An Angel Appeared in My Bedroom!
In early 2009 my wife, Jodie, and I were experiencing one of those valley seasons. When I think about that time, I am reminded of my teenage years growing up in New Zealand, surfing after school, on weekends, and every chance I got. Because of the unique geography of where we lived in the beautiful North Island, we had the rare opportunity to be able to drive from the East Coast beaches when the surf was flat, to the notoriously much bigger and rougher surf of the West Coast, in only an hour!I remember, on many occasions, wiping out on the huge West Coast waves and getting caught “inside” where the waves were breaking. A massive wave would hit and hold me under for as long as I felt I could take, and then just as I could finally surface and take a huge gasp of air, another even bigger wave hit and again I would be pummeled, tumbling around like I was in the heavy duty cycle of my mum’s washing machine. This could go on for six or eight waves in a row depending on how big the set was.Well, that’s exactly what this time in 2009 felt like for us. We had one hit after another over a six-month period that left us feeling devastated, disappointed, and disillusioned. I won’t go into all the gory details, but I will paint a bit of a picture of what we were going through, because I know you might just be able to relate.The “highlights” are:
We unexpectedly and suddenly lost Jodie’s mum to cancer.
Our dear friend and pastor was also very sick with cancer, and ultimately passed away.
We were let down and betrayed by some people close to us, which hurt.
Another ministry friend had a massive failure that really knocked the wind out of us and destroyed the momentum and ultimately the ministry, into which we had placed so much time, hope, and energy.
We were dealing with several ministry friends who were getting divorced.
We were also caught up and exposed to some behind-the-curtain leadership politics that left us feeling discouraged and disappointed and wondering where to put our trust.
There were a lot of other things going on, but I think you get the picture. We were left feeling like everything had been smacked out of us. We didn’t love God any less and neither did we blame Him for any of it, but we were just so flat, knocked on our butts, and wondering, If this is really what ministry is like, is it even worth it? How can we go on like this? Just being real!
At just the right time, we heard that one of our favorite worship leaders and revivalists—and now friend—Roy Fields, was visiting a church about an hour away from us. Despite everything that we were feeling, we were still hungry for God, even if that feeling was a little deeper down than usual. Something in us knew that even though in the natural we didn’t want to go, we just had to. So Jodie and I, along with our 11-year-old daughter, Keely, jumped in the car and headed off to the first night of what was to be three nights of meetings.
Marker Night
Well, we only made it about halfway through the worship on the very first night when we were overwhelmed by the presence of God. It was so glorious. Holy Spirit started to speak to both Jodie and I at the same time and we just knew what we had to do. We both went down to the front and threw ourselves on the altar. Praying together we said, “YES” to God afresh, a completely unconditional, unqualified, YES—despite all that we had been through, all the pain, all the betrayal, all the loss and disappointment.The Lord was reminding me that if I put my hope in anything other than Him, I will ultimately be disappointed. Everyone, even the best of us, has imperfections and weakness and is in need of grace. The valleys and the challenges, the disappointment and hurts, the things I didn’t fully understand, the wondrous and the incredible, all of it in that moment, became an offering at His feet. And so right there on the altar, once again we fully yielded ourselves to God and His plan and purposes for our lives.That night was one of those marker nights for us. A massive fork in the road. What was meant to be only three nights, turned into two weeks straight. We drove back and forward every night and fully immersed ourselves in the presence of God. We worshipped at the front on the altar every night and experienced wave after wave of His glory and power.
Less than two weeks after those meetings, we would have a life- and ministry-defining encounter.Around that time, an amazing man of God by the name of Jim Drown was on a ministry tour in Australia. We had been invited to lead worship for some of His meetings. During those meetings—that blew up and were full of so much fire!—we became quite close. Jim asked us one night if we would pray about going on the road with him full-time.
Also during our conversation that night, Jim mentioned, almost as a throw-away comment, “If you ever get visited by an angel, make sure you ask its name and mission.” Well, I had never had any kind of angelic encounter, and although I heard him, I thought I would just file that info away, like the emergency numbers on a fridge magnet for highly unlikely random future events. Well, little did we know what was about to happen.
We were excited by Jim’s invitation to go on the road with him and so, of course, we wanted to go home and pray about it together as a family, like we always did. We had spent many years in full-time ministry at this point, but were in a short season when I was working full-time with a Christian Radio Station as an announcer and advertising sales rep, while traveling on weekends as itinerant ministers.
We knew that we were called to full-time vocational ministry and wanted to ask the Lord if this was His timing for us. So when we got home, that’s exactly what we did. Jodie, Keely, and I sat together in our lounge room and started to pray. We asked Jesus to speak to us, as He had done so many times before: “Are You calling us to step back out into full-time ministry?”We waited on the Lord, waited for Him to speak, as He had done so clearly many times before. We waited, and waited…and heard nothing. After some time, we were a little perplexed and slightly frustrated, and so we went off to bed—we would pray some more the next day.
Sometime in the middle of the night when I was in a deep sleep, all of a sudden I was awakened by what can only be described as a massive ball of electricity surging up and down the length of my body, from my head to my feet and back again. It was so strong and rapidly increasing that I woke up screaming at the top of my lungs…AHHHHH!Just when it felt like I couldn’t handle anymore, Jodie, started hitting me and also screaming, “BEN, BEN, BEN, THERE’S AN ANGEL! THERE’S AN ANGEL! THERE’S AN ANGEL!” She was screaming, I was screaming, we were both screaming! I laugh now when I think about it, but it was the most intense thing I had ever experienced!When angels showed up in the Bible, the first thing they always said was, “DO NOT FEAR!” as everyone seems to freak out. I had always thought to myself, Oh they’re just a bunch of wusses. If an angel appeared to me, I wouldn’t be afraid! Well, famous last words, because that night, I screamed like a little girl.
As we were screaming, the angel left and then immediately the fear of the Lord fell in the room like a very thick, very heavy, blanket!Jodie and I both went from one second screaming at the top of our lungs to instantly being terrified of making a sound. The fear of the Lord was so intense that I felt like if I just breathed wrong, I was going to explode. Consequently, that intense sense of the fear of the Lord lingered with us both for weeks following. We almost felt like we were going crazy as we couldn’t even speak to each other without every word and motive of our hearts being measured. We became intensely aware that holiness and our actions matter very much.The angel was there and then it was gone.
Jodie describes the angel as being about 10 feet tall, bright white, with a golden sash across its chest. The angel was standing on the end of our bed, with arms folded and a serious intense look on it’s face.
After some time, it dawned on me that Jim Drown had only just said the night before, “If you ever get visited by an angel, make sure you ask its name and mission!” Yet all we did was scream! I got up out of bed and started to pray, “God, what or who was that, what was its mission? Please speak to me, or send it back! What did You want to tell us?”Very clearly I heard the Lord say, “Zechariah 4:11.” I immediately grabbed my Bible, and not having any idea what the passage said, I turned to Zechariah 4 and began to read, remembering that our question of the Lord the night before was “Are You calling us to step back out into full-time ministry?”The Scripture passage began, “Then I asked the angel,” [I immediately knew we were on the right track.] “‘What are these two olive trees on the right and the left of the lampstand?’ Again I asked him, ‘What are these two olive branches beside the two gold pipes that pour out golden oil?’ He replied, ‘Do you not know what these are?’ ‘No, my lord,’ I said. So he said, ‘These are the two who are anointed to serve the Lord of all the earth’” (Zechariah 4:11-14 NIV).
Well, that rhema word from God immediately hit me like a freight train and I almost physically felt it come off the page—“These are the two who are anointed to serve the Lord of all the earth.” I then flipped over to The Message version of the Bible of that verse and read: “He said, ‘These are the two who stand beside the Master of the whole earth and supply golden lamp oil worldwide’” (Zechariah 4:14 MSG).The Lord was indeed calling us to step out, but it was more than that, He was commissioning us. As Jodie and I prayed together, we felt the Lord speak to us, “Start a ministry and call it Pour It Out Ministries.” Our mandate would be to pour out the golden oil of His presence and power in the nations.
That night, in March 2009, Pour It Out Ministries was birthed, and our lives would never be the same again.Two weeks later, I was learning a worship song that was written by amazing worship leader Rick Pino. He had written a blurb about the song: “In late October 2006, I was visited by the angel of Zechariah chapter 4…Angel of Awakening is part of that emerging sound of awakening!” I immediately called out to Jodie, “Come look at this, honey!” We opened our Bible to Zechariah 4 again and read from the beginning: “Now the angel who talked with me came back and wakened me, as a man who is wakened out of his sleep” (Zechariah 4:1).
That was, of course, exactly what had happened to us—what a wonderful confirmation of what the Lord was doing.
Two Lessons Learned
#1: You never know what’s on the other side of saying “Yes” to God!
Immediately following that encounter, everything changed. We found ourselves suddenly thrust into an international itinerant ministry. We went from being disillusioned, burnt out, and feeling like quitting, to suddenly being booked every weekend and traveling all over Australia and the nations.The Lord opened so many incredible doors for us, so quickly, that we couldn’t have possibly opened ourselves. In fact, He was very strict on us in those days—we weren’t allowed to do any promotion or ask for any meetings, or even let someone know we were in town. He wanted to really show us that He would do it and that “it’s not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord”—which just happens to also be from Zechariah 4!The Lord opened such crazy doors, that we found ourselves eating Nando’s Chicken and racing go carts with the revivalist who had been leading the meetings two weeks earlier, and we are friends to this day. That’s another whole amazing story in itself.The bottom line is this—we felt like we had nothing left in ourselves. We were disappointed, disillusioned, busted, disgusted, to use an old preaching phrase; but one simple act of yielding ourselves to the Holy Spirit and giving Him an unconditional and unqualified “YES” changed our lives completely.
Since then the Lord has taken us all around the world, on five continents in just the past year. We have planted churches, led revivals, known as the Pineapple Revival, that impacted tens of thousands, seen countless saved, healed and delivered, recorded albums, trained thousands of ministry students in our Revival School and online courses, and have seen God do the most incredible “impossible” things.
Yielding to God is not a one-time deal—it’s a daily thing. In the ten years since the Zechariah 4 God-encounter happened, we have experienced many more valley seasons. Our yes has been tested and has required us to continually offer up our yes to Him afresh.Our daughter Keely, who is now 20 years of age, just wrote a powerful Facebook article about Being Faithful with our Yes:Keep saying yes to His way, His plan. There is so much power in our yes. When we say yes, we are giving Him permission to move through us, to work on our behalf and place us where He wants to place us. Being faithful with our yes can look like saying yes all over again every morning. It looks like backing that big yes with a million little ones. Keely HughesI encourage you to yield to Him afresh today. You never know what is on the other side of your “Yes” to God!#2: Holiness matters!It’s hard to describe in words the intensity and weight of the fear of the Lord that we experienced that night of our visitation. It’s important to note that it wasn’t in any way the same kind of “yuck fear” you might experience when you encounter something evil, or if your life is in danger, but it was fear nevertheless. It was a holy, weighty fear of the Lord. Perhaps best described as a terrifying awe. As mentioned earlier, I felt like if I moved a finger wrong, or breathed too loudly, I would literally explode.
Hebrews 10:31 (KJV) says, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” I want to tell you, I have experienced a taste of what that means. God is pure, there is simply no impurity in Him whatsoever; and when He shows up in His glory, no darkness or impurity can survive. Even as I write right now and remember this, I find myself asking God to forgive me for any sin I have before Him.
Don’t get me wrong, I am an absolute believer in the goodness, mercy, and kindness of God. I am a lover of His amazing grace, and great praise rises within me at the revelation that I am the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:21), made pure by His blood! (Can I get an amen?!) But I want to tell you, our actions matter. Purity matters. Holiness matters.
In those weeks following, when Jodie and I even struggled to speak, that weighty fear of the Lord remained with us and impacted every thought, word, and action that we had. I’m sad to admit that same sense of the fear of the Lord isn’t as tangible now as it was then, but it is my prayer, a dangerous prayer, for me and for you: “God, I need a greater fear of the Lord, we need a greater fear of the Lord.”The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; because when we walk in the fear of the Lord, it becomes a guiding force in our lives for our decisions and actions to come from a place of purity, considered and directed by the Lord. (See Job 28:28; Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 1:7, 9:10, 15,33; Isaiah 11:2, 33:6.)I believe that a great fear of the Lord is about to return to the church. I believe with all my heart that we are about to see a day when there is going to be such a powerful manifestation of the glory of God in our churches and meetings that entire congregations will have their faces pressed into the carpets screaming in awe! This is what was happening in Acts 2. God was showing up with such power, that “fear came upon every soul” (Acts 2:43).
Holiness matters.
Encounter Moment
Please pray the following prayer for breakthrough refreshment and holiness:
God, I want to say YES to You afresh, right now. I want to say YES with no conditions or qualifications. I chose to trust You, no matter what. Here’s my life afresh. Have Your way in my heart, in my family, in my home, in my life. Awaken me to the MORE of You. Awaken me to new depths of Your holiness and the fear of the Lord. I say YES to You, Jesus!
Article by Ben Hughes
