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.’
Abraham knew God and he knew that God would meet with him wherever he was.
God and Abraham had a covenant together and Abraham was going to do everything he could to keep his end of the deal. He promised God that he would learn the truths of God and teach them to his children and his whole household so that they too would follow God.
In this covenant Abraham was given a great promise of blessing for him and for all the generations to follow. It was a promise that can be inherited by any person who makes a decision to obey and follow God.
The proof of this is in Revelation 7:9-10 when John looks in heaven and sees before him a great multitude of people from every nation and every tribe and every language standing before the throne of God and crying out “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”
In Psalm 22:27 David prophesied that “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before Him.”
And the Apostle Paul quoted the words of God through Isaiah in Romans 14:11 when he said, “It is written: ‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ’every knee will bow before me; every tongue will confess to God.’”
Let’s look at the Covenant Blessing that is found in the book of Genesis.
1 The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. 2 "I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you." Genesis 12:1-3 NIV
4 "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. 5 No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. 8 The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God." Genesis 17:4-8 NIV
This covenant has a redemptive initiative to it. It was the beginning of God’s plan to redeem mankind.
Sin was not God’s original plan, when Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden the very first time they gave us a generational legacy of sin.
Because of that legacy mankind needed to be saved and for the plan of redemption to take place this covenant between God and Abraham, a man who loved and trusted God in every detail of his life.
Mankind needs God whether they realize it or not, we all need God. There have been, there are, and there will be billions of people who are hurting and confused in this world and they need God.
A lot of people will deny their need for God and they will say that faith in God is a crutch for weak people.
Well guess what? I am a weak person! There are times when I am hurting and there are times when I am confused.
If I had a broken leg I would be using a crutch to walk. How much more do I need God the Father to be a part of my life? I am nothing without Him.
I need God, you need God, we all need God, every one of us in this room and every person who is outside these walls. We need God!
There is a world beyond these walls and they need redeemed and the only one who can redeem them from the generation curse of sin, the only one who can break those curses in their lives is God.
There are 11 significant promises in the covenant that God made with Abraham.
1. Abram’s name would be changed to Abraham and his name would be great.
2. A great nation would come from his seed.
3. His blessing would be so great that the whole world would be blessed by him.
4. The land of Canaan would be an everlasting inheritance.
5. The multitude of his seed would be as the dust of the earth.
6. Whoever blessed Abraham and his descendents would be blessed and whoever cursed them would be cursed.
7. He would be the father of many nations.
8. God would be God to him and his seed.
9. His seed would possess the gates of their enemies.
10. Kings would be born from his seed.
11. It was an everlasting covenant.
In order for these promises to be fulfilled there were 2 conditions: First, Abraham had to believe God.
Second, Abraham had to do what God wanted him to do.
Abraham’s belief in God and his obedience to God are two of the greatest traits of his life.
I am not saying that Abraham was perfect but he had those two things going for him, he believed and he obeyed. And because of this, God poured His blessings into Abraham’s life.
There is another side to the covenant and that is what happens if you fail to meet the two conditions. Look at Exodus 20:1-5.
1 And God spoke all these words: 2 "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 3 "You shall have no other gods before me. 4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me… Exodus 20:1-5
Now that sounds really harsh, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation and you may ask why would God do that?
God has given us a choice. We can either live under His covenant blessing or not.
God is loving, caring, compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in love and He has made a way for us to be close to Him, but He gave us the choice and if we choose to go against His Word and His plan then we are going to see our actions played out in the generations that follow us.
To illustrate this principle I want to tell you about a man named Max Jukes who lived in the 1700’s.
Max was a known atheist and he lived a godless life. He married an ungodly woman and from their union over the years there came the following; 310 died as people deeply in debt, 150 were criminals, 7 were murders, 100 were drunks, and more than half of the females in the family became prostitutes.
From their union, the 540 descendents of Max Jukes cost the state over one and a quarter million dollars.
Our sins and our problems are linked to the sins and the problems of our mothers, fathers, and grandparents.
There was another man that lived at the same time as Max. His name was Jonathan Edwards.
Jonathon was a man of God who married a Godly woman. Of the 1394 known descendants of Jonathon Edwards, 13 became college presidents, 65 professors, 3 US Senators, 30 judges, 100 lawyers, 60 doctors, 75 Army and Navy officers, 100 preachers, 60 authors, 1 vice president, and 295 other college graduates who went on to prominence.
The descendants of Jonathon Edwards cost the state nothing.
Something really good happens when we walk in God’s covenant blessing.
Generations can be blessed or cursed by the actions of the fathers and the mothers.
Some of you here today have been handed down generational curses from your ancestors, and my earnest prayer is that you would desire to break those curses right now.
The key to breaking a curse is to start a blessing.
When we bring Jesus into our lives we become grafted into the family of God which means that the promises God gave to Abraham are as viable to us as they are to Abraham and his descendents.
In the movie The Patriot, the main character begins with a narrative.
He states, “I have long feared that my sins would return to visit me and the cost is more than I can bear.”
When I think about that statement I cannot help to think about the legacy that I am leaving my children and my future grandchildren.
I made a decision a long time ago to break the curses that my ancestors had placed upon me and start a blessing for my family.
That blessing began my Debbie and I making the same declaration that Joshua made, “But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
There is a blessing that automatically happens when you put God at the center of your life and your family. There is a change that takes place and there are blessings that continue from generation to generation.
When you make that decision, the curses are broken and you are set free.
We need to make a decision and that decision is are we going to live in a curse or in a blessing and are we going to leave a curse or a blessing.
We need to consider what the measure of our resolve is to stop living under the curses of the enemy.
What is your resolve tonight?
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