Garwood Presbyterian Church

Stopping Family Sins At My Generation

God's Way to Health, Healing, and Wholeness

"May God Himself sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless." I Thes. 5:23

1. Three Main Areas of Emotions Can Harm Our Body, Damage Our Soul, and Are Sinful Spiritually
   1. Anger, resentment, hatred, bitterness, and revenge can lead to heart attacks or cancer.
      1. Fear, anxiety, and worry can lead to having any one of a whole list of diseases.
      2. Not liking ourself can led to having an autoimmune disease or high cholesterol.
   2. These emotions come from three sources.
      1. Traumatic experiences, especially from childhood.
      2. Generational sins.
      3. Unwanted spirits.
      4. This lesson is on traumatic experiences and generational sins and what to do about them.
2. Traumatic Experiences
   1. For example, any incidents of verbal, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. Also, an absent father or mother, accidents, rejection by peers, moving, the death of someone close to us, or if we had a close call with death, divorce, breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, being mugged or robbed, rape, losing one's job, serious illnesses or hospitalizations, even a difficult birth.
   2. We need to do the 9 R's (9th = Restore) to health, healing and wholeness for each specific traumatic incident.
      1. Because harmful, sinful emotions are still living in us attached to each one of them.
      2. When Pastor Gary Wetzel did this for an incident where he nearly drowned as a child and experienced a lot of fear, allergies he had had for years went almost completely away.
      3. The more traumatic experiences we deal with spiritually using the 9 R's, the more cleansing we will receive. And the more cleansing we receive, the more healing we will receive.
3. Generational Sins = Inherited Sins = Family Sins
   1. The Bible teaches that this is true.
      1. Exodus 34:5-7.
      2. Jer. 32:17-19.
      3. Abraham's family is a Biblical example. Abraham told a half lie that his wife Sarah was his sister. His son, Isaac, told a full lie that his wife Rebecca was his sister. His son, Jacob, lied to him so that he could steal from his brother, Esau. Jacob's sons lied to him about their brother Joseph's death to cover up their sale of him into slavery.
      4. Whatever we don't deal with, gets passed on to our children.
      5. If a person grows up in a family where there is a lot of anger, yelling, arguing, fighting, and condemnation, there is a greater chance that they will do the same thing.
      6. If a person had a parent who was a worry wart, they are more likely to be one too, because that is what they took as being "normal".
      7. If a person's parents did not like themselves, then they very likely looked to their children for the love that they needed. When their children could not give them enough, they very likely became critical and condemning of them, beginning another cycle of producing people who feel unloved, unworthy, rejected, and failures.
   2. The secular world also agrees that this is true.
      1. Alcoholic families statistically produce more children who become alcoholics than nondrinking families.
      2. Children who are abused are more likely to become abusive adults than those who have not been abused.
      3. This is also true medically.
         1. When filling out forms at a doctor's office or for life insurance, they usually ask questions about your family's medical history because they recognize that diseases often run in a family.
      4. One reason for this is that the emotional climate of a family will cause or encourage certain diseases in it, which if it is passed on to the children will produce the same or similar diseases in them.
   3. Diseases can also be passed on in a family genetically.
      1. An ad in Time magazine points out that "Bad cholesterol has a lot to do with your family history. Bad cholesterol comes from the cholesterol that is absorbed from food and the cholesterol your body produces naturally, based on heredity."
      2. In another ad in Time magazine titled "Diabetes: Is It In Your Genes?", it points out that "Type I diabetes is an autoimmune disease controlled by a number of genes. Type 2 diabetes has the greatest genetic influence."
      3. This is true for a number of other diseases.
4. What to Do About It As a Christian
   1. We are not trapped in a bad emotional or genetic family history if we come from one.
      1. Because Isaiah 61:1 says, "The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me ... to proclaim freedom for the captives and release for the prisoners ..."
      2. And "if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.", John 8:36.
      3. As a Christian, you can draw a line and stop any generational family diseases at your life.
   2. The first thing to do is to take an emotional and medical history of our family.
      1. "Family history may be the single greatest risk factor for disease.", says Dr. Paula Yoon of the Center For Disease Control.
   3. The next thing to do is what God's people did in Neh. 9:1-3 where they confessed not only their own sins but the sins of their forbearers.
      1. And "If we confess our sins, He [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.", I John 1:9. This purification would include from diseases from our family's sins.
   4. Also, for emotionally caused family diseases, we need to go through the 9 R's for them.
      1. We do this as the Lord's priest of our family.
   5. For genetically caused diseases, we come to our Father God as a child and ask Him to change the genetics so that they are the way He wants them to be.
      1. The way they would have been before the Fall and before sin marred them over the millenniums.