~Open in prayer~
Ice breaker
• Say you’re independently wealthy and don’t have to work, what would you do with your time?
• If you could add anyone to Mount Rushmore, who would it be; why?
• If you had to delete all but 3 apps from your phone, which ones would you keep?
Message Review
This is a series on the supernatural. The reason for this series is that we are fighting stuff that we can’t see. There are people struggling with depression and they have no idea why they feel those feelings. There are people up at 2:00 AM looking at things they hate, but they don’t have the power to stop. When you expose your enemy he’s not as lethal. In other words, when you can see your enemy and you know what you are fighting, he’s not nearly as lethal. When you don’t know what he looks like, or what you‘re fighting, he’s dangerous. This is heavy stuff that nobody talks about anymore. We’ve got more people on medicine than ever in history. The suicide rate is as high as it’s ever been. We have every twisted and perverted thing being walked across the pulpit and people don’t know why. As a result, I want to get behind the seen and expose the unseen a bit. Last week’s topic was on curses. These are some things that were given the legal right to operate in your life and in your family’s life. It’s a weight pulling you down that is cyclical in nature. No matter what you do, it keeps rearing its head. I’m going to talk about this and go deeper today.
Proverbs 26:2
This verse is saying that curses are real. It’s also saying that they can’t be there until someone, or something gives them permission to be there. These things are legalities. In Prayology we talked about how heaven is a courtroom and when you go to a courtroom everything is about protocol and legality. There are some things you can’t do in a courtroom and certain protocols you have to follow to get what you want legally. That’s what prayer is in heaven. We have God who is the judge, Satan who is the accuser, and Jesus the only lawyer and mediator between God and man. We have the testimony of the blood and a great cloud of witnesses in the heavenly courtroom. We also have a registry where names are registered in heaven. There are all types of legal language, and you make your petition known to God. It says in this verse that a curse cannot operate in someone’s life unless it has been given a legal right to function there. What does it look like to give a curse a legal right to operate in your life? How do you do that?
Deuteronomy 28
There are fourteen blessings and thirty-four curses in this chapter. These are not actions from God. For example, you do right, and He blesses you and if you do wrong, He destroys you. Wrong concepts of God have ruined people. I grew up in a hyper-holiness church and I grew up thinking that God was out to get me every day. I believed that He was hunting to find something wrong with me. I believed you got saved by grace but stayed safe by works. I didn’t know that the same grace that got me saved, kept me saved. That was the wrong concept that I had, and a lot of people have, about God. God has built in laws in the universe, and he’s given us keys to the system. Jesus said I have given you the keys to the kingdom. God says in Deuteronomy 28 I have laid before you everything you do to be blessed. It also says I’ve laid before you everything you need to do when you see that the curses have been released. God says you choose. He shows you how to live, but He won’t live for you. He’ll show you the pathway to blessing, but He’ll never take the choice away from you. When you choose to go with the law of God, you have His momentum, and the blessing is released.
The blessing is the power of God in your life to elevate you and your life ascends. Most people don’t want to admit that their decisions didn’t allow them to elevate. Yes, there are outside factors that can affect your life, but 80%-90% is what we did. Do you have a skewed perception of God and see Him as a judge? Is salvation maintained through works in your mind? What type of decisions can we make in our lives that prevent us from getting that blessing or elevating in our lives?
Exodus 20:4-6
The Israelites have been in captivity for 450 years here. They don’t know who God is and they are being reintroduced to Him in these verses through the Ten Commandments. They have left Egypt and they are depending on God for everything, including their next meal. These are millions of people with nothing, and the first thing God does is not give them food, but a moral code. He is telling them who He is.
Iniquity is not sin. Sin is an action, and it comes from the Greek word hamartia, which means missing the mark. Sin is nothing more than God has a standard and we reach for it and miss it. That’s why we need Jesus. That’s why we need grace because His grace is sufficient when we are constantly missing the mark.
Iniquity, however, travels three or four generations deep. In other words, you can be struggling and fighting an iniquity that was started by someone you have never met. You might wonder, for example, why is alcoholism always in my family? Why am I always depressed? Why does my family never stay together and our relationships stay sustained? Why are we always struggling financially regardless of how many raises we get? Why is the same sickness in my family down the line? Because all of these things happen in the blood. Leviticus 6 says that the life of anything is in the blood. You didn’t just get your physical attributes from your parents, you got the other things too that no one talks about. And if you don’t talk about it, you’re left to fight things in the dark, cluelessness, because you don’t understand why you do the things you do. Romans 7 talks about why we do things we don’t want to do. He’s talking about the struggle that we have within ourselves. The word iniquity means bent. It means twisted. That bentness travels three or four generations. When a baby is born it has never been exposed to anything and has no opinion, but it’s already bent in a certain direction. It’s born with an inner momentum towards a certain lifestyle. That lifestyle was passed to that baby by the sins of the fathers. Is there an inequity that you notice in your life that always reappears time and time again? Is there a problem that has moved down the bloodline of your family from one generation to the next and you never understood why?
Genesis 1:11
God said if I put seed in the ground, it will produce according to its kind. You will never plant one thing and it will grow something else. Orange trees and apple trees will produce after their own kind. Addictions are the same way and will produce after their kind. For example, if it’s pornographic, it will reproduce after its kind. Depression will reproduce after its kind. Heart disease will reproduce after its kind. What seed was planted in your life? Do you know who may have planted that seed in your family? Was it you?
Genesis 8:2
You have seed, which produces after its kind. You then have time and then you have harvest. Whenever you see the same scenery, it’s called a cycle. For example, he’s a different man, but the same argument. It’s a different generation, but the same alcoholism. She’s a different girlfriend, but the same result. The Calendar is turning and your hair is turning grey, but nothing is changing. If you drive past the same building ten times in a row then you know you’re in a cycle. These iniquities are not constant; they are cyclical. You think you beat the problem or lifestyle, but it comes right back around. That’s a cycle and seeds create cycles. Most of the time something happens somewhere in a family that births the generational curse. Curses are progressive until they destroy you; they come upon you, pursue you and, overtake you. Usually what one generation struggles with the next generation is destroyed by. The reason for that is that if that curse is not confronted and cut, it continues to grow. You have to confront and cut the generational curse so it doesn’t affect your bloodline for generations to come. Where do cycles come from? Where would you be if there wasn’t a cycle in your life?
Genesis 26:1-3, 7-8
The child of promise was Isaac. He was Sarah’s and Abraham’s son, who is the patriarch of our faith. Isaac was a liar just like his father. They both dealt with the same king. They were both in the same town. They were both put in the same position and they told the same lie. What Abraham started not confronted came upon Isaac. It pursued Isaac and overtook him. Overtaking means it stays there until it destroys the entire family. The enemy wants you and everything connected to you. He wants your household, your entire family, your finances and your legacy. After he’s destroyed you, he wants the community, the city and the region because what he has is progressive. You have to stand between two generations and break that curse or else it’s going to continue to increase because what you do not confront grows. Jesus met the woman at the well and asked her to go and bring her husband. She said she didn’t have a husband and He said He knew because she had five previous ones. He then told her that if she didn’t drink from His well, she would be coming back to the same thing. What He was trying to do is break the cycle in her life. He knew that she had a hole in her that she was trying to fill with relationships, jumping from man to man. He was telling her that she would be coming back to the same problem, and jumping from man to man, for the rest of her life, unless she repented and drank from His living water. She made the decision not to drink from that curse anymore, but to drink from His living water that filled her forever. What caused the generational curse in Abraham’s bloodline? What was the seed? Will a curse not develop in someone’s life because of who they are and their status in life or not? How do you confront and cut a generational curse by the root?
Isaiah 53:5
A sin is an act. It’s a transgressional act against the Lord. Jesus receiving outside wounds for your public act of sin. In other words, He received wounds on the outside for the sins everyone saw you do. A bruise is where you bleed on the inside. He was bruised for iniquity. These are struggles that we don’t want anyone to see. We’re ashamed and don’t want people to know we struggle on this level with something. Everything everyone can see, He was wounded for. Everything on the inside that we hide and hate, He bled on the inside for. Jesus understood that you have actions and that you have will whirling on the inside. Jesus said that He died for that, too. Notice why all of these things are transferred through the blood. He shed His spotless blood to clean all of that because He was conceived of the Spirit. Everyone knows that the father determines the blood type. Mary was Jesus’ entrance into the flesh, but His bloodline was from heaven so it was never tarnished. He had to spill and shed blood that had no iniquity so that He could be bruised for your iniquity. Are we delivered through the spotless blood of Jesus from our inequities? How? Why did Jesus have to take our inequities onto Himself?
Hebrews 12:1
A curse is a weight. It’s a downward pull. God says you are running a relay race. The previous generation has handed the Peyton and have moved from the track to the stand. They are now a great cloud of witnesses cheering you on in your race. But, God says you have to lay aside every weight so you can win the race. Racers wear very little clothes to rid themselves of the weight for optimum efficiency. Some of you have weight on every side dragging you down as you try to run the race. Then you wonder why you are tired and depleted all of the time. He says in this verse the sin that so easily sets you back. There are a bunch of sins that are chasing you, but there is that one sin that’s tied to your back like a bungee cord. And every time you feel like you got rid of it, it snaps right back. This sin is the one that picks you off anytime it wants to because it’s not a sinful act, it’s an inequity. This verse says let us run the race, dropping that one sin that ensnares us. Ensnares means circle. Lay aside the sin that keeps you running in a circle or cycle. What are you hiding that needs to be cut off from your life? What’s the one sin that keeps coming back like a bungee cord that you need deliverance from? What’s the ongoing cycle that you can’t move away from? Do you believe that you can be delivered from this sin, inequity, cycle, and curse?
Prayer Focus and Requests
Ask your members if they have any prayer requests or praise reports. Encourage one another to stir up your faith and pray BIG prayers this week and expect God to blow your mind with His answers.