Podcast 1.10 The Angels in the Room

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Transcript

Episode 1.10: The Angels in the Room

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Intro: Welcome to the Encounter Jesus podcast, also known as the ‘feel like Jesus is hugging you today’ podcast. I’m Elizabeth Ellynshaw, and today we will be talking about something that is real–and true, and wonderful… and also invisible, just like the truth that Jesus is with us is real, and true, and wonderful, and invisible. And we’ve been learning about and practicing looking with the eyes of faith at what is true and real and wonderful and invisible, seeing with our hearts that Jesus is with us and seeing what He wants us to see and hear and know about what He’s doing, just like Jesus always saw and did what His Father was doing, which was also real and true and wonderful and almost always invisible to physical eyes.

So the most important thing we can fix our spiritual eyes on is Jesus. But as you fix your spiritual eyes on Jesus and see Him with you, you may or may not start to notice out of your peripheral vision that Jesus is too great a king to travel alone. That He is surrounded by angels, by angel servants, by angel-warriors, by angel-escorts that worship Him. And you may or may not even see Him assigning these angels to help you, comfort you, hold you, protect you, and fight for you, because the Bible says that angels are ministering spirits that God sends to serve humans who are inheriting His salvation. So I hope today’s episode will blow open your imagination and your inner mental landscape to how glorious it is to go through life aware of the armies of holy angels that are in the room with you right now.

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Prayer:  Lord, today I pray to You as the Lord of hosts, the Lord of heaven’s armies, the God of angel armies who is always on our side, the One who sets up the camp of His army around the people who fear You to deliver them, and I ask You to open up the eyes of the person listening right now, just as Elisha’s servant’s eyes were opened, so they would be able to see that the warriors standing with them in the spiritual realm as they pray are more than those with any enemy attacking them in any realm ever. And I pray, Lord Jesus, that we would learn to partner with You and Your angel armies in every way You want us to. In Jesus’ name, amen.

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Content: I used to picture the spiritual realm as having God, and then satan and demons, and then me. And I pictured the enemy bad guys attack me and God fights for me and protects me. That is all real stuff, but there is a really important piece missing from that picture. It’s almost obvious enough to be like one of those kids coloring workbooks with a page called, ‘find what is missing in this picture’ And then there’ll be a picture where the trees are missing their trunks or the bicycle is missing its wheels or something. So can you find what is missing in my old picture of the spiritual realm? I bet you guessed, it’s… Angels. Angels are the fourth kind of spirit inhabiting the spiritual realm, along with God’s Spirit, and our spirits, and evil spirits, there are also angels. And it’s really funny that I forgot about them because the Bible says there are a LOT of angels, ‘thousands upon thousands and myriads upon myriads’ however many that is, and I bet if I could actually really see all the spirit beings around there would be angels everywhere, way more angels than anything else! You might remember this actually happened to someone in the Old Testament, the servant of the prophet Elisha, this whole army surrounded just Elisha and his servant to take out these two guys, and Elisha was not scared and he said Lord open my servant’s eyes that he may see that those who are with us are more than those who are with them, and suddenly the servant could see there was a much bigger spiritual army around them in fiery chariots than the army of humans! And they were delivered.

So when I started to include angels in the way I imagined the spiritual realm around me, some really important things changed and became more Biblical and accurate. Firstly, I stopped seeing God as the opposite of satan and demons, and I started to see that angels are the opposite of demons, and God is way way bigger than all these created things. So my view of God got so much bigger and more accurate and more honoring to Him when angels were restored to their location in the picture. I was going to be traveling to another country where I knew there would be a lot of spiritual warfare, and I heard the thought from the Lord, “I want you to have more interaction with the good guys than with the bad guys,” and I thought wow, then the Lord is going to show me a lot of angels, because here I’m expecting to be aware of all the ways the enemy is at work in this country and I’m expecting to have to pray against all this evil stuff, but God wants me to see what His angel armies are up to and partner with them even more. And I did. I received both word-thoughts and picture-thoughts from the Holy Spirit about the angels there, that there were angels there serving the specific people I met and rejoicing that I had come to help, angels that were in position worshiping God and who were happy to wave at me as I went by, angels that never gave up, whether they were assigned to individuals or whole nations. So my mental picture of it all became so much less dark when He started to make me aware of the angels not just the demons at work in the world.

And I would say I experience angels as feeling the opposite of the way I would experience the enemy feeling. I don’t know if you would say that in your life you can identify what it feels like when a demon is trying to bother you, but if we think of all the ways that demons make us feel, angels feel like exactly the opposite of that. The bad guys feel dirty and make you feel dirty, like they slime your thoughts and make the spiritual atmosphere polluted so you might feel nauseous or choking or sick or harder to breathe, or make you feel far from God or distracted from God or feel terrible about yourself, guilty, ashamed, hopeless, afraid, they give you nasty thoughts about God or yourself or other people, and they dishonor the sacrifice of Jesus by accusing you of all your sins and telling you what Jesus did was not enough.

(By the way if I was feeling these things I’m describing, I would say out loud, “In Jesus’ name I command anything not from Jesus that is trying to affect me right now to leave me in Jesus’ name and go to Jesus,” and send them packing! I’ve done that so many times and felt the bad feelings instantly leave even before I finished the sentence. And on the rare occasions that it didn’t instantly leave me, the Lord showed me a sin I needed to repent of, a lie I needed to repent of believing, a way I was disobeying that I needed to repent and start obeying, or somebody I needed to release and forgive that the bad stuff was holding onto, and once I did that, then the bad feeling completely left me.)

But the reason I was describing what the bad guys feel like was to contrast it with angels. Because angels on the other hand just feel clean, so clean, in this really wonderful clean way inside and out, they feel like cleanness and they feel like joy and they feel like light, like when sunlight shines into a room and you can see everything and there are no secrets and no evil or confusion and it brightens your mood and makes you feel so happy and good, and they make you feel so close to God and so aware of Him and not distracted from Him but able to focus on Him and wanting to worship Him with them, they make the atmosphere feel wonderful and full of God’s presence and glory and so easy to breathe and so clean like fresh mountain air, and they make you feel loved and forgiven and whole and not in pain and at peace, and they honor the sacrifice of Jesus because even though they are sinless and we’re not and they are way more powerful and smart than we are and way older than we are they just love us and forgive us and accept us and they want to serve us and they even love doing things for us because Jesus died for us and they love Jesus and they are obsessed with Jesus and they honor and obey Jesus and they’re just wonderful to have around. So basically having angels serving you and being aware of it feels even more wonderful than having demons trying to bother you and being aware of it feels nasty.

But even more important than how angels make us feel, or how being aware of the truth and reality of angels makes us feel, is that that it glorifies and honors our King Jesus to see Him as He really is, in the context of His created angel army and servants, as a King who is too great to travel alone. I shared in episode 4 about picturing the throne room of God when I pray. If I picture King Jesus on a throne all alone I might want to kneel before Him, but if I picture more accurately, as the Bible says is actually true, that billions of angels who are way bigger and more powerful and wise and holy than I am are falling on their faces all around Him and adoring Him with all their beings unceasingly and yet I’m still allowed to go get close to Him and say something to Him and He’ll listen to me, my mind is blown with awe and gratitude and reverence.

When I pray I can picture the truth that Jesus is with me by picturing Him with me in my room, which is true He’s here, or I can picture myself with Him in His room, His throne room, seated with Him in heavenly places, which is also true, the Bible says I am there too. But either way, in both rooms I can see His angels are with Him, in my room, the angels Jesus has brought on assignment to minister to me are here with us, and His room where we’re seated together in heavenly places is just full of angels, the angels always worshiping Him around His throne and ready to be sent out at His command in answer to my prayers.

And that brings me to the third thing that got better when I began to picture Jesus’ angels with Him. So first, I saw that angels are the opposite of demons, not God, God’s bigger, and secondly I saw Jesus as a much greater king with an army of servants and my worship improves when I see how they worship Him, but also, thirdly, picturing angels when I pray gives my prayer life this whole new dimension of faith. Many years ago I was staying with this wonderful couple in their home, and the wife said to me and to her husband,

“Can we stop and sit down and pray together? I felt this morning like the Lord wanted me to pray but I got busy making breakfast and I forgot about it, and then He showed me this picture-thought or vision, this picture of God and angels up in heaven and there was this hole in the floor like a portal where the angels could jump down the hole to be sent from heaven down to earth, and all these angels were standing gathered around the hole ready to be sent down in answer to prayers, to do whatever God’s people will pray today. But nobody was praying anything and the angels were just standing there getting bored and sad, wanting and waiting to be sent in answer to our prayers, but we hadn’t prayed. And I felt so convicted like I need to do what God said and pray!” she said.

Well, I had never pictured anything like that before, but we did sit down and pray together and when I pictured those angels standing ready to be sent by God in answer to whatever I asked, I really started to think, what do I want God to do in the world? If He’s really going to do it, what do I want to ask Him for? And my faith increased to pray, and my motivation increased to pray. So now I often pray and ask God to send His angels into specific situations to accomplish specific things.

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Question: So today I invite you to picture Jesus with you, fix your eyes on Him, and ask Him, “Lord, what do You want to say to me and show to me about the angels You have assigned to minister to me? What do You want me to know about Your angels and how can I partner with them?” I invite you to write down the word-thoughts and picture thoughts that Jesus brings to your mind, and continue to ask Him what “Lord, what else do You want me to know and what else do You want me to do?” I hope that His angels will light up your life and landscape like they have mine and that your adventure with Jesus will never be the same again.

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