Tag: angels

He Will Give His Angels Charge Over You

  • Thanks to RoadsideAmerica .com for the use of this image

Just today I received the following email from Abigail. I  suppose she knows that from the Bible, Abigail came to mean servant and actually was an early English slang name for a servant. This wonderful Abigail is a servant of Christ who owns a great little company called Heavenly Divine Company. I encourage you to not just visit their site but become a customer, you’ll be glad you did.

Here’s here e-mail:

https://www.facebook.com/heavenlydivinestore

Abigail’s email has spurred me to share two instances when I believe there is no other explanation than angelic intervention which saved my life and the lives of some others. You may choose to believe what I am about to share, or not. I was present in each these and I know for myself, the veracity of what I write.

The first incident came on a freezing winter night, with icy roads and a bitter wind, but a full moon which made visibility incredibly clear against the white snow. I was working night shift as a police officer, sometime in the mid-1980’s, when I observed a vehicle blow through a red light at high speed. I attempted to initiate a traffic stop. The vehicle sped south toward the city limits and I was in pursuit. The road conditions made it treacherous. We approached the crest of a hill that I knew to be steep on the other side and have an intersection with a state route immediately at the bottom. As I watched the fleeing vehicle crest that hill, I slowed down and advised the other responding car by radio to be careful of the hill. When I got to the top of the hill, no vehicle in sight and I was right on its tail. No car overturned, no crash, no taillights, nothing. Calling off the pursuit I continued across the highway, south, and turned on my spotlight to check the couple of access roads that went into a wooded area on the west side of the road. The only place the car could be hiding. I went back and forth two or three times across the area, again, nothing. I could clearly see each road, no car.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/118360296432795461/

A week later I received word through an informant that the vehicle I had chased had a large drug shipment in it for delivery. The driver was heavily armed. According to the informant, the car had pulled into one of those lanes, backed in. The way he described my actions driving back and forth, it had to be true that I was seen from the very lanes which I checked but saw nothing. I was then told the driver had a high-powered rifle with a scope and my head was lined up in his sights. The driver had determined that if I spotted him and started to pull into where he was parked, I was dead. The total distance between me and where the car would have been was less than 50 yards. You tell me. Why I did not see the car and go toward it?

A second event happened on the opposite side of the world almost two decades later. The town, Tuzla, Bosnia, again winter and this time high atop one of the mountains upon which this section of Tuzla sits. I had travelled up the narrow winding road in a large blue van belonging to the missionary, Brad Collins, who ran a hockey ministry in Sarajevo and in Tuzla. My wife, Karin, and I were there in our role in missionary care in support of Brad. Along with a Bosnian pastor from Tuzla, we had gone to the very pinnacle of this mountaintop where there was a small neighborhood of shacks housing squatting Roma’s (gypsy’s we would call them, a term offensive to this tribal group of people. They are not, as the name might suggest actually Romanian but  originating “ in the Punjab region of northern India as a nomadic people and entered Europe between the eighth and tenth centuries C.E. They were called “Gypsies” because Europeans mistakenly believed they came from Egypt. This minority is made up of distinct groups called “tribes” or “nations.””[i]

We visited with friends in one of these small homes and when we took our leave we found that due to the narrowness of the road, the size of the van and slippery pavement, turning to go back the way we had come was not an option. We proceeded the only way possible down the road in the dark of night. The freezing rain made it nearly impossible to see on the dark mountainside. I was in the front passenger seat and suddenly I heard myself exclaim to Brad to ‘STOP!’ I had no idea why, but I had a ‘bad feeling’. I got out and started walking ahead of us and soon found that had we continued another hundred yards or so we would have gone off the side of a cliff. The road had given way. No barriers. No markers. No lights. No road. Just a steep, several hundred foot, drop. We tried to back up the slight incline we were on. The van spun every which way and no matter how we tried to push or plan, we were going nowhere. On the hillsides around us were a few houses, all dark. Well past the bedtime of most of these folks, I suppose.

Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina

In utter desperation, and I mean desperation, as I slowly walked along the driver’s side of the van in the road, balancing myself against the van, I simply said, “Lord, we need help now.”

I came around the back of the van and there stood four or five men who had not been there seconds before. Every house around us was still dark. The men pushed the van back to a place where it could be turned at a flat spot on the side of the road. With the vehicle turned, we could go back to town from the way we had originally come. As soon as the van was ready to reboard, I turned to thank the men profusely. They were not there. They were not walking away. They were not just behind a bush (if there was one). They were gone. You may think I’m rowing my boat with only one oar, but I know what I saw, and I know angels walk among us.

Just thought I’d share that with you this Thanksgiving and Christmas season. You can rest assured that what the Bible says is true and God’s angels have been given charge over you.

God bless.

[i]
encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/roma

Finding Our Place in Heaven

We can live each day, joyously, victoriously, in grateful appreciation of the heavenly home that has already got our name on the mailbox!

Recently we treated the topic of having only about ten minutes left in your life and knowing that it was soon to be over. The topic was spurred on by the recent crash of a Lufthansa flight into the side of the Alps, apparently on purpose. Those on the flight would have known for about ten minutes that they were about to crash. Today we want to take that a step further and consider finding our place in heaven. As we mentioned in the previous offering  there is no biblical support for St. Peter standing at the pearly gates of heaven deciding who should or should not enter.  The GOOD news is that for those who have accepted Christ as Savior, they are already in heaven! You ask how that could possibly be since every morning you wake up and you are still living and working on the mortal plain. If we read what the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus, the Lord has already given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places and predestined us to adoption. What Paul is helping the Ephesians to understand is that if they had accepted Christ’s forgiveness for their sins, then they were already citizens of the heavenly kingdom. Perhaps an analogy will help us to understand it a little bit better. God had already created a way for us to be adopted us as His children.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a child whose father was in the US Air Force stationed in Germany. When you were born you were born on the U.S. Air base but within the country of Germany. Because you are the child of a U.S. airman you are automatically a citizen of the United States even though you have never set foot in the U.S. Someday you will travel with your parents back to the U.S. and when you arrive you will have credentials that show you are a U.S. citizen even though you have never been in the U.S. and you are immediately admitted. You were, positionally, a U.S. citizen though you had never been in the U.S. That is what Paul meant when he said that God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Just as the child of an American has all the freedoms and rights of every other citizen positionally without ever having been in the country or, for the believer who is positionally a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, never yet having been in the heavenly places.

Paul writes that we were preordained to adoption as sons. Let us use the same example only with an adoption. The U.S. airman and his wife are living in Germany. Both are U.S. citizens. They have an opportunity to adopt an infant who is of German descent. He is, in fact, a German citizen. Once they adopt the little German infant the boy becomes a citizen of the United States positionally because he has never been in the U.S. and was not born there. In this scenario we will make it so that as he gets older, to have his American citizenship he must renounce his German citizenship. He may still have not been inside the United States physically, in fact he may still live in Germany; but his position is one of a full U.S. citizen; adopted as a son of a citizen and given full rights as a citizen. No one will dare deny him access because he is already a citizen. Imagine if when he got to the entry point and they learned that he was the son of the president! The welcome home mat would certainly be rolled out!

When we accept our position as a child of God we will walk up to those gates as a Child of the King; a royal heir to all that is God’s! Talk about a red carpet arrival! The Bible tells us that the angels marvel at us because of what God has done for us. They have been with God since He created them, yet they can never experience being the recipient of the full love we have received and can never be adopted as God’s children. As a Christ-follower, we are children of the King with full citizenship in heaven, instilled with all the rights and responsibilities that are part of our citizenship in heaven.

That is the meaning of Paul’s words in Ephesians chapter 1. I trust it will provide you with comfort knowing that you, if you have accepted Christ as Savior, have already attained your position in heaven. Jesus said, I go to prepare a place for you and if I go, I will come again and receive you unto myself. What a spiritual blessing in the heavens we have already received that our place has been secured, Paul writes, that it is sealed by the Holy Spirit. For those who argue then that we can somehow lose our place there is to believe that we, as failed human beings, Jesus said He understood that we were dust, could take something away from God who has sealed us with the Holy Spirit! Those who live in such a way that one would say they would be in danger of losing their salvation should examine themselves to see if they ever had salvation to begin with. Like the seed that fell on shallow ground and never took root; many need to return to the cross and seek that original forgiveness and then their lives will be eternally changed. The outcome of their human life will be radically different.  Praise God for that!

We have covered a great deal of theology in one lesson but perhaps a reminder for us all. We can live each day joyously, victoriously and in grateful appreciation of the heavenly home that has already got our name on the mailbox!

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