Portal of Glory, Part 2

Greetings friends and new listeners.

Welcome! I'm Sharon Otz thanking you for joining us today on The Sound of Faith because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. In today's exciting message, Portal of Glory, I will be sharing the story of my recent breast cancer diagnosis and how the Lord sealed my heart with His supernatural, unsurpassable peace from the first day of my journey, during which God gave me a phenomenal dream of a portal of glory from which radiated streams of energy into my body.

Stay tuned for Portal of Glory. And so we are told in Scripture, in Hebrews 1-7, Hebrews 1-14, they are ministering spirits sent forth to the heirs of salvation. They're sent forth on our behalf.

They are assigned to us during our lifetimes. Amen? And we're told in Psalm 34-7, the angels of the Lord encamped round about them that fear Him and deliver them. And that's what the word fear there means just like what Jacob was afraid. Not afraid in a phobic sense, but afraid in the reverence. I guarantee you if an angel showed up, you would be afraid. Every time we see them show up in the Bible, the first thing they say before they deliver their message is, fear not.

Because your human body reacts to that supernatural presence and power. We are told that they encamped round the ballast. And we are told that they encamped round the ballast. So that means north, south, east, west. That means 360 degrees. Amen? And we've already seen 24-7. So angels of God are sent to us. God's got us covered 24-7, 360 degrees. Amen?

Come on, that's something to be happy about. The angels on His payroll are 24-7. And God's got us covered 360 degrees. We're told in Psalm 91, 11, and 12, for He shall give His angels charge over thee to keep thee in all my ways.

They shall bear thee up in their own hands lest you should dash your foot against the stone. And that means to us that in a time of danger, they will quickly rescue us. It may be a last minute rescue.

I imagine, I see them swooping in to prevent you from falling or stumbling or something bad happening to you. Sometimes that rescue doesn't come until that instant that you need it. But when you need it, it will be there. Amen? We are told in Psalm 103, verse 20, His angels excel in strength.

What does that mean? If you excel in something, that means that you are greater than somebody else's strength. They are stronger than the other ones that come against us. Amen? And if God needs to, He can send more. He's got myriads of angels, we're told. We're told in the Scriptures, if you study it, that there's innumerable angels.

Amen? So sometimes we may come up against a fierce archenemy of the wicked one. He may send one of His archangels of darkness against us. But we don't have to be afraid because God has got angels that excel. They excel over all the powers of the enemy. That's why He told us in Psalm 91 and then it's brought over in the New Testament by Jesus that we can tread on the serpent, the scorpion, the lion, the adder. Amen?

Over all the powers of the enemy. Because the angels of God, they excel. And it says that they not only excel, but they do His commands and they harken to the voice of God's word. Amen? That's why you always want to speak the word of God. When you speak the word of God, that calls us in the supernatural realm for God to dispatch His angels to bring it to pass. Amen? When human endeavor cannot bring it to pass, when the arm of flesh can't do it, amen, that's when God will send His messengers and His angels on our behalf.

And Psalm 104 tells us He makes His angels a flaming fire. You probably have read or heard people give accounts where they were getting ready to be killed. They were getting ready to be killed getting ready to be kidnapped or getting ready to be shot or getting ready to be killed. And all of a sudden the perpetrators and the criminals hightailed it out of there with no explanation. They just took off running.

And later on when someone could, I mean I've read things like this for real. Later on when someone could talk to them, they said, oh man, we weren't going on. We saw these huge giants standing there with flaming swords.

We got out of there fast. Amen? God opened their eyes and let them see His mighty fearsome angels.

Amen? Just like when Elisha was surrounded by the enemy in the city of Dothan and his servants said, oh, they were surrounded. And Elisha said, God, please open his eyes. And when his eyes were open, he saw the angels of God surrounding them. He said, there's more for us than are against us. So knowing that these powerful beings and messengers of God are employed on our behalf, how much comfort does that give us?

How much reassurance does it give us? Amen? So now God speaks to Jacob. He's seen this beautiful vision of the angels coming up and down. And now God's going to speak to him. And God reiterates to him what he already told Abraham and what he already told Isaac. He said, I will be with you wherever you go.

I am with you. So that means even right now, Jacob, in this wilderness, in this desert place, in this inhospitable place where you're all alone and away from everything that's near and dear to you, you don't have the comfort of your parents. You don't have the comfort of your surroundings. And you feel you're abandoned out here.

And you've got a long way to go. And you've got to go through this terrible desert and wilderness. But I want you to know you're not going it alone. I am with you wherever you go. I'm with you on the mountaintop. I'm with you in the valley low. I'm with you in the fiery furnace. I'm with you in the floods. I'm with you in the wilderness. Wherever you go, I'm with you. And then he said, and I will not leave you. I will perform everything that I have spoken.

I will do it. Now, until now, Jehovah would have been known as the God of Abraham and Isaac. But now, he's going to be known as the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Amen? Now, here's a curious thing.

Lisa's curious to me. We know that later on at the end of his life, on his way back home, he's going to, again, have fear of meeting up with Esau after all these years. And we know that he got desperate with God. And we know that an angel of the Lord appeared unto him.

And I won't go into all the ins and outs of it. It's probably, you know, Jesus. Amen?

But in any case, we know that he wrestled with him. And God changed his name to Israel and said, you have wrestled with God and prevailed and Israel means prince. Amen? Sar means prince and El means God. So he says, you are a prince with God. You know, why didn't then the Jewish people and God's people after that begin to call him Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel? How many think that that's a reasonable question?

Amen. I mean, keeps calling him the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, even though he said, your name is now Israel. They named the country. They named the nation Israel. They called the people Israelites until this day. But why then is he not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel? Why is he the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? This is my opinion.

Okay? Because whenever you see, especially in the Psalms of David, he once in a while will refer to the God of Jacob and every time he's in trouble. He is in trouble. I'm going to read you just two.

You don't have to turn there because I'll read them very quickly. For instance, a good one is Psalm 20 verse 1 says, the Lord hear thee in the day of trouble. And the Lord is all caps so we could say, Jehovah hear thee in the day of trouble.

Listen to this. The name of the God of Jacob defend thee and send you help from the sanctuary and strengthen you out of Zion. Here's another good one. Psalm 146 five. Happy is he that has the God of Jacob for his help whose hope is in the Lord God.

This is just two of them. So here we know that the God of Jacob is the God of those who are in trouble. I'm telling you when you are in trouble, when you are in the wilderness, Jacob knew sore troubles. Amen. And his troubles weren't over. He was going to have a whole lot more hurdles. He was going to have to get through for the next 20 some years of his life.

Amen. He was going to have some bitter things happen to him. And we know later what happened to him when he thought that his son Joseph, the apple of his eye was dead. And all those many years he mourned for that son.

Here's the point people. The God of Jacob is the God for those who were ever in trouble. How many think you need the God of Jacob sometime? Amen.

See, David said the God of Jacob help you in your trouble and strengthen you. Amen. So the God of Jacob, he helps us. He strengthens us. Amen. He comes alongside of us when we're in trouble.

And that's why I believe he's still called the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Amen. We read, I read to you, he defends those who are in trouble. So whenever you're in a place where you need defense against some enemy, and I'm even talking about people that Satan is using the vessel. We know we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but we have to talk to the vessel.

Amen. We got to deal with the vessel. If we got to go to court, we got to deal with the vessels. If we got a issue on our job, we got to deal with the vessels. Amen. We know it's the enemy using them to try to harass us, trying to prevent our blessing or whatever it may be.

And even if you have a medical thing, sometimes you got to deal with people that are hard to deal with. That's when you can say, you are the God of Jacob. You brought Jacob out of his troubles. And I'm calling on you now in my trouble, defend me from my enemy. Help me. Strengthen me.

Strengthen me that I'll see it through until the victory comes. That's what the God of Jacob will do for you. Amen. And God waited until he was in the wilderness to show him this extraordinary ladder from heaven and earth.

He never saw it at home where everything was good and comfortable and easy. And no, when he was in that desperate place, feeling abandoned, rejected, alone, probably scared of what might come. That's when God opened up the portal of glory and showed him this awesome link between heaven and earth, between God and man.

Amen. To show him a portal of glory. Nothing in Jacob's life up to this point, nothing that he had experienced could have created this dream and vision that he saw. How many understand that? You and I sometimes we have dreams and we can interpret the dreams by the symbols in the Bible. We can say, well in the Bible this meant this, so let me see if that's what it means in my dream.

And very often it is. Amen. If you've got to twist it and turn it and all to make it fit, well then, you know, you might not, you need to back off. Don't try to, how many ever put a puzzle together and you're going to make that piece fit? That piece goes there.

Only problem is down the road you find out, uh, yeah, I think I need it over here. Amen. But most of the time you can interpret dreams by the symbolism that's in the Bible. Jacob didn't have any of that. He had nothing. Amen.

No life experience. He didn't have Bible descriptions of angels and what takes place, the warfare behind the scene like we have. And so this was God showing up to him in his place of desperation. Amen. And it says when he awake, he was overwhelmed by what he had just seen.

Let me give you a little tidbit right here that I like. The Hebrew word for awake is Yikatz. Now listen to the spelling. Y, Y, I, K, A, T, Z. Yikatz. Starts off with a double Y. There is no grammatical reason to spell that word with a double Y.

And I've told you this before in other messages. It would be like spelling yellow. Y, Y, E, L, L, O, W. And there's no reason to have that extra Y. But you know, as I've told you before, that Jehovah in Hebrew is really Yahweh. J is really a Y. So Jehovah we could say is really Yahovah. And just like we like to use initials sometimes to shorten things, we'll shorten it down.

They did the same thing. You will find in Psalm 68 that Jehovah is shortened down to Yah. J-A-H or Y-A-H. It means Jehovah.

They just had a shortened form. And you know they would even shorten it even more to just the Y. The Hebrew letter Yud. In the proper context, a Hebrew letter Yud or Y means God. So when they spelled it here with that extra Y, what it means is when Jacob awoke out of his dream, Jehovah was with him. Jehovah was there. And just I won't go into details but you can take the same word awake and apply it to Samson when he woke up after Delilah cut all his hair off and it says he woke up.

It's spelled Y-I-K-E-T-Z. It doesn't have the extra Y because Jehovah wasn't there. The Spirit of God had departed from him. So here we got the double Y meaning that when he awoke, Jehovah was there.

And what did he say? Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not. Surely Jehovah is in this place and I knew it not. Now notice he did not say was in this place. He said is in this place. Maybe the ladder had been pulled up into the heavens and maybe the portal had been closed but Jehovah was still there.

Amen. He was still there. He said I knew it not. Now the correct translation of this is I did not expect it to be here. Because if you see I knew it not it might kind of think what does that mean?

Let me tell you what it means. I did not expect God to show up in his glory in this place. In this wilderness, in my predicament, I am far away from my father's house. I am far away from the altars of worship that my grandfather and father built to worship Jehovah.

I'm far from that. I'm in the wilderness. I'm alone. I'm in this forsaken place. I never expected God to show up here but saints of God that's exactly when and where he will show up with his glory.

With his glory. Sometimes you pray and ask God show me your glory. Show me a vision. I want to see you and you never see it happen.

Most of the time when it happens it's when you're not expecting it. I wasn't expecting that dream. I wasn't expecting that vision of the glory. Amen. And God knew that in a few days I was going to be given some news that would have been unsettling to me. Amen. But God shows up when you are in that desperate place.

He shows up when you need the glory of God to lift you up out of the shadows, out of the pit of despair. And Jacob said I would have never ever expected God to show up in this place. Amen.

I had no idea that God could meet me in the wilderness. Nobody likes to go in the wilderness. Nobody likes to go in the desert place. Amen.

Nobody likes to go in those places. But let me tell you something. Do not despair. Because God will show up and when he shows up he will say to you I am with you. I am with you right now.

I am with you right here. And I will be with you wherever you go. I will be with you for the rest of your life.

For the rest of your journey on this earth. I will be with you. And I will bless you with blessings beyond your expectation and your imagination. Hallelujah. Oh, I am so glad I know the God of Jacob. I am so glad I know the God. Hallelujah. That is Emmanuel.

That is with me. Hallelujah. And Jacob said how dreadful is this place?

This is none other but the house of God and the gate of heaven. My God. Now the word dreadful has evolved over the time. It did not mean dreadful in the scary foreboding sense back then. Rather it would meant what we would say today, awesome.

Even though that's starting to get watered down it probably won't mean this anymore either. I like to say all inspiring. It's sort of like synonymous with awesome. But you know we say you get a new pair of tennis shoes. Oh man those shoes are awesome. No they're not. They're shoes. Unless an angel brought them to you from heaven they're not awesome. Amen.

Doesn't matter if Michael Jordan's name is on them. They are not awesome people. But it meant oh how all inspiring, how reverential, how reverence held this place. This place where I've got a rock for my pillow. This place where it's burning hot in the day time and freezing cold in the night time. Amen.

How dreadful, how awesome this place is. He was overwhelmed as I would be, as you would be, by the superlative majesty of what he had just seen. It's like Peter said later talking about the day upon the mount of transfiguration when they saw Jesus turn into a burning blazing light. He said we were eyewitnesses of his majesty on the holy mount. We saw him with our eyes. We're not telling you some fables that we made up that we cunningly devised.

No. We saw his majesty. We heard the heavens open.

The portal of glory open. And we heard the voice say this is my beloved son. And Jesus needed to hear that.

He already knew he was God's son. He heard it at his baptism. But he needed to hear it then because a week later he was going to be in Pilate's judgment hall. He was going to be whipped with a cat of nine tails. He was going to be crucified. And while that was taking place and he was going through that agony and that torture, he could hear the voice say this is my beloved son.

He could remember the heavens opening up how good our God is to connect with us in our time of trouble. He said this is the house of God and he named it. This is Bethel. Beit El. Beit El.

Beit is house and El is God. This is the house of God. And this is the gate of heaven. This is a portal into God's glory. He saw the connection between heaven and earth and God and man. God is not a far off. I hope if you don't get anything else from this today that you understand God is not a far off. Amen.

He is very nigh unto us. And many do not realize how real the heavenly realm is because they're so earth bound. They're so carnal. They're so natural minded. They're so fleshly minded. They're caught up with the amusements of the flesh. I'm not talking about being sinners out in the world.

I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about living on a carnal natural plane. They that are of the spirit mind the things of the spirit. And they that are of the flesh mind the things of the flesh. And he says if you want to mind the things of the flesh, well, that's death or separation from God. But if you mind the things of the spirit, it's life and peace. It's life and shalom. Amen.

And so many people are so caught up in the natural. What am I going to wear? What am I going to eat? Let's go out here. Let's go on this vacation. Let's do this. Let's go there.

Let's do the other. And their whole lives are consumed with that. I am not denigrating any of those things. The part of the dream I didn't tell you about was a place of vacation, a place where people would come. I knew in the dream they had come to get away from the stress of the world and to get some R&R. I think the Lord was telling me, you know, you can't just go, go, go, go, go.

No, I know what some of you may be thinking. Sister Sharon doesn't even drive a car. How's she go, go, go? You can't go, go, go if you don't drive, right? If I was still driving, I'd probably be at the mall. I'd be at this store.

I'd be at that store. We got to go to this store and get groceries here because I can save one coffee. But then I got to go over to this store because then I can save one sugar at this store. But no, but if I go to this store, I'm going to save one chicken.

So we're going to go to all the stores. That's what I used to do. I had a family of five and I used to do that. But you can't spend time in the Bible, in the Word of God. You can't preach and teach and you can't have messages and all doing that. So my losing my ability to drive in the beginning was a bitter pill. But boy, later on I saw I don't have that temptation to run all over and shop like a crazy person.

But the point I was going to say is this, just because I don't drive doesn't mean I don't go, go, go. I'm working on so many things all at once. I have a very multi-tracked mind and I thank God for it. I'd be working, I got to preach Sunday morning, got to get that message. Okay, now I got to get the message for the magazine.

And don't forget you got to get the blog for the website. And one of my devotionals, I was doing them. I've done 366 of them. You don't just pull them out of the air, amen? And do the radio announcements. Figure out what needs to go on the radio. Oh, well, we need to put that on a CD. Oh, well, then we need to give it a name.

Oh, we got to do the tracks and name them. So it's go, go, go, go. It's a mental thing, going, going, going. I'm not doing physical gymnastics, but I'm going and going and going and that can equal stress. Not stress that I would complain about because I love to do it. I love every job I do with all my heart. I'm not stressed out that, oh, I don't want to do this.

I love to do it. But the fact is at some point you got to have R&R. Amen?

But there are some people that that has become the focus of their lives. They've got more and more R&R and more and more amusements than they do time with the Lord. Oh, you like the glory part, don't you? You want the glory. You want me to tell you that the heavens will open and the glory will come down, but you have got to have a heart like Jacob did for the things of God. Amen.

Amen. I hope you're enjoying this fantastic look into the heavenly realm that I experienced in portal of glory. This occurred a few days after I had surgery for breast cancer, which had been found on a routine annual mammogram.

It was very small and had not spread, so a lumpectomy was done followed by radiation. Now this process took over five months and there were several curve balls thrown at me along the way, but from the first moment I was given the diagnosis, the supernatural peace of God that passes understanding invaded my heart and never left, even in times of uncertainty and Satan's attempts to bring fear. To sum up my dream of the glory penetrating my being in just one word, it would be ecstasy.

And the unusual declaration I kept making in the dream, Gloria Santiago, led me on a Google search that landed me in the wilderness with the Old Testament patriarch Jacob and his angelic ladder between earth and heaven. Don't miss one glorious nugget from Portal of Glory. Order on CD for a love gift of $10 or more for the radio ministry. Request SK191, Mail to Sound of Faith, P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203 or go online to soundoffaith.org where you can also order on MP3s. And when you order SK191, Portal of Glory, we will send you a bonus CD about my journey through breast cancer. Mail to Sound of Faith, P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203. Until next time, this is Sharon Otze, Maranatha. Thank you.