Open Heaven

Look in Hebrews 1:7, "In speaking of the angels He says, 'He makes His angels winds, His servants flames of fire.'" I know this may be a little bit new to you, but I just want you to study the Bible with me. I want you to be a Berean. Sometimes we hear things, and the way we are taught to see it, that is the only way we can see it. But I am telling you, some of the things I think that I was taught is not really what was clearly in the Word. I am just asking you to study the Word with me.

I was in Volta Redonda with about three thousand people in a tent, and I was really hot. I was preaching, and I said, "God, let Your wind blow through here!" Now I just meant it metaphorically. Preachers use metaphors a lot such as 'the wind of the Spirit.' I was not talking about real wind; I was just using a metaphor. A way of saying, "Come, Holy Spirit" is, "God, let the wind of Your Spirit blow." Later, some people said, "You know, when you said that, wind blew through all the windows." (I was not in a place where you could feel the wind.) I thought, "Now that is an interesting coincidence!" I was not connecting yet. I was not connecting yet -- I want to show you. Then in a meeting in Volta Redonda another time, I said, "Let Your wind blow" and it happened!

We went to Manaus. There were ten thousand people, and I was praying for the sick. I said, "God, let the river flow!" You know, Revelation 21 and Ezekiel 47. "Let the river flow through this place! Wherever that river flows, heal people!" I had no more got that out of my mouth than, BOOM! Thunder came and the rain started coming down. The building did not have walls yet; it just had the pillars, the ceiling and the floor. On one side was the deaf section. The rain started coming in. The wind came and blew the rain in on the deaf section. They are sopped. I mean, it was just like somebody had taken a hose and just watered them down -- they are sopped! But I saw something. I actually caught one of the videos we have. That wind turned the water into mist. (You know, you go to county fairs on a hot day, and they have these little bitty spray things that are like a little mist? You can step into the mist and it will keep you cool?) God created that mist. This place seats ten thousand people! It is several times the height of this place, and that mist is going all the way across the whole church.

Now, I was still not making a connection. I am still thinking this is just natural phenomena -- until! Don't you love the Bible when it says 'until' and 'therefore'? Well, this is one of those 'untils' in my life. Until I turned around and all of a sudden, on the stage we have a bunch of people coming up who were healed. The had been deaf and now they were hearing! Everybody had their cameras, but We did not know which one to focus on, because we had eight people in a matter of a few minutes who were deaf and now they could hear, who were mute, and now they are speaking!

What happened? The wind blew. The rain came. The river came, and God sovereignly healed them. Now I am thinking, "Oh, my gosh, this stuff is getting serious!"

Then I went to Goiania. There were only three places that trip. I was worshiping on my knees, I had my eyes closed, I had my hands out, and all of a sudden I felt a wind go across my face -- 'whoo!' I opened my eyes because I thought maybe a dancer had spun by and created a draft or something, but there were no dancers there. A friend of mine from Georgia, a businessman was close by. I said, "Mike! Did you do that?" He said, "What?" I said, "Forget it."

This was the turning point for me. This really was. This is where I connected the dots. I said, "Lord, what was that?" And I heard in my mind, an impression, not an audible voice, just an impression, "That was an angel." "Lord, if that really was an angel, how can I know it? If this is really You talking to me, not my mind playing, if this is really You, how can I know it?" The next thought came, "You tell the people that there are angels here and they will feel wind go across their faces or they will feel pressure come on their bodies, their shoulders or their heads, and when they do to stand up and do not even pray for them. Just have them stand up and I will heal them. Just you declare that there are angels here. I will prove it to you."

I was thinking, "God, if this is not You, this could be the devil lying to me, and I am being set up because it has been great worship up to this point. It has been a good meeting. If I say that and it does not happen, it is going to kill this meeting. So just in case this is the devil talking to me instead of You..." By the way, when you first begin to hear a lot of things from the Lord, you are not sure always who you are hearing from. Is it you, is it God, is it the devil, is it a set-up, is it deception? It is a little bit scary at first. So I said, "Lord, just in case this is not You, I am going to use wisdom. I am going to wait until the meeting is over. That way if I say it and it does not happen, then it will not hurt, because everything else that would have happened will have already happened. Because if we do it the other way and it does not happen, it is going to kill this meeting." I felt like that was wisdom.

The next thing I heard in my impressions in my mind was, "No, do it now." Well, I thought that either had to be God or the devil because I had already given my impression of "Let's wait until the end." Now I thought, "Ok, I have to know if this is really God. The only way I am going to know is to go for it."

Here is the thing. Sometimes if you do not know, and you are not sure something is God, there is a tendency (like lawyers or preachers) on a weak point to just get louder. On a weak point, just get loud. Sometimes to bolster it, we kind of hype it a little bit. So they shout something like "I just heard God say, I just heard the Lord tell me that we are going to have a great meeting ahead tonight! I want you to know, my brother, that the Lord just told me that we are going to have a glory time! There are angels in the place tonight. I am declaring that you are going to get healed in the Name of Jesus!"

I don't want to offend anyone, so let me tell you something about me. I do not preach that way because that is just not who I am. But there are other men of God, women of God who preach that way, and God mightily uses them. So I am not making fun of them. I used to make fun of one preacher. Some friends of mine told me, "We went to his meeting and it is real. We thought he was weird too, but it is real." The point I was making is that sometimes when you are not sure, there is a tendency to use over-authority. Then when you are wrong, it makes it looks worse. If you say, "God just told me" so you have more confidence to build faith in the people, and God did not tell you, then that really hurts worse. It is better to be humble and be honest.

So I said, "I think God may have just told me something. I am not sure it is God. I think it is. And the only way I am going to know is to say what I think He said. I think I just had an angel touch me. I think God told me it was. This is the way we are going to know. You are going to feel wind come across your face, some of you. Or you are going to feel pressure come upon your body. When you do, stand up, and God will heal you. We will not even have to pray. That is what He said, I think."

See, that way, if you miss it, you have already said that you are not sure. It does not make God look bad, it just makes you look like you are trying to learn how to hear God, and you have a little humility. So I said it, and I said, "We are going to wait five minutes." I declared it, looked at my watch and waited. Two or three of the longest minutes of my life went by, and there was not one person that stood up. I am thinking, "Oh my God, I am wrong. I am glad I do not have to come back here ever again!"

But I just waited. I did not say a word. A friend of mine later told me something. He said, "One of the problems we have is we try to help Him out. We act too quickly and get in the way." So we waited, and all of a sudden people started standing up all over the place. I said, "Ok, check your body out if you are healed." I said, "All right, I want you to come down here and give your testimony." We had seventy-five testimonies of wonderful healings that came because God said, "I am going to prove to you that what you felt was an angel." That was the beginning of the development of this message. I didn't have all the doctrinal stuff, the biblical stuff in place yet. I just had the experience. I asked God to show me, then I saw it in the Scripture.

By the way, Hebrews 1:7 is actually a quote from Psalm 103:20-21 and Psalm 104:3-4. The psalmist goes back and looks through the history of Israel and says, "God often spoke to His people through an angel that manifested as fire!" Then all of a sudden it made sense to me when I remembered about Heidi Baker saying she was sweating under the prophetic word to her. The fire of God came on her and she was sweating to the point where her hair was sopping wet. She was drenched in sweat. She told me, "Randy I felt like God had stuck me in an oven. It was almost unbearable, the fire, the heat that I felt around my body."