God intended the ministry of angels to be something more than a mere "safety net" for us when we begin sinking in our circumstances.
Look at Exodus 23:20, and you will see what I mean. God told the Israelites, "Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared."
What He once did, He still does. That means He has assigned angels to go before you as His New Covenant child just as surely as He assigned them to go before His Old Covenant servants. Hebrews 13:8 tells us that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. His angels go before you!
What does it mean for God to send angels before you? It means He dispatches them to make the way clear for you. He doesn't want your life to be characterized by crises and catastrophes. He sends angels before you to keep you on a safe path and to bring you into the destiny He has prepared for you. That is God's will for you!
Because angelic ministry is deployed to help you at all times, you don't have to live life bouncing from one emergency to the next. As Psalm 34:7 says, "The angel of the Lord encamps round about them that fear him, and delivers them."
In every area of life - in business and ministry, in finances and family affairs - God has commissioned angels to go before you to prepare the way. God's best is for us to understand enough about this angelic ministry to deliberately and consciously commission our angelic hosts on a daily basis.
He would prefer that we avail ourselves of them in advance so they can help us avoid the hard places instead of simply waiting for them to rescue us when we get into trouble.
Allow me to clarify something at this point. When I say we "commission" the angels, I'm not saying we simply order our angels around. I believe God has made the ministry of angels available to us as a resource to enable us to fulfill our created destinies. But that doesn't mean we have them at our beck and call. We can't arrogantly order them about as we see fit. The angels wouldn't listen to our dumb ideas anyway because they get their instructions from God. They do His bidding on our behalf.
With that said, let's examine how this angelic system works and find out what we can do to take better advantage of it in our daily lives. Let's start by looking at Hebrews 2:1 again, keeping in mind that it is referring to angelic ministry: "Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip."
In Scripture, the word "things" is frequently used when making a distinction between the material realm and the spiritual realm. Look, for example, at the way Paul uses the word things in Colossians 3:2: "Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth."
If the ministry of angels is going to become a daily fact in our lives, there are some spiritual things to which we must give more earnest heed. We need to pay attention to the differences between the natural world and the world of the spirit.
The Bible makes a clear distinction between these two realms. Consider Second Corinthians 4:17-18, which says, "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."
Those verses are telling us that if we want our affliction or hardship to be light and momentary as opposed to something long and drawn out, then we must look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. We need to look in the spiritual realm and not in the natural realm.
Obviously, we can't literally acquire visual acuity into the unseen, spiritual realm (unless God supernaturally gifts us to operate in the discerning of spirits and enables us to see with your natural eye into that realm).
That isn't what this passage is saying. It is simply saying that the unseen realm needs to be the focus of our attention.
It is telling us to give earnest heed to the unseen realm because it supersedes the temporal world in which we live. It is urging us to pay more attention to the spiritual realm than we do to what we can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell.
That is the realm in which you access the ministry of angels - angels who can get you through those hard places quickly and easily! But let me warn you. It won't be easy to give priority to the world of the Spirit rather than the temporal realm. It goes totally counter to everything your flesh wants to do.
You have spent years being conditioned to rely upon what you physically see, hear, taste, smell, and feel. You have learned to rely upon your rational abilities when making decisions. It takes a major adjustment to begin basing your life and your decision-making processes on the unseen realm.
But the fact of the matter is, if you don't make that adjustment, your afflictions won't be light. They will be long and hard. So it is worth the effort it takes to shift your focus from the realm of the natural to the realm of the Spirit.
Excerpt permission granted by Harrison House Publishers
Mac Hammond is the senior pastor of Living Word, a large and growing church in Brooklyn Park (a suburb of Minneapolis), Minnesota. He is the host of the Winner’s Minute, which is seen locally in the Minneapolis area on KMSP Channel 9 at 6:44 a.m. and 11:11 a.m. He is also the host of the Winner's Way broadcast and author of several internationally distributed books. Mac is broadly acclaimed for his ability to apply the principles of the Bible to practical situations and the challenges of daily living.
