The Message Of Angels Series

INTRODUCTION

Today I’ll be bringing you the fourth and final message in the series Angels All Around Us. I hope that during this study you have been informed to understand the Bible, the Word of God, has much to say about angels and about how people in their everyday walk of life have had many experiences in which they think they encountered an angelic being. Now, in the first message we talked about all the fantasies and the facts about angels. Much of what people in America believe about angels is based more on folklore and superstition than the word of God. As I have shared with you there will continue to be in the months and years to come a profusion of books and interest on angels, but we must be careful that we make sure all the things we are hearing about angels line up with the inspired word of God. A lot of the stories we hear are just amazingly fantastic and plug more in to what you might call reincarnation or spiritism so we’ve got to be careful to judge every account in light of God’s word. We also learned angels have a wonderful ministry to us. They protect us; they work with us; they deliver God’s messages to us; and last week we learned about how angels ministered with and to the Lord Jesus Christ. I told you a couple of weeks ago that one of the main roles angels play is delivering messages. The word angel means “messenger.”

Today I’d like to talk to you about “The Message of Angels.” Some time ago I asked the computer software program I have called, “Quickverse,” to print out every verse in the Old Testament and New Testament that had anything to say about angel, angels, cherubim, seraphim, spirits and thirty-five pages later, single-spaced, I had a thick stack of pages of every verse in the Bible that spoke about angels. I through and highlighted every time an angel spoke and I was looking for some kind of a trend. I believe I found it. There are three messages that seem to appear over and over in the word of God that angels give.

MESSAGE #3: SPEAK UP

We’re going to do the opposite of a countdown to the top forty. We’re going to do a countdown to the top three messages in terms of prevalence in the word of God. The first thing we’re going to talk about is the message angels give in the Bible that is the third most common and that is the message, “Speak up!” We’ll read about one incident where an angel gave directions to “speak up” for the Lord Jesus Christ.

Acts 5:17-20. “Then the high priest and all his associates, who were members of the party of the Sadducees, were filled with jealousy. They arrested the apostles and put them in the public jail. But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail and brought them out. ‘Go, stand in the temple courts,’ he said, ‘and tell the people the full message of this new life.’”

You’ll notice the angel came in the middle of the night and we’re going to learn today that that’s when angels do a lot of their work. But in the middle of the night the angel came, woke them up, delivered them from prison and then he delivered this message. He said, “I want you to go and stand and speak up. Tell people about what Jesus Christ has done for you.” Now, as you study the word of God, you’ll find that many times angels have told people to go and speak up for Christ. I told you earlier in this study that angels do not preach the gospel to lost people, because angels don’t understand the gospel. They’ve never been lost; they’ve never been saved, and so, it would be wonderful it would be easier for us if God would just send evangelistic angels all throughout the world and preach the gospel, but he doesn’t do that. We’re the ones to preach the gospel. Sometimes angels come to us and whisper in our ear–sometimes audibly sometimes in our spiritual ear–“Speak a word for the Lord Jesus Christ.” That’s what the angel told Peter and John and the others. Now, if you’ll look at this message, you’ll notice we see a trend in two different directions.

a. A Christian may be directed to speak to an unbeliever

First of all sometimes a Christian may be directed to speak to an unbeliever. Turn to Acts chapter 8. By the way, all of our scriptures today are in the book of Acts, all that have to do with angels. And these three messages are found in Acts. We see Philip, one of the seven deacons, was given a message by an angel.