Transcript

Angels, yeah, created by God.

They are beings of incredible beauty, power, they're immaterial, they are wise, they have a spoiler at the end, does your guardian angel have a name?

Can you name your guardian angel?

Can you find out the name of your guardian angel?

All that and more.

Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this is Ascension Presents.

What's the deal with angels?

Specifically, what's the deal with guardian angels?

First thing, they exist.

They're good.

Now, there are fallen angels, maybe more on that later, but angels are created completely good.

They have free will, they have intellect, so they have intellect and a will.

At one point in time, God allowed them to make a decision either definitively for him or definitively against him.

So all those angels that chose that definitive choice for the Lord remain in his service, they remain in his presence, they do his will constantly, they glorify the Lord, they serve him, they praise his name, and they also intercede on our behalf.

More on that, as I said, in a second.

Those angels that definitively chose against the Lord, those are what we call demons, those we call the devil, right?

And so we recognize, but even the devil was created good.

He took his goodness, took his beauty, took his power, took his intellect, took his will, and he said, I will not serve.

He chose to spend his beauty, his will, his intellect, all those things on himself rather than on the Lord.

But those angels that remained faithful to God, they, as I said, continually praise and bless God, they continually intercede, they protect people on earth.

The angels of God are amazing.

So they are beings of beauty, as I said, even though they don't have no body, they're immaterial.

They have intellects.

The intellect is a different kind of intellect than us.

St. Thomas Aquinas dived deeply, dove deeply, investigated that thoroughly when he talked about how angels have a thing called infused knowledge.

We don't have infused knowledge.

Infused knowledge is like, if you remember that old movie called The Matrix where Neo gets plugged into the Matrix and he's like, oh, I know Kung Fu, I could fly a helicopter, that kind of thing.

That's infused knowledge, like instant instantaneous knowledge.

They don't learn.

We don't have infused knowledge.

We have to learn over the course of our lives.

But angels, they have this instantaneous infused knowledge, according to St. Thomas Aquinas and the church.

Beyond that, the word angel itself means messenger.

And so there are three angels that we know their names, Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael.

Those three angels are called archangels because they had a greater message, right?

They had a great message, an arch, arch mess, arch message, they had a big message.

And so Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael are archangels.

Now another category of angels are called guardian angels.

And we get the idea, the notion, the belief of guardian angels from scripture.

In fact, Jesus himself says that don't despise these little ones because each of them has an angel that goes before my heavenly father.

So there's that sense of like, wait a second, if each, all these children around Jesus who are trying to get close to the Lord have an angel that goes before the heavenly father, wait a second, does that mean we all have a guardian angel?

The answer, yes, we all have a guardian angel.

We all have an angel that is essentially assigned to us at our conception to guard, to guide, and to lead us to the Lord Jesus.

So many saints have talked about this.

So many saints have talked about how we won't know until we get to heaven, God willing, until we get to heaven, the number of times that our guardian angel has protected us, the number of times our guardian angel has guided us, and as protected and guarded, the same words, but has led us to a place where we should go and away from places we shouldn't have gone.

So it's really, it's a good thing to have a devotion to your guardian angel to actually have an awareness that right now, as you're listening to this, as you're watching this, not only is the Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit completely present to you, but so is your guardian angel, that your angel is there, and you can ask your angel for blessings.

In the sense of this, you can ask your angel for protection.

You can ask your angel to go before the face of our Father in heaven and bring your prayers of petition there, your intercessory prayers there, or even to ask your guardian angel to bring your prayer of praise or thanksgiving before the throne of the living God.

So to be aware of this.

The last thing I'll say is sometimes people will say that you can name your angel, or you can find out the name of your angel.

I know that's kind of popular in some circles.

I would have to say, please do not ever, ever, ever do that.

Please never, ever do that.

Say, oh, but it's really cool, my angel's name is such and such.

No. Here's why.

In scripture, people would often ask the angel who appeared to them what the angel's name was, and the angel most often never revealed that.

When it comes to the name of the angel, we don't name the angel beyond that, because to name something is to have authority over it.

To name something is to have some kind of power over the thing.

We don't have power over our guardian angel, so we wouldn't name it because we wouldn't take authority over our guardian angel.

Also, it's like, I want my angel to reveal his name to me.

If we're opening ourselves up to the good spirits, like angels, we also might be inadvertently opening ourselves up to evil spirits, fallen angels, and so just don't do that, is my encouragement.

You're not going to name your angel, and if you had a practice of doing that, you're going to stop.

This is me saying that in a very nice way, hopefully, but we are going to have this awareness of this is a relationship that maybe you've neglected your whole life with you and your guardian angel.

This is a relationship that the moment of your conception, God assigned you this angel.

To be aware of that angel, to be aware of his presence, and his, again, his guiding you, his guarding you, his leading and protecting, is a great, great gift.

Anyways, that's what I got.

From all of us here at Ascension Presents, my name is Father Mike.

God bless.

Ascension Presents