In a sermon on Sunday, California megachurch pastor Greg Laurie speculated whether every believer has a “guardian angel” but acknowledged their roles in doing God’s work in our lives.
“Here is a question that pops up every now and again: do we have guardian angels? Here is my definitive answer: maybe,” Laurie said in the message titled “Angels and Demons.”
“I would even add that I think there’s a good chance that we do,” he claimed, according to The Christian Post.
Laurie, who serves as the senior pastor of the multi-site Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California, referred to Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:10 while He spoke about children.
“He said, ‘Make sure you don’t look down on these little ones for I tell you, their angels in Heaven always see the face of my Father in Heaven,'” Laurie explained. “Interesting he said, ‘their angels in Heaven.'”
The longstanding Harvest Crusades evangelist also pointed to a passage in Acts 12, where an angel helped Peter escape from prison. Believers, who were praying at home, were in disbelief after Peter arrived at their doorstep, saying “maybe it’s his angel.”
“Does that mean that Peter had a personal guardian angel? I don’t know the answer to that,” Laurie said. “But even if we don’t have personal angels, you can be sure that we do have angels assigned to us that are involved in our lives.”
He noted that the Bible has about 300 references to angels and that they “primarily work undercover” as “God’s secret agents.”
“It is not the job or the nature of an angel to draw attention to themselves,” he said. “They are just doing God’s work. You might describe them as God’s secret agents. Another way to put it, they are sort of like Navy SEALs. … Their job is to get the job done.”
Additionally, he said, angels operating in a believer’s life can stop them from doing the “wrong” things and going down the wrong path.
“There are times when an angel has prompted you [and] spoken directly to you,” the 69-year-old pastor explained. “I wonder how many times we’ve been headed for destruction, and God changed our course by directing an angel to stop us from where we were going.”
Later in Laurie’s sermon, he addressed several misconceptions about angels that many Christians believe, including the belief that angels are females.
“I know we often think of an angel as feminine, like ‘she’s as pretty as an angel.’… In reality, when angels do appear visibly, they appear as men,” he said, referring to how angels appear throughout the Scriptures.
Laurie also debunked the idea that people become angels after they die.
“We don’t become angels. … That’s wrong. … Angels are angels. They’re created beings. They are spoken of in Scripture,” he contended.
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Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer. He is also the co-hosts of the For Your Soul podcast, which seeks to equip the church with biblical truth and sound doctrine. Visit his blog Blessed Are The Forgiven.