Generational Legacy Part 2 Series

PRAYER

Father, open my eyes to see Your Word.

Open my ears to hear.

Open my mind to understand.

And open my heart so I may receive Your Word today.

AMEN

A legacy as defined by Webster’s dictionary is anything that has been handed down from an ancestor.

Most often when you think of something that is handed down from our ancestors you think of things like heir looms, items that are valuable to them and to the family. It may be valuable because it is worth a lot of money or because it has sentimental value or because it was something that has been in the family for a long, long time.

Today and next week I want to talk to you about a different kind of legacy. I am going to be taking about generational legacies that are passed from generation to generation within the family structure that can be in the form of a blessing or in the form of a curse.

The fact is, all families have generational legacies and they are very important when it comes to the spiritual, mental, and emotional ingredients of each family member.

These generational legacies are the values, morals, and lifestyles that you are leaving with your children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and so on down the line.

Let me give you three random examples of generational legacies that are not blessings.

An example of a generational curse; A man I will call Fred was having troubling dealing with the news he had just received; his father was really his grandfather. He was a victim of incest.

Another example of a generational curse; A woman I will call Martha was feeling extreme rejection in her life. Why was she feeling this way? Why was she always depressed? Why did she have a low self-esteem? She experienced these things because when she was a young girl she was a victim of physical, mental, and sexual abuse.

Another example of a generational curse; An accountant who I will call Bill had a problem with lust. When he was about 14 he would look at his father’s pornographic magazines. For the rest of his life he struggled with this problem until one day it cost him his marriage.

Each of us today is either living our lives under a generational curse or a generational blessing. And as long as we live under that curse or blessing we will continue to pass that on to the members of our family that follow.

There are two things today that I believe God wants to accomplish.

First, if you are living under a generational curse, no matter what that curse is, God wants to break it.

Second, God wants you to start a generational blessing in you and your family today that can be passed on to all of your descendents.

In order for us to determine which generational legacy we are living in we are going to examine the Abrahamic Covenant. It is the covenant that God made with Abraham that was for him, all his descendants, and all gentiles who accepted God as their Lord.

Included in the promise that is found in this covenant is both a blessing and a curse and even though this is an Old Testament covenant, I believe that it is still relevant to our lives today.

Open your Bibles to the book of Genesis and we will look at Genesis 12:1-3 and Genesis 17:4-8. We will read them here in a minute or two.

Abraham knew God as a matter of fact; you could probably call them best friends. They had a relationship which should be desired by every Christian around the world.

They trusted each other. They honored each other.

At NO time in Abraham’s life did he ever have a reason to doubt that God was real.

So many times these days I hear people say I don’t feel God’s presence with me.

Listen, God says that He will never leave you or forsake you.

Abraham never went a day without talking to God. He never had a reason to think that God was not with him.

There is an old Jewish story that says, “One day Abraham was walking up a mountain side to go and meet with the Lord. He was well advanced in his years, when he was younger he could have made it up the mountain in half the time.”

“He was going to meet his friend and the journey had just begun and Abraham was getting tired fast. Suddenly he stopped and started to laugh, ‘What a fool I am!’ he gasped, ‘If I cannot make it to the alter I know the Lord will meet me wherever I am.’”

“He sat down on the rocks, in its mossy coolness and said, ‘My Lord and my God, I’ll wait for you here.’