. Angels are not robots, they are cognizant beings who love God and who gladly and willingly serve Him.

Now I would like to switch gears and share a few stories that fall under the realm of angelic protection, as per Psalm 91:11-12. It says, "For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone." In other words, one of the tasks that God gives His angels is to protect His elect from harm.

One day in October of 2000, I had been sick and was recovering from the stomach flu. It had been raining outside and the dogs had been cooped up in the house all day. I was working on GodSpeak lessons all day and concentrating on that. The rain finally let up and I let the dogs outside for a few minutes to do their "doggie business." I did not intend to leave them outside very long because they have a tendency to get out of the yard and cars zoom down our street very fast, it is not a safe neighborhood for dogs to wander the streets unsupervised. As is my habit, I shut and locked the front door. I ran back to my computer to check e-mail really fast ... and soon I was caught in a lengthy e-mail "emergency" and temporarily forgot about the dogs.

I was in the middle of something very involved when I felt strongly prompted to go check on the dogs. That type of prompting is often the Lord, so I would normally go do it immediately, no questions asked. But I was not dressed since I was home sick that day. I decided I'd take five minutes to get past this really involved thing, then I would throw on some clothes and go outside to check on the dogs. So I turned my concentration back to the task. About three minutes later, I heard the front door open. I heard the jingle of the license and id tags on the dogs' collars which indicated that the dogs came in the house. My first thought was, "Oh good, Ed's home. I won't have to get dressed and look after the dogs." Then I remembered that it was muddy outside and I went running downstairs to wipe the dog's feet before they tracked mud all over my carpets.

I came barreling down the stairs and to my surprise, the previously locked front door was wide open. I was still in my nightee, so I hoped no one would pass by. I went to close the door, and looked out briefly to see if anyone had passed by and seen me. No one was in eyeshot. But Ed's car was not in the driveway. I did not have any time to ponder it, because the dogs were trying to run to the carpet. So I shut the door, grabbed the larger dog and began wiping it's feet with the towel we keep by the door. I asked the Lord how the locked door got open so the dogs could get in. He told me that He had sent an angel to let them into the house since I would not listen to Him when He told me to go downstairs and get them. They had gotten out of the yard and were in danger of getting hit by a car. I was able to verify the last part of the story by seeing muddy paw prints (the same size and shape as those in my entry-way) on the sidewalk outside of my fence at the area where they usually get out of the yard.

Here is another story that was sort of amazing. I had gone to the auto teller to withdraw the maximum amount I could take out, which was $200 cash. I did not want to spend a lot of time messing with opening my purse, taking my wallet out and my money in it because this was in a "seedy" part of town very early in the morning. There were a lot of derelicts around, some of which had been known to attack people at the auto teller for their cash. So I shoved it and my auto teller card into my jacket pocket and walked quickly away from there. When I got about a block away, I glanced at my pocket and noticed it had a big hole in it. I felt a surge of alarm and looked in my pocket. It was empty! Just then a man tapped me on the shoulder and said, "excuse me. You dropped this." He handed me a wad of 20 dollar bills and the auto teller card. I said "thank you." I glanced down briefly at my hand to look at what he handed me. When I looked back up at him, he was totally gone. I only looked down for maybe 2 or 3 seconds and there was nowhere he could have gone in that short period of time to get out of sight. It was like he disappeared into thin air. I held the pile of money cupped in my hand until I got safely to the building where my office was in. When I counted the money, the entire $200 was there. I believe that an angel picked this up for me and handed it back to me to protect me from loosing all that money.

And here is one last story, which happened on Nov 19, 2002. I had to borrow my husband's van (an automatic) to take my dogs somewhere. I had been writing a lesson for this teaching series on Angels for the prophetic-school list just before I left with the dogs.

I am used to stick shifts, not automatic transmissions. So I did not realize that there were two different settings that could cause the car to move forward. So I had it in low thinking I was in Drive. Everything was ok when I was on city streets for 2 or 3 blocks on my way to the freeway. But as soon as I hit the freeway and started to accelerate, the van began acting up. It all happened very fast. The van began to shake and jerk, the engine began making what I knew was a "very bad" noise and was not accelerating like it should. I found myself throwing out one of those "help Lord!" prayers.

I glanced at the gear setting indicator and realized I was in Low instead of Drive. I realized I had to shift it to drive. The engine sounded like it was going to explode and the noise startled me and I hesitated in reaching for the gear shift. Before I could compose myself and reach over to grab the gear shift lever, it moved on it's own from Low to Drive and the car settled down. I was a bit astonished.

"Lord," I asked, "did you just shift the gears on my car for me in response to my prayer?"

"Not exactly," the Lord replied, "I asked one of My angels to do it for you." He went on to explain that since I was studying and writing about angels, He decided to orchestrate an encounter with one for me. This is very interesting because the part I'd been studying just before I left the house was the Scripture discussing the angels' role in helping and protecting God's elect!

I have one last angel story to add to the collection that started about 20 minutes after I thought I'd finished writing this lesson. I went to get my check book to pay a bill before my husband and I left to go to a sporting event. This was Saturday afternoon, two days after Thanksgiving. I thought I'd left my wallet in the car after I'd run to the grocery store on Thanksgiving morning to get some flowers. But it was not there. So I tore the whole house apart looking for it and could not find it. I knew the last time I'd seen my purse was when I paid for the flowers at the grocery store. So I asked my husband to drive me to the grocery store.. I wanted my purse back.. it had my passport in it, my personal and ministry check books, my credit and bank cards and over $300 cash. I knew that something left in as public of a place as a grocery store was not likely to still be there, so I prayed very hard for God to return the purse to me.

We got to the store and the assistant manager said the lost and found would be in the office, so she took me there. We looked around the office.. no purse. The counters were clear, nothing on them. The cabinet they put lost and found items in was empty. They checked the two drawers in there as well. They found someone else's wallet, but not my purse. All this time I am silently praying for God to somehow get the important items back to me, like the passport and check books. I had already written off the cash and figured I'd have to report the credit cards as lost.

As I left the office, the assistant manager suggested I leave them a written description of the purse and my contact info. I remembered thinking to myself "if you don't have it after two days, you wont' have it in a week", but did as she asked. There was a window to the office and a counter right outside the office. So she handed me a piece of paper and a pen. I began to write on the counter as she went back inside the office and closed the door. As I was finishing the note, she opened the door and came out looking sort of amazed. "Is this it?" she asked and held up my purse. I was so glad to get it back. Then she told me that suddenly there it was in a place where we'd already looked and did not find it!

I believe that an angel was involved in this incident, because as I left the store, the Lord reminded me of how He uses angels to protect and He reminded me that I'd just been writing a teaching on experiences where angels protected us. I felt like I was supposed to go back and add this story to this lesson.

I wanted to conclude this teaching series by sharing a few angel stories with you from my own personal experience. I hope you have found this series enlightening and helpful. I would like to end by reminding you of the charge Randy Clark gave us on working effectively with angels. This was first presented in lesson 4, but I would like to repeat it here:

God expects His Church to work with angels to be effective. Therefore we need to learn how to work with them. Obviously we must make a place for them to co-labor with us. At the same time, we must not get wrapped up in angels and put our focus and our attention on them.

Rev 19:10 makes it very clear that we are not to worship angels or overly elevate them. John writes, "And I fell at his feet to worship him (the angel who had been speaking to John). But he said to me, 'See that you do not do that! I am your fellow servant, and of your brethren who have the testimony of Jesus. Worship God!'"

We should respect angels and cooperate with them. But we should not give an angel more honor than or respect than we would give another anointed human minister.

A Birthday Gift

I shared some of my "indirect" experiences with angels in the last lesson. When this teaching series was originally written, that was all I had to share. I had not experienced much by way of direct angelic interaction. There was the occasional angelic messenger, like the one who appeared to me when I was on the prayer journey through Italy, but I did not see angels very often. That changed in March of 2007, and the Lord began giving me much more frequent and direct encounters with His angels.

Those encounters were actually a birthday gift that the Holy Spirit gave to me back in 1999, only I did not realize it at the time. The birthday gift did not manifest in my life until about seven and a half years later.

Let me share how the Holy Spirit gave me this present. My birthday had been a very difficult day. Not only did everyone forget my birthday, but an amazing number bunch of unpleasant and frustrating things happened to me on that day. I got caught in unexpected bumper to bumper traffic on my way home from work and all I wanted to do was get home and go to bed and forget the day. But I'd been sitting on the freeway for over half an hour and hadn't even gone two miles. I was so frustrated that I wanted to scream.

That was when the Lord spoke to me and said, "Happy birthday Teresa. What would you like for your birthday?"

Please understand, I was in a bad place at that moment, and I did not think that was really God speaking to me; I thought it was my imagination playing tricks on me. I decided to play along because I had nothing better to do, but I did not really think that this was real conversation with God.

So I said, "Well, let's see, You are a Trinity, aren't You? So can I ask You for three things, one from each of You?"

The voice in my thoughts said "Yes."

So I made my requests. I said, "Ok, From the the Father, I want the gift of prophecy. From Jesus I want John 14:12 in my life--e.g., I want miracles and healings and mighty works. And from the Holy Spirit..." I paused because I was not really sure what to ask Him for. I pondered for a few minutes and then I said, "I'd like the Holy Spirit to give me something that I need but that I am not smart enough to ask Him for."

At the time of the conversation, I did not think it was real. But when I finally got through the traffic and got home, I received a phone call from a prophet from back east. God had told him to call me (and gave him my phone number). God said that he had to call on precisely this day, not before and not after. This was the message God had for me: "Today I am giving you the gift of prophecy." That was how I discovered that my conversation with God was real. I also began to see the Lord do healings and miracles through me.

So I began to ponder what the Holy Spirit was going to give me, and I had absolutely no idea what that might be. If He had told me back then that it was to be "angelic encounters" and "working with angels," I would have rejected it because I had some serious misconceptions about angels. The Holy Spirit had to work on me for close to seven years to change my views and attitudes about angels, to get me to the place where He could release angelic interactions into my life. He did that gradually over a seven hear period.

Then, in late November or early December of 2006, Jim Paul (a friend of mine who also mentors me from time to time) told me that he was having angelic visitations in his home. He lived in Ontario, Canada. That is a long way from San Francisco.

But when I heard that angels were showing up on a daily basis at my friend's house, I longed to go there to encounter God. At that time in my walk with God, I felt spiritually "dry," and I was very hungry for Him. I teasingly told Jim that I was half-tempted to fly out and camp out in his living room and pursue God. I did not seriously mean it when I said it, but Jim took it seriously. He invited me to come and stay with them. I said I'd pray about it, not really expecting to take him up on the offer.

But when I prayed, my hunger for God increased even more. I knew I had to go, so we made arrangements. The schedule worked out so that I could not go on this pilgrimage to until mid-January. I was a bit concerned that the angels would stop showing up by then. I called Jim about a week before the trip and asked him about it. My fears had been realized: the angels were not showing up on a daily basis any more. In fact, it had been a few weeks since Jim had seen one. But he thought I should still come anyhow, as there was a conference at TACF that he felt God wanted me to attend. Monday night was a special meeting just for the local pastors, and Jim invited me to it with him.

I ended up going to Canada to visit Jim and Diane. I spent hours each day sitting and praying in the room where the angels had appeared to Jim. I really longed for an angelic encounter. God had been speaking a lot of stuff to me over the past year, and I wanted to have a face-to- face with an angel and have that angel tell me basically the same stuff. I felt that would be a validation of my hearing, and I was very hungry for that.

The Lord did meet and refresh me wonderfully on that trip, but I never saw a single angel. Here is a funny part--one afternoon while I was praying in the living room, Jim was upstairs in his bedroom reading a book. His bedroom was directly above the room I was praying in. I was asking God to send an angel to speak to me. Right them, two angels showed up in Jim's room and began speaking to Jim--about me! When he told me that, I was miffed. It was like they missed and went to the wrong room-- only God never misses. He wanted me to focus all my searching and desire on Him, not on His servants.

God met me on that trip the way He always meets me, and He spoke to me the way He always speaks to me. But my spirit was revived in His presence, and God restored my sense of destiny and calling. I felt like a sponge that had been bone dry, and the Lord saturated me with His living water during the trip, so I wasn't dry any more. God did not meet me the way I expected Him to, but He did meet me and I was very satisfied.

I came home and had a crisis to deal with. It did not take long to get "back under it all" and loose the sense of refreshment I experienced in Canada. I cried out to God for help and all He said was "Trust Me." (I hate it when God says that, because I am not as good at trusting Him as I need to be.)

Over the next two months, I started to feel very dry again. I decided that the only thing I could do was to saturate myself in His word and cry out to Him for help. Then I was so hungry for God that I started spending about an hour or two a day reading the bible, and another hour praying and crying out to Him. God would meet me in the prayer time, and He even caught me into a few visions of Heaven. But when I wasn't in that prayer time, I still felt very dry and worn out, and I began to mentally prepare myself for a "desert experience."

That was in March of 2007. I had stopped looking for angelic encounters and I was desperate for God. I had been spending one to two hours a day in the bible for about a week when an angel suddenly showed up in my room as I was reading God's word. The angel began to speak to me and I could feel God's strong presence radiating from him. I knew that angel had to be from God, because he carried such a strong measure of God's presence. This was not a demonic "angel of light" -- this was the "real thing."

The angel began to instruct me. He showed up frequently, two or three times a day for about an hour or so at a time. It was wonderful and I felt myself coming alive in the Lord. The angel told me his name (which was Lub). I tried to ask him questions about what it was like being an angel, but he did not walk to talk about himself, he just wanted to talk about God. He would ask me a lot of open-ended questions that were designed to get me thinking about some aspect of God's character or faithfulness, etc. I found that as I pondered his questions, I could not help it, I would start worshiping God and get lost in worship. The angel taught me a lot about God's character and I was caught up into God's presence and into several open visions of being before God's throne. It was an incredible experience.

(The angel instructed me to document some of what he was teaching me. I was afraid that people would think I had "lost it" if I shared my experiences publicly. So the angel told me that I could put my experiences into a fictional story instead, but I needed to write them down. If you want to read that story, the book is titled Mercy In Judgment)

This angel worked with me for about a week, appearing to me every day and sometimes multiple times in the same day. It was an incredible experience and it drew me closer to God than I had felt in a long time. At the end of that first week, a second angel began showing up. The two angels were both from God, but they were not alike. The first angel is what is called an "intimacy angel" or a "worship angel" and his main job is to help draw people closer to God and help them learn to worship Him better. I really enjoyed my time with him.

But after a week or so, the other angel started to take over, and my experiences with him were a bit different. I will share them in the next lesson.

More Encounters With Angels

In the last lesson, I shared how the Holy Spirit had given me a gift for my birthday--the gift of being able to see, interact with and co-labor with some of His angels to accomplish His purposes. I shared how He had to work in my to change my views and attitudes about angels so that He could release this gift into my life--and it took Him seven years to do so. Then in March of 2007, I was really pressing in for God and reading my bible several hours a day and praying and crying out for Him to meet me. That was when God sent a intimacy angel named Lub to me.

About a week or so later, I met a second angel who also began to spend a lot of time with me, and I saw less of the first angel. The first angel had been a worship and intimacy angel, and his task seemed to be to help me move into higher levels of worship and intimacy with God.

The second angel was a judgment angel. He said that God has sent him to mentor me for a season, and it was a time of incredible growth for me. At first the angel seemed very jolly--he laughed a lot and had a wonderful sense of humor. But he could also get very serious and purposeful. The mentoring that he did with me did not go the way I expected it to go. I think I expected to learn divine secrets that would show me how to move more in God's power and anointing. But this angel focused more on my blind spots and character growth. He showed me areas of myself that I did not want to look at because I did not want to admit that I had them. He would instruct me to go to God and deal with the issue with the Lord.

One time I had a "fight" with this angel over an area of my woundedness that he wanted me to embrace and put under God's lordship. I did not want to admit that I had this problem and I was stubborn. I tried to get the angel off of this topic and onto something else, but he would not leave his agenda. (At that time I did not realize it was God's agenda and something that I had no option of avoiding.) The angel insisted that I deal with this and I refused.

He did not do anything to threaten me or to hurt me, he simply left. When he left, the sense of God's nearness also went away. (I had been living in a very tangible sense of God's presence since the angels had started to visit me, and it was almost unbearable for this to go away.) I had this horrible three-day period where the Heaven's seemed like brass.

I figured that I'd blown it and shut down the whole process, and I was very upset with myself for doing that. I finally decided that I was going to embrace and deal with this character issue--even if the process of being mentored by angels was over, I was still going to bring this area of my character to the Lord and deal with it with Him. At first my prayer time was awkward, but God managed to meet me and get me through it.

Once I had prayed this through, I experienced a tangible sense of inner- healing from the Lord. Next, I started mentally lamenting the fact that I'd shut down my angelic mentoring. I realized that my stubbornness and grieved God's heart and I apologized to him about it.

Suddenly my room filled with light. I was not sure what was happening. Was God catching me into another vision?

"Teresa," a voice called to me from out of the light. I recognized the voice. It was the angel who had been mentoring me.

"I am so glad that you came back! I am sorry that I was so stubborn and difficult and I will try to do better."

"You must do better, failing is not an option."

I did not say anything, but I had a question mark in my spirit. Angels can read our thoughts as easily as they can hear our spoken words. He knew I did not understand and he went on to explain.

"Don't you know that when an angel speaks to you, he is sent by God and is representing God to you? I don't come with my own message or agenda; I come with God's. When you disobey me, you are actually disobeying God."

I knew he was rebuking me and I knew I deserved it. I knew that I owed him an apology before he even began to speak to me. But when I heard that I was disobeying/fighting God, I felt pierced to the heart. I had to stop right then and repent to the Lord.

The angel waited for me to finish before he went on. He told me that he knew it was hard for me, but it was important that I cooperate with God, because God was offering me something I really did not want to pass on. But in order to get what God wanted to give me, I had to let Him work in me to transform my character. God had been trying to work on some of these areas for some time, directly and personally with me. But I had been in denial and shut the door to Him in some areas. That is why He had found it necessary to send the angel to work with me: because I would not cooperate with the Holy Spirit working in me in this area. When he said these things, I knew it was true. I felt so bad that I started to cry.

The angel let me cry for a while, then he collected me into his arms and gave me a hug. I felt the love and acceptance of God pouring over me, and I was saturated in His peace. I realized that he wasn't mad at me about my resisting him earlier, and that I could trust him to faithfully represent God to me. I made a mental decision that I would do my best to cooperate both with God and with His angel.

After I had collected myself and was in a place of peace, the angel asked me if I would like him to tell me a story, and I said yes.

We were in the guest bedroom, which doubles as my "prayer closet." He sat on the bed with his back pressed against the headboard and his legs stretched out on the length of the bed. He invited me to sit next to him. Before I knew it, I was curled up on the bed with my head in his lap, much the way a small child sleeps on the sofa with their head in their parent's lap. He put one hand on my back and then covered me with one of his wings. I felt so safe at that moment and the love of God washed over me. Even if he hadn't said a word, that would have been an incredible experience for me.

Then he began to tell me a story about an angel. "Teresa, as you know, we angels are now fixed in our relationship with God. We all love Him and we all continue to grow in Him, but the growth is now at a fixed rate. Our order in Heaven is fixed and cannot change. We have been ranked relative to each other and that ranking can never change. And we are perfected in the Lord, so that we all love and respect each other, regardless of our rank."

He paused, and then he continued. "But there was a time when we were not fixed in our rank. We each had duties to perform and decisions to make, but there was flux and fluidity in our individual relationships with the Lord. There was an angel who was very hungry for God. He sought and pursued God more than most of his peers, and he grew closer to God because of that. When the time came for us to be fixed in our relationship with God and in our rankings relative to each other, this angel was given a relatively high rank because of his hunger for God during the time when things were fluid."

"You're talking about yourself, aren't you?" I asked. Angels hardly ever talk about themselves, so this story really caught my interest. I realized that this angel must be a high-ranking (important) angel and I wondered why God had sent him into my life. I did not feel like I merited an angel at all, much less a high-ranking one.

"Yes, I am talking about myself. But there is a reason why I am telling you this story."

"I'm listening."

"Teresa, you (and all of the people living on this earth) are still in your fluid stage. You haven't yet be fixed in rank and in your relative relationship with God. I want you to go as high in God as you can now, while you are still fluid in your ability to grow. The point that you reach before you die will be your launching point for all of eternity. In eternity, you will still grow and God will continue to reveal more of Himself to you, but your rate of growth will become fixed. The higher point you start at, the more you can get to know Him in eternity."

Then he went on to explain that there are basically five categories that we can end up in, based on our hunger/passion for God and also based on how long we have know and served Him. Each of the five categories will have its own rate of growth in knowing God in eternity. The angel encouraged me to press to get in as high of a group as I could while I lived on this earth, so that I could have a faster rate of growth in God revealing Himself to me in eternity. He explained that the hungrier we are for God now, and the more we submit to His will and obey Him, the more (e.g., faster) we will get to know Him in Heaven. God is so big and so vast that we can never know Him fully, but we will spend all of eternity getting to know Him better, and He will reveal more and more of Himself to us.

The angel's story sparked something in me. I have been hungry for God for a long time, but now I am even more motivated to know Him better and walk in a greater measure of His lordship here on this earth. I don't know if it is possible for me to make it to "group one" (the group who grows the fastest in the Lord in eternity), since it contains the heroes of the faith like Abraham, Moses, David, Peter, John, Paul, etc. But I decided to do my best to get as close to God now so, that He will reveal more of Himself to me more rapidly in eternity. What a wonderful prize to pursue--knowing Him better and being closer to Him!

When the angel finished his story, it was back to the regular mentoring. I did more dieing to self than anything else. But I also learned more about God and about the ways of Heaven. The intense mentoring lasted six weeks, then it sort of tapered off. Angels still came and speak to me, but not nearly as often as during those six weeks.

Wrap-up And Closing Remarks

Some people today are suspicious of angelic activity and they are uncomfortable with the idea of interacting directly with angels. I can certainly understand those concerns because I shared them for quite a number of years. I knew that there were angels in the Bible, and I knew that there were a lot bible accounts of angels interacting with men. But I was also keenly aware of verses like 2 Corinthians 11:14, which says, "For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light."

For years, my concern was that if I met an angel, I would not be able to tell if it was a real angel or a demonic "angel of light." I did not want to take the chance of being deceived, so I hoped I'd never meet an angel, so I'd never be put in the position of having to figure out if it was "real" or not.

Don't get me wrong. I wanted angelic activity in my life, but I did not want to see any of them. I definitely wanted the angels of Psalm 91:11-12 to protect me. "For He shall give His angels charge over you, To keep you in all your ways. In their hands they shall bear you up, Lest you dash your foot against a stone." I definitely wanted the angels of Psalm 34:7 to deliver me from harm: "The angel of the Lord encamps all around those who fear Him, and delivers them."

I just did not want to come face-to-face with an angel because I was afraid that the devil would appear to me as an angel to deceive me. I had devised some "test questions" to assure that the angel was really from God, but I hoped I'd never have to use them. For instance, 1 Cor. 12:3 said, "...no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit." So I figured that if I ever did see an angel, I would ask him to say that "Jesus is Lord" and the demonic counterfeit would not be able to do that.

Then I had my first experiece with a real angel in November of 2000. That angel carried the Lord's presence very strongly, because he spent a lot of time before God's throne. I knew the Lord's because I had personally spent a lot of time in it. I realized that anyone who "knew" God's presence would never mistake a real angel for the demonic countfiet, because you cannot counterfeit the Lord's wonderful presence.

Over a period of time, my attitude about angels changed, but it was still a "wrong" attitude. I started desiring to see angels and even pursuing that desire. While pursuing angels is not the same as worshipping them, it can come dangerously close. The apostle John almost fell into that trap in Revelation 19:10. An angel had just commanded him to write down a prophetic uterance. the John "fell at his feet to worship him. But he [the angel] said to me, 'See that you do not do that! I am your fellow servant, and of your brethren who have the testimony of Jesus. Worship God!'"

The angels do NOT want us to worship them or to look to them instead of looking to God. They want to point the way to God, they do not want to become the object of our attention affection. That is why I am going to share a guideline with you. There are probably exceptions to this guideline, but it seems to hold for most people: you are not going to see angels when you are actively pursuing them.

Angels are God's servants and they love Him dearly. They want to glorify Him and point to Him--not to themselves.

This guideline held true in my own life. I traveled all the way to Ontario Canada (from San Francisco) to go to my friend Jim's house. I went there explicitely to seek an angelic encouter. I was in a desert place and I was hungry for a touch from God. But I somehow got the idea that meeting with His angels would solve that problem. I did not mean to seek them instead of seeking Him, but that is basically what happened to me. And that is not a good idea.

God actually dispatched His angels with a message for me while I was at Jim's house. But because I was "hung up" on angels, the angel did not come to me personally. Instead, it went to Jim, gave him the mesasge, and instructed Jim to relay the message to me.

Seeking angels is not a good idea. It is much better to seek God, and at some point, God may very well send some of His angels to interact with you. But if you put all of your attention and focus into seeking them, you are probably not going to get anywhere.

If you are thinking that you would like to build a friendship with an angel--think again. It won't happen on this side of eternity. Angels are different than us. They are perfect, having never tasted sin. They have existed since before the creation, and they have an eternal perspective. They think differently than we do. For example, an angel's main concern is to serve God and do what He says to do. Angels are not interested in pursuing personal relationships with us, they are interested in pursuning their relationship with God. They are completely and totally committed to Him, and their desire is to carry out His will.

Angels are given some latitude in how the carry out their assignments, but they only do assignments that God gives them. They don't make decisions on their own to come and visit a given person; they are sent by God and they represent Him. Angels may feel affection for those who God sends them to work with, but their actions will never be "ruled" by that affection. An angel who had been sent to bless a person at one time would not hesitate to strike that same person dead if God so directed.

There has been an increased interest in angels recently. There has also been an increase of angelic activity in the church. Many people feel this is a part of God releasing heavenly resources for a great revival. Randy Clark pointed out (in lessons 3 and 4) that God has arranged for angels to co-labor with us to advance His kingdom. In addition to being God's mesasngers and heavenly protectors, angels seem to play a role in healing the sick. I don't fully understand their role in healing, because we have also been granted authority to heal the sick. But I do know that there is more "anointing" for healing when the angels are present. I also know that when I personally pray for people, I seem more healings when God releases angels to minister with me, and they usually happen faster.

Angels seem to be playing a bigger and bigger role in healing the sick as the church learns to cooperate and work with them. In fact, there is a huge healing revival that is going on in Florida, which started on April 3, 2008. I am told that God released a healing angel for that revival. They have seen an incredible amount of miracles and healings there, and they have also seen a huge number of salvations.

There does seem to be an increase in angelic activity. God seems to be releasing His angels (and the anointing they carry) into more and more ministries, as He prepares to invade the world-systems and transform them for His kingdom.

As far as I can tell, this increased angelic activity is a very good thing, and I am glad that God is doing it. As John Wimber used to say, "It should be natural for the Church to walk in the Supernatural," and when angels are released to work with us, that ushers in the supernatural. But that also means that there is a learning curve on our part. We need to learn how to do our part without interfering with their part, so we can work effecively with the angels to advance God's kingdom here on this earth.

To that goal, I would like to end by reminding you of the charge that Randy Clark gave us on working effectively with angels. This was first presented in lesson 4, but I would like to repeat it here:

God expects His Church to work with angels to be effective. Therefore we need to learn how to work with them. Obviously we must make a place for them to co-labor with us. At the same time, we must not get wrapped up in angels and put our focus and our attention on them.

Rev 19:10 makes it very clear that we are not to worship angels or overly elevate them. John writes, "And I fell at his feet to worship him (the angel who had been speaking to John). But he said to me, 'See that you do not do that! I am your fellow servant, and of your brethren who have the testimony of Jesus. Worship God!'"

We should respect angels and cooperate with them. But we should not give an angel more honor than or respect than we would give another anointed human minister.

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