Angels and Intercession
2nd Edition

I originally wrote this series in October of 2006. At that point in my life, I had very few direct encounters with angels. While I was aware of their God-appointed activity, they just were not a part of my day-to-day life.

Sometimes God has fun planning out the timing of things. I think He had me do the research and write this series on angels because He wanted to bring a higher level of overt angelic activity into my life. I did not know it at the time I wrote the teaching, but He trying to prepare me for what He was about to do in my life.

Shortly after I finished writing this series, I talked to Jim, a prophet friend of mine (who also mentors me from time to time). Jim lives in Ontario Canada and I live in the San Francisco area. We are pretty far apart from each other, and keep in touch by phone. I mentioned that I'd just finished writing a teaching series on Angels. In response, Jim mentioned that he was having daily angelic visitations in his home, which had started a couple of weeks ago.

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. I felt "dry" at that time and was very hungry for a fresh touch from God. 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 really mean it seriously, but Jim thought it was a great idea and invited me to come stay with them for a while. Both of our schedules were loaded, so I could not take my "pilgrimage" until mid-January. By the time I arrived, the angelic activity at Jim's house had decreased and it had been a few weeks since Jim had seen one.

None the less, I spent hours each day sitting in the room where the angels had been meeting Jim every day, praying. Probably about a quarter of my prayer was spent asking God to send and angel to me because I really longed for an angelic encounter. But I wasn't able to convince God to give me one.

The Lord meet and refreshed 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. The bedroom is 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 the angels 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.

When I got home, there was a crisis to deal with and 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." Over the next two months, I started to feel very dry again. My mid-march I was feeling so desperate for Him that I decided to saturate myself in His word and cry out to Him for help. I was spending about 2 hours a day reading the bible and another hour praying and calling out to God.

It was about a week into the intense bible reading 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. At first 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 and I tried to ask him questions about what it was like being an angel. Mostly 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 worshipping 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.

About a week or so later, I met a second angel who also began to spend a time with me. As the week progressed, I saw less of the first angel and more of the second. 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 instruct 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 instruction 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 interacting directly with 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 prayed this through, I experienced a tangible sense of healing from the Lord. Next, I started mentally lamenting the fact that I'd shut down the angelic encounters by being so uncooperative. 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 form out of the light. I recognized the voice as belonging to the angel who had been visiting 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, it 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.

This angel almost never talked about himself or other angels, but one time he asked me if I would like him to tell me a story, and I said yes.

"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 ranking in Heaven (relative to each other) is fixed and cannot be changed. And we are perfected in the Lord, so that we all love and respect each other, regardless of our rank."

"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."

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. It made we want to do my best to get as close to God now so that He will reveal more of Himself to me both here and also so I could get to know Him more rapidly in eternity. What a wonderful prize to pursue: knowing Him better and being closer to Him!

When the story was over, it was back to the regular routine. I did more dying to self than anything else. But I also learned more about God and about the ways of Heaven. The intense mentoring lasted six weeks and then it sort of tapered off.

I still see angels from time to time (probably more often than many, but not like those early days where I had daily encounters). Sometimes the Lord will send an angel to more a few times in the same week. Other times, weeks can go by without my seeing a single angel. But when they do cone, they come with an agenda (God's agenda) and not just to socialize. Sometimes they bring me specific instructions or warnings or words of knowledge. Sometimes they help me to better understand God and what He wants, and sometimes the intimacy angel comes to help me draw closer to God or to help me worship better. But when I start getting my focus off of God and onto the angels, then they tend to stop showing up until I get my priorities in order again.

As the angel said to John in Revelation, they are fellow servants and we are not to seek or worship angels...we are to seek and worship the One who sends them to us. But at the same time, we should not be surprised when God uses angels in our lives. After all, they are fellow servants and they love serving Him just as much as we do. Angels enjoy it when God sends them with the answers to our prayers, and to work with us in performing God's kingdom business.