Open Heaven

I want to tell you a story that happened to my friend Gary. Gary had been a pastor of Campus Crusade for Christ, had planted five churches, and was involved with Vineyard for years about the same time I was. He was in Volta Redonda with me again. It was the second year we went back to where the wind first came through. We were back again. This time, David (who had been healed of Down's syndrome, has been taken to heaven eight times, sees in the spirit realm -- sees angels and demons) was talking to me. Gary wanted this desperately. He has been crying out, "God I am desperate! I have to be touched!" David reaches across the aisle of the bus and puts his hand on his leg and just prays a little prayer of blessing over him. David gets off and says, "Gary do you remember the Scripture in Romans about everything being committed and consecrated to God?" That night, while we are worshiping, Gary has been praying, "God I want to see. That is my prayer right now."

I can relate to Gary's desire because this has also been one of the major concerns of my own life for the past ten years. I feel like God has given me words through Ruth Ward Heflin and others, saying "I want you to see." If I have one word, I have twenty. So I have been praying, "God, I want to see." Now I have gone beyond petitioning and I am starting to declare into the spirit realm, "I can see!" You say, "Well, can you see yet?" A little. Barely. But I am saying what God said. God said, "I want you to see." If He wants me to see and I know it is His will, I want to see, we are in agreement, so it is mine! I am declaring it! I am a seer.

Anyway, Gary had been praying the same thing. We were on the front row, worshiping. There was a huge dance group up on the stage, and all of a sudden he saw angels dancing behind the dancers, and over them. And he thought, "Oh my gosh. I've never seen anything like this. This is weird!" After a little while of watching that, all of a sudden, he was gone. I was right there beside him and I could tell he was in a trance. His eyes did not bat once, so I knew he was gone. What happened was that his spirit left his body and he could see his body. He described it to me this way: "I felt myself getting six feet, ten feet, twelve feet tall, looking down on everybody else. Then all of a sudden, I popped out." Now, he was looking at his body and he is not in it.

The interesting thing is, Heidi Baker is a natural mystical-type person. You can look at her life and see that she has been like that her whole life. So I cannot identify with Heidi because I am not a mystical-type person. But Gary is one of these guys that is really organized, likes to be in control of everything. So his experience gives me hope. If it can happen to Gary, it can happen to me. Actually, I could probably enjoy it more than Gary because I'm not as much of a control freak. As a matter of fact, I flow pretty easy. If things change, I say, "Ok, let's go!" You know, it does not bother me; I am not organized. Organized people like it when things go according to plan. People who have no organization do not know there is a plan and so they can flow real easy!

Anyway, Gary was going up, floating, and he was up towards the top of the tent. He told me, "Randy, if you like to be in control and your spirit is outside your body, it is a very freaky experience. It is scary." He got fearful, and when he got fearful, his spirit started to come back down and then he realized what was happening. He said, "No, God! No, God! Up is better! Up is better!" And suddenly it was as if somebody had shot him out of a cannon. He went right straight up through the top tent roof. He was like Superman. He could see through the roof and see everything that was going on at the same time, supernaturally. The spirit has so many abilities that we do not know it has. It seemed like he had caught onto the Challenger, going outside the stratosphere! The tent was getting small and he got scared again. Because of fear, it stopped and he began to come back down until he was inside the tent. Again he said, "Oh God, please, no!"

He later told me, "Randy, I really believe that if I had not done that, I would have gone straight into the Throne Room. That was my destiny. Because of my fear though, I did not enter." (Now since then, he has been there. This experience has happened to him several times since.)

That first time, his arms went straight out. To him they seemed to be a mile long, and then the Lord came and touched him and looked at him. When that happened, he just snapped instantly back into his body. When he came back into his body, he was shot backwards. I saw it. This is not only first-hand experience of hearing it. I not only heard what happened, I saw it happen. He knocked down three rows of chairs and almost knocked the pastor down, then one on our team, when it hit him. He fell on the floor and just shook and trembled and wept for the longest time. He could not talk about it.

The next night I called him up. "You have to give your testimony." He is seeing stuff, but he thinks he has gone crazy because his eyes got opened out of that experience and now he can see angels and stuff. They had to help him up onto the stage. He could not talk. His wife gave the testimony. I said, "There is an anointing on Gary. Pastors, I want you to come." Those pastors ran. They lined up. Gary was so weak he could not even lift his hand. He was just weeping, shaking, could not talk, undone by the presence of God. These humble Brazilian pastors would be on their bellies like a marine in mud, crawling underneath the barbed wire while bullets are going over. That is how low they were. They would crawl underneath his hand. They would get his hand and put it on top of their heads and then they would go out. We would pull them out and another one would crawl under and grab his hand.

Gary said, "I felt so stupid. I was helpless! I was doing nothing." It was some of the most powerful ministry he ever had, and all he had to do was nothing! He was just there, could not do a thing, but God was flowing through him.

We went back to Manaus shortly after that. Gary was up preaching on the microphone. He had never fallen in thirty years of ministry while he taught before this. He said he saw an angel on a girl and he prophesied to her. He prophesied what she had told the Lord she needed to have. She felt like an orphan spirit. She said, "God I need something personal for me." He called her out and prophesied to her and told her the things of her heart. This angel was around her and she just collapsed into the glory of God. Then he continued to teach and all of a sudden he stopped, and his eyes were bugged again. (He has real piercing blue eyes.) He started going backwards, then fell down, still holding the mic. He could not even let go of it. I knew that something was up.

(I am telling you these things so you will not be afraid when it starts happening, so you will know. Some people just think it is the devil. It is not the devil. It is God!)

I looked over at Gary's wife, who had just been touched recently; her eyes have been opened too. I said, "Kathy, go get the mic and take over." So she went and got the mic, and she started prophesying to the wind, like Ezekiel. What happened was that Gary had seen a fifteen-foot tall angel come in the door. (By the way, this was a year later and they have the walls up now.)

That first night it rained again, and mist came in from the doors all the way to the walls and the platform and hit us on the face! The people said, "Randy, this has not happened since you guys were here last year." As a matter of fact, the nick-name for our global team is now 'The Legends' because of all of the miracles that have taken place in the natural and through healing. We've seen tumors drop out of peoples' bodies!

Kathy began to prophesy to the wind. What happened? The wind came into the building. It was not blowing outside. The wind that came in was so strong that it knocked over the last three rows of those little white lawn chairs that they had for seats. It knocked three rows over and came up onto the stage. I tell you, when that happened, all heaven broke loose in that meeting!

We had been seeing ten percent, at least, get healed every night. During the week, we had five to eight thousand people -- on the weekends it was up over ten thousand with standing room only. So every night for six nights in a row, we had seen five hundred, eight hundred, nine hundred people getting healed a night. That was ten percent at least.

I had been telling Gary, "Gary, I cannot see! I feel like I am a blind man. I need to see! If I could see! Even just hearing what you tell me what you see encourages me. Just getting it second-hand -- I am like I am blind and you are the seeing-eye dog! You have to tell me if you see them." On the last night he came up to me. I was getting ready to preach, and he said, "Randy, they are here." I said, "Where?" There is a very high ceiling with a catwalk across. He said, "They are up there on that catwalk. There are four of them. These are not like the normal ones. These are warrior angels." I said, "Gary, how do you know they are warrior angels?" He said, "Because they have gladiator clothes on, and swords drawn." I said, "What are they doing?" "Nothing. They are standing guard." I said, "Ok, keep me posted."

I began to teach, and we went into the ministry time. Gary walked up to me and said, "They are on the move." I said, "What are they doing?" He said, "They are clearing out the atmosphere. It is like there are these globs and they are just going after them. They are clearing it out. They are creating an open heaven without opposition, without oppression." I said, "Oh, that is good!" A little bit later while we were ministering, he came up to me again and whispered in my ear, "Hundreds of new angels just came in on the right." I said, "What are they here for?" He said, "These are healing angels." So I said, "On the right, God is getting ready to heal a bunch of people!" I was not trying to hype it up. I was totally confident, totally confident because of the ability to see -- even though it was through somebody else -- that they were there to serve.

Now it is interesting what they look like. I asked him, "What do they look like?" He said, "They are whirlwinds of fire." They came in and they rested over people's heads. Gary told me, "My theology changed, Randy. I had always thought what happened was basically -- who got healed and who did not -- was mainly a sovereign thing. I realized it was not all sovereignty, because the angels came in and they would rest over people. They would spin about six inches over their heads. They were about a foot tall, a whirlwind of fire."

They can take all types of forms and sometimes appear like lights and stuff. A friend of mine in Peru took a picture of them, and had a professional photographer tell him, "I can explain it." In this picture all you can see everywhere are hundreds of wheel-like lights. He said, "I can explain it." I showed it to him. This man is a professional photographer with over $100,000 worth of equipment. He said, "There is no natural explanation for that. I would like to take that and show it to some of the greatest photographers in the United States. How did you capture that on digital?"

Gary said, "The angel would wait, and if the heart was right, the faith was right, the hunger was right, they would 'whffft!' and the person would get healed. If the person was not receptive, the angel would wait and then would move over somebody else. I realized it is just not sovereignty. It is sovereignty and human response to God's initiative."

Now you may say, "This is a weird message, and you are really out there. What makes you think that this was real?" I knew it was real because in the six nights we had been there, there had been about ten percent healings. The night when this was happening, I felt like the Lord said, "Sing Agnus Dei, count to three and give a shout, and I will heal the people." So we did it. (If you are going to have confusion, it will be on the first or second night. It is not going to be on the last night, the seventh night, because we have the routine down. They understand.) Then we said, "If any of you are at least eighty percent better, begin waving both hands over your head like this!" I turned to the pastor, and said, "I cannot count them. It is impossible. You and your associate come here and tell me what percentage of the people here (there are over ten thousand people) are waving their hands right now?" They said, "At least ninety percent!"