I spoke the following in a chapel service.

"Paul says the angels give attention to the stories God gives His people to tell. In a sense, when God gets up before a congregation of angels, we are His sermon illustrations. Another image is that sometimes, we are the map that He, the commander in chief, spreads out on the table to use as He directs his generals (the angels) in fulfilling His strategic missions, His tactics in bringing forward the glory days. Ephesians 3:9-13 says His plan is "to make all see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the ages has been hidden in God who created all things through Jesus Christ to the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places, according to the eternal purpose which He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord." Look at the prepositions again. What does that say to you? Paul speaks of this as a mystery of the church, indeed much of the church gives little attention to this honorable role they have been given: that of making the manifold wisdom of God known, and this accomplished BY the church TO the principalities in the air. You are the sermon to beings that can see you even though you don't notice them. And rarely do we know what these angels are discovering about the wisdom of God through us, but that does not change the divinely given order for it all. "



Here is an example, I think, of one of those stories; a story of things of forgotten value that are destined to be rediscovered and once again understood:

Fri Oct 20, 12:13 AM ET
PORTLAND, Ore. - A painting dropped off at Goodwill by an anonymous donor sold for $165,002 Thursday during an auction on the organization's Web site.
Bidding on the painting, a 1923 watercolor by the American impressionist Frank Weston Benson, started at $10 on Oct. 12. The bidding soared after the painting was authenticated by the owner of a Portland gallery.
The name of the winning bidder has not been revealed.
Dale Emanuel, spokeswoman for Goodwill Industries of the Columbia-Willamette, said that the nonprofit gets a lot of valuable donations, but that it's unknown whether the person who dropped off the painting knew its worth.
"We get donations that have come through the generations of a family, and as it goes from one person to the next the true value may not be understood," she said. "I've seen that many, many times."