Angels Among Us, 2nd Edition

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.