Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 59
TRANSCRIPT
Have you ever been stuck in a sin pattern and wanted to quit, but you seemed to be drawn back again and again? Are you repeating some of the sinful behaviors you saw in your ancestors and can’t figure out why you keep committing them? What you may not know is that you have been set up for these problems. There is pressure being put on you to continue in these same sins that is actually coming from the sinful behavior of your ancestors. That is actually good news and I will tell you why it is good news.
I’m Lee Whitman from Restoring the Foundations and today’s verse is Exodus 20:5 “you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me.” It is interesting that the words of this verse are repeated three other places in the bible. When God says something once it is important, but when He repeats Himself it must be something that He wants us to understand. What we are going talk about today is very important to the heart of God and vital for us to understand so that we can live in freedom in this life.
In today’s podcast we are going to talk about what RTF calls The Sins of the Fathers and Resulting Curses. It is one of the four problem areas that affect each and every one of us. I will be taking some of today’s information from Chester and Betsy Kylstras wonderful book called Restoring the Foundations: An Integrated Approach to Healing Ministry and from the RTF book called Healing and Freedom. Both of these outstanding books are available at the online store on our website restoringthefoundations.org.
Let’s start by using Chester and Betsy’s definition of The Sins of the Fathers and Resulting Curses: “Sins of the Fathers represents the accumulation of all sins committed by our ancestors. It is the heart tendency (iniquity) that we inherit from our forefathers to rebel (be disobedient) against God’s laws and commandments. It is the propensity to sin, particularly in ways that represent perversion and twisted character. This accumulation continues until God’s conditions for repentance are met.”
How this works. When a person sins, that sin stands in need of confession. If the person doesn’t confess it and receive God’s forgiveness, then it is passed down to his children and his children’s children until the sin is confessed and God’s conditions for repentance are met. People in today’s world would respond to the idea that this happens by saying, “Wait a minute. I didn’t commit that sin, so why do I have to confess and repent for sin I did not commit? I’m not responsible.” Our confusion comes because we have a mindset that is very individualistic, in other words we think that only what we do has an effect on us. God however sees man in terms of families. He thinks in terms of generations. When He looks at you he sees you plus all of your kin folk, as they say in the south. We see this mindset when God says of Himself “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Those were three generations of Abrahams family. We see another picture of God’s generational view of man in Hebrews 7:9-10, “Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, so to speak, for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him.” Levi was Abrahams great grandson yet this verse says that Levi paid tithe to Melchizedek before Levi was even born. How can that happen? Because in God’s economy He sees us in families and He looks at us through the generations. So, if we are aware of sin patterns from our ancestors’ lives, that sin has created an outstanding debt for our family line that is in need of confession and repentance.
Am I saying that you have to confess every one of your ancestors’ sins in order for them to be removed? No. But you are to confess the sins that you are aware of that are affecting your family line. And when you confess the sins of your ancestors, the guilt of that sin is cut off from you and from your family line stopping the curse from continuing to the next generation. There are examples of this several places in the Bible. Nehemiah 1:6 says, “You may hear the prayer of Your servant which I pray before You now, day and night, for the children of Israel Your servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel which we have sinned against You. Both my father’s house and I have sinned.” Nehemiah confesses the sins of not only the children of Israel, but the sins of his father’s house as well and God forgives his entire family.
There is another example of Daniel confessing the sin of the people of Israel and bringing them before the Lord. In Daniel 9 it says several places, we have sinned, we have rebelled, we have done wickedly. Then in verse 20 Daniel says, “Now while I was speaking, praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before the Lord my God for the holy mountain of my God”. And because Daniel repented on behalf of all of the nation of Israel, God forgave the entire nation. This is called identificational repentance.
This generational iniquity from your ancestors is resident in your bloodline. It passes from one generation to the next until God’s requirements of repentance are met. This generational iniquity puts pressure on the following generations to sin in the same manner as their ancestor. You may have experienced this for yourself. You sin and you hate the sin you committed so you repent and receive God’s forgiveness for that sin. Then hours, days, or weeks later you commit the same sin. You were very sincere when you repented for that sin, so why would you return to it once again. It’s because of the pressure that iniquity puts on you that actually pushes you towards that sin. As long as that generational iniquity is in your life, you will be continually pushed in the direction of the sin.
This iniquity is not the same thing as sin, in other words, it is not accredited to you as sin unless you give in to the pressure and act out the sin. For example, many people have parents who are alcoholics. The generational iniquity of alcoholism is resident in their bloodline from the moment of conception putting pressure on them towards alcohol abuse. Some who succumb to the pressure and drink to excess activate the curse of this sin and become alcoholics. Others have that same generational pressure in their bloodline but they never give in to it so it is not activated. The pressure toward alcoholism is still in their bloodline putting pressure on them, but for the ones who are able to resist the pressure to enter into alcoholism, the iniquity remains in a dormant state. What RTF ministry to this generational iniquity does is to apply God’s solution and remove the pressure that pushes them toward that sinful behavior.
Let me give you a personal example. I was born with the generational sin of shame resident in my bloodline. My grandfather was ashamed of being German as a businessman in Michigan during the 1st World War so he changed the spelling of our last name from the German spelling WITTMAN to the English spelling WHITMAN. From as early as I can remember I felt like there was something wrong with me (shame). I did not have to do very much for that generational iniquity of shame to be activated in my life and it then became my own sin. I lived with the generational pressure to live in shame until I received Restoring the Foundations ministry and applied Gods solution to that sin area in my life.
This Sins of the Fathers is a bad news / good news situation. The bad news is we all have inherited generational iniquity from our ancestors so we are all under the curse. The good news is that God has provided a way for that pressure to be broken off by applying what Jesus has done for us on the cross.
Leviticus 26:40-42 describes how to remove the generational iniquity. It says “But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers, with their unfaithfulness in which they were unfaithful to Me, and that they also have walked contrary to Me,…if their uncircumcised hearts are humbled, and they accept their guilt—then I will remember My covenant with Jacob, and My covenant with Isaac and My covenant with Abraham I will remember;
I will remember the land.” The pattern here is much the same as 1 John 1:9 “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Jesus has completely satisfied the requirements of God’s judgment through His death on the cross. He has already provided freedom for all of us from the curses originating from the Sins of the Fathers. Jesus has also already taken the punishment due us for our sin and nailed that to the cross as well. Colossians 2:13 says “having cancelled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us ….and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.” All we have to do is appropriate or apply His work on the cross to our lives by faith.
When we were going through RTF training, Cindi struggled with the idea of having to confess each of these sins individually. After all, Jesus paid the price for all of our sins on the cross, so it already done, right? Jesus did it all on the cross. The Holy Spirit led her to the story in Exodus 12 of the Israelites leaving Egypt. God had sent plagues to entice Pharoah to let the people leave, but after each plague ended Pharoah recanted and refused to let the people go. In the last plague God was going to send death to the first-born male in every household of both humans and livestock. He told the Jews to take a perfect lamb into the house, kill the lamb and take the lambs blood and paint it over the doorpost of their homes. Then God was going to pass through the land of Egypt and every house that had the blood on the doorposts He would pass over. But any house that did not have the blood on the doorposts, death would come to the first born.
The Holy Spirit asked Cindi, what would have happened if the people killed the lamb and kept the blood in a bowl in their house and didn’t apply it to the doorpost? Death would have come to that house, right? He said that is what you are doing by applying the cross of Christ to each of these sin areas in your life. You are applying what Jesus has already done for you on the cross. The $10 word we use is to appropriate what Jesus has done for us. It means to apply to your life the incredible work of Christ on the cross in order for these sins and curses to be cut off from you and from your family line. Another example of appropriating or applying what Jesus has done to your life is in the act of salvation itself. Jesus died for all of mankind, yet the only ones who experience salvation are the ones who appropriate or apply it to their life. “To as many as received Him He gave the right to be called children of God.” The ones who do not receive Him are not children of God.
In our years of doing RTF ministry, we have seen first-hand how these Sins of the Fathers put constant pressure on people to continue in the same sins. We have never ministered to someone who got into sexual sin who did not have an ancestor who also committed sexual sin opening the door over their life for the generational iniquity of sexual sin to enter their bloodline. It works the same with many other sins patterns. The sins of our ancestors open the door for the generational iniquity to put pressure on us to sin in the same way. That is why it is necessary for us to confess and repent of the sins of our ancestors as well as our own sin so that God’s forgiveness and cleansing comes and puts a stop to the sins and curses inherited from our ancestors. Isn’t that amazing? God has provided a way out for us.
Sometimes the iniquity we inherit pushes us toward unworthiness. Sometimes it pushes us to escape. Other times it will push us to try to control everything. It doesn’t matter what sin we are being pushed toward, please don’t try to simply tolerate it. I know for years I tried to manage my sin. Managing sin is not the same thing as freedom. Jesus came to give us freedom. You do not need to settle for anything less than freedom.
