It Stops With Me | Pastor Keith Pittman

Welcome to the Celebration Church Orlando podcast.

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It is so good to see every one of you.

If you're joining us online, if you're in our family lounge, maybe you're checking us out on the podcast later.

However, you are with us today.

We're glad you're with us today.

And we believe that it's going to be a very meaningful day.

I do want to take a quick moment to just honor and celebrate all of the amazing fathers, the unks, the big bros, the mentors, all the men in the house, in our community.

Can we show some love to the incredible men of the family, grandfathers, all of you, man?

We're so thankful for your influence, your impact, and your presence.

And so today I'm excited to kick off our series.

And so every year, this is our third year doing it, we we have a series that we do around this time of year called Summer School.

Now, I'm of a certain age where they used to actually have summer school.

I'm not even sure if that's a real thing, but summer school used to be the place that it was like a purgatory for the kids who didn't do good enough during the school year that you had to go to summer school to make it to the next grade.

And so some of you may be having a traumatic response right now because you're thinking like summer is supposed to be parole from school.

And yes, I find myself sitting in the seats of a church about summer school, but but for us, we're taking a different spin on it because here's what I know I know that just because we go on vacation, that doesn't mean that the devil does.

And that means that there's opportunities for us to continue to grow spiritually even while we are on vacation and spending time together.

So our summer school series has always been centered around having some dedicated space where we can talk doctrine, theology, topically, things that are gonna really help us to grow spiritually, but also practically.

And so today I'm excited to kick it off.

One of the beautiful things we like to do during this series, though, is we like to make as many resources available as possible.

So you'll find in the Church Center app that we have book recommendations, access to right now media, which is a great resource to kind of give it like Netflix, but for Christian curriculum, it's a great space to get that.

And there's gonna be notes and things in there, so it's a great spot to go as a central hub to get the content that we're gonna be sharing over the next couple of weeks.

So today I want to talk about something that I think is really, really important and revolutionary, something that I actually am excited to share.

So if you do have your Bibles, I would love to invite you to join me in Exodus chapter 34.

Exodus 34 · chapter mention

The book of Exodus.

If you are unfamiliar with where it is, the book begins with Genesis.

Exodus is right after it.

It's the second book of the Bible, and it's a meaningful book because it teaches us so many deep principles.

Exodus chapter 34.

Exodus 34 · chapter mention

And we're going to look at two passages and then begin to go from there.

But but starting at verse number six, here's what the word of the Lord says to us.

The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord, a God that is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands of generations, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generations.

A God who is merciful, a God who was kind, who forgives our sin, transgression, and iniquity.

But he also goes on to say, but but we don't clear the guilty that those patterns will be visited upon their children to the third and fourth generation.

Have have you ever looked in the mirror and and realized that you're fighting a battle that you didn't even start?

You just find yourself in the middle of a situation relationally, and it seems as if these were not choices you were that you made, but it just seems to be a part of the reality that you live in.

The the grandmother who was filled with stress, anxiety, and worry, raised the mother who's filled with stress, anxiety, and worry, which now has the child who's filled with anxiety, worry, and and wonder why we struggle with basic things.

These are not things that you asked for, these were not choices that you made, but it was passed down to us.

But what if I were to tell you that these were not just things that were happening, but these were patterns often referred to as generational curses.

But today we're breaking those in the name of Jesus.

So I want to talk about this topic in a way that's gonna be meaningful, impactful, confrontational, but in a way that I truly believe is gonna be transformational.

So if you're taking notes, and of course I hope that you are, I've entitled today's message, It Stops with Me.

Turn to someone next to you and say it stops with me.

Turn to the people you ignored and say to them, It stops with me.

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you so much for your faithfulness, we thank you for your grace, your kindness, your goodness in all of our lives.

Lord, we slow down, we take a deep breath, and we ask for you to be present in this space.

We ask that we can be more aware of your presence in this space.

Holy Spirit, you are welcome here.

This is your space.

Allow us to be a blank canvas to receive everything that you want to deposit into us.

God, I ask for you to confront us.

I ask for you to challenge us, I ask for you to convict us, I ask for you to correct us, I ask for you to reveal yourself to us, reveal the truth, bring us to a place of healing and deliverance.

So, Lord, I ask that you give us open eyes that we can see you above all else, open ears to hear your truth, and open hearts to receive everything you have for us that is built on the foundation of the incorruptible seed of the Word of God.

Have your way.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Amen and amen.

I I remember it's probably been about two years or so now that I had been meeting with uh a young man who was coming to see me to kind of process through a lot of the anger that he was dealing with in his life.

And one of the things that made it so unique is that he he wasn't coming in under his own desire, but he had a fiance who ultimately said, like, hey, if you don't, if you don't find someone to sit with and talk with about some of these things, this is not gonna work out.

So he was basically coming in under duress.

He was like, Man, I don't feel like I need to be here.

I don't want to be here, but but my girlfriend says I have to come, and so I'm here.

That's always an amazing foundation to work on when you're meeting with people, but nonetheless, we we gave it a go.

So I remember as we began to talk, and week after week, we would just talk about life and the things that have influenced him, his work schedule, the things that trigger him, all these things we're working through.

And if I can be honest with you, I was having a hard time with identifying like the anger issue.

Because I was helping him to understand, like, hey, like the Bible says be angry but sin not.

Anger is an emotion that God gives us, like it makes it available to us.

In fact, the definition of anger is simply the response to perceived injustice.

So God gives us this emotion of anger to react or respond when we perceive that there's been some form of injustice.

We just have to do it within certain boundaries.

So I was having a hard time seeing the the rage that seemed to be out of bounds.

So I said, hey man, I said, What do you think about having your fiance come in the next time you come to meet with me?

And we just sit down and we we chop it up, we just talk.

He's like, Ah, that'll be great.

She would love that.

So the next week she comes in with him and we're going through the pleasantries, getting to know each other, and and we begin to talk.

And I I can't even remember the initial question that I asked, but then she kind of jumped in and began to kind of like share.

She's like, This is my moment, I'm gonna let it rip.

So she's just going, she's going, she's going, and I'm I'm watching this play out.

And it went from an observation to full-on, like it was like it was a flat out fight.

Now I'm I'm watching this and I let it go on for probably like five or six minutes, and and and I I probably should have intervened much sooner, but at one point I was like, yo, you gonna let her talk to you like that?

Like, I mean, it's I was just taking it all in, but it but for me, I love to kind of observe what you're fighting for, what you're fighting about, and also it lets me get a glimpse of like hey, if you're gonna fight like this in front of me, I can only imagine what it's like when you're at home.

Then she makes this statement, and I remember this statement.

It cut it cut through the room with all the back and forth, all the yelling.

She says, You're just like your father.

Yeah.

Because everything went silent when she said that.

He just shut down.

And so now I'm I'm I'm looking at him, I'm looking at her, both of them are are seething, and and I just gently lean in and I say, Hey man, I said, What do those words mean?

Because of course I don't have context of what just like your father means.

Apparently, it's not a good thing.

So he says, I'm nothing like my dad.

I said, Okay, man, I said, I said, well, tell me, tell me about your dad.

Tell me uh, I said, a fact, don't tell me about your dad now.

I said, but your son, right?

Your son is about 10 years old, right?

He's like, Yeah.

I said, tell me what the 10-year-old version of you experience of your father was.

Give me, give me what did 10-year-old version of you vision of your dad is.

And he sat for a second, he said, okay, well, my dad was a very hard-working man.

He worked really hard.

He was very, very hardworking.

He would come home from his blue-collar job and and he would he would expect dinner to be there and ready, and and and then he would go into the living room and then he would just drink a couple of beers, watch TV.

He just wanted to watch some sports, and he just wanted to be left alone.

And he's like, But my dad, he didn't spend time with us, and and if we said anything, if we did anything, he would get very angry, he would yell at us.

Like it was very, it was very aggressive.

I'm nothing like my dad.

Uh he's like, and then he did the same thing that people tend to do when you're an adult looking back at the past, which is he then began to say, But my dad wasn't that bad because he's nothing like what his father was.

I said, Hey man, I said, tell me, tell me about your grandfather.

What did your dad say about him?

Well, my grandfather, he he was a hard-working man, and and he he worked really hard and he came home and he would drink and he would abuse my grandmother.

He would also abuse my my dad and his siblings, and so he had a lot of anger issues.

I'm I'm nothing like them.

I said, Man, let me I said, let me see if I can do something really quick.

So I said, so here we have your grandfather.

And I said, and then we have And then we have you have a lot of people.

He had a bit of anger that came out with verbal and emotional abuse.

So we have these lines with grandfather that have been passed down to dad, and now we we we get to you, and it seems like you're a very hard-working man.

You don't drink as many beers as your dad does.

Like you said, you only you only drink like two or three at the end of the night just to kind of take the edge off a little bit after a long day.

If if if your kids get in the way, or if they don't give you your space, you get a little angry, but but you you're you're not abusive.

I said, so so it looks like your your grandfather has some things, your father has some things, and and tell me what you see here.

And I'll I'll never forget the moment where he's looking at this portable whiteboard that I had, and he said, Oh my god, I am like my dad.

He had been playing a part in a script that he didn't even sign up for, and sadly, didn't even recognize that he was in.

There was a pattern that had been passed down from generation to generation, and he didn't even notice it.

So I said to him, I said, Man, I said, this is where we begin.

Because ultimately, when we think about somebody's behavior, it breaks down into two categories.

The first category is nature, and the other category is what?

I heard somebody say it.

Nurture.

Come on, somebody's gonna help me preach today.

Nature and nurture.

Nature is the genetics, that's the DNA.

That's you, you, you have the eyes like your father, you have the build of your father, you, you, you're soft-spoken like your mother.

Temperament is actually something that gets passed down genetically.

It's just one of those things.

But you know, the other thing that can be passed down through nature is a leaning towards coping mechanisms or addictive behavior.

70% of people, you will identify that those tendencies are something that's passed down through nature.

What it means is this that if you have a family member who has an addictive personality and that can express itself in many ways, you are 70% more likely to also have some form of addictive personality.

It doesn't mean that you're doomed from the start, but what it does mean is that when you were born, the engine was already revving.

And if you put it into gear, it's easy for you to fall into this space.

That's that's nature.

But then nurture is the other side.

Nurture is what you absorb by being in the room and absorbing the oxygen of the environment that you were raised in.

This is where you are not just a person who was born with a short fuse, but the place where we nurture it is where we're given the script on how we actually walk that short fuse out.

I may have a short temper, but the environment that I was raised in showed me what the expression of that temper looks like.

Because when you're very small, you're watching this is what a man does when he's upset.

This is what a man does when he's disappointed, this is how a man responds when things don't go his way, when the job is giving him a hard time.

He's picking up this script that also continues to perpetuate itself over and over.

And after a long time, these two lines collide together and they all create these patterns that can be repeated over and over again.

And here's the reality.

The reality of all of this is that we find ourselves at a space where we repeat these things enough that these are not just things that are happening, they become our personality.

This is just the way that we are in this family.

This is just what we do.

This is how our culture deals with anger, and it almost becomes this protected space that we never actually have to confront it or deal with it.

Now, it's easy to say that this is just a pattern, this is just the way that we are in our family, but the scripture gives it another name.

Culturally, some people would call these generational curses.

Now, side note, the words generational curse don't appear anywhere in the Bible, but it's implied when we read passages like what we just read.

And in the simplest form, what a generational curse or these patterns are, it's the consequence of one generation's patterns being passed down to the next.

From one thing to the next.

It's not a hex, it's not voodoo, it's not a spell, it's unresolved brokenness and trauma that never get dealt with that keeps showing up in every generation looking for a place for it to land.

This is what this text is talking about in Exodus chapter 34.

Exodus 34 · chapter mention

Let's back up and see how we got here.

Because in Exodus 32, the Bible says that Moses goes up to the mountain to have this moment with God where he's getting this profound revelation of who God is and what God expects from his people.

This was a very radical idea at that time in idolatry and these false gods.

You never knew what they needed and you never knew what they wanted from you.

So that's why they had all these weird rituals.

But but here's Yahweh saying that I'm going to give you a written list of what I expect from you, but you also know what you can expect from me.

God was showing them a new way.

But while Moses was up there spending time in the presence of God on this mountain, the children of Israel had already agreed to not making any graven image.

They had already agreed to when they left Egypt of not having the patterns in the religious movements of Egypt.

But while Moses was up in the clouds with God, they came to Aaron and said, Man, he's been gone too long.

So make us a golden calf.

And so they gave their resources to create an idol that they then began to worship.

Imagine that for a moment.

Not even two months out of bondage, and they forsook the God who parted the Red Sea and started worshiping jewelry.

Just started worshiping jewelry.

So Moses comes down, he confronts them, he he corrects them, there's significant consequences for it, and then he begins to negotiate back with God on their behalf because God at that point was like, I'm done with them.

I will wipe them out and just start a new thing through you.

So so Moses is negotiating with God, and there's this powerful moment where God agrees to not wipe the Israelites out.

And Moses makes a statement, a bold statement to want to make sure that they're still on good terms.

He makes this statement, he says, Lord, can you show me your glory?

Can you show me your Kavad, the fullness of your glory, the fullness of your way?

Can you can you reveal yourself to me so I know that we are still good?

God responds in this moment and he says, You can't, you can't handle my glory.

You're a sinful being.

You can't handle what I'm gonna show to you.

But here's what I will do: I'm gonna put you in this corner and I'm gonna pass by you, and I will reveal myself to you by showing you my backside.

Now, God is a spirit.

So what he's doing is he's speaking what we refer to as an anthropomorphic term.

That means when a divine being takes on human elements so that we can wrap our minds around who he is, anthropomorphism.

So God says, I'm gonna show you my hinder parts or my back so that you can understand who I am.

This is not literal.

So what God is saying, if you want to know who I am, let me show you what I've done.

So when he says, I'm gonna show you my back, he says, I'm gonna show you the history of what I've done.

So when he's passing by Moses, Moses gets a glimpse of what God has done and he sees creation.

He gets a glimpse of in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

He gets a glimpse of the things and the way that God showed mercy with Adam and Eve.

He got a glimpse of these things, and now he had a glimpse of who God was because he knew what God did.

This is why in the Old Testament, saying that he's the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was such a foundational statement because it helped them to know if God did it for them, then he will do it for me.

I know who God is by knowing what he's done for others.

But as he's passing by, he also makes these statements concerning himself.

And I want us to lean in because the words that God uses to describe himself are words that he is saying that he expects us to think about when we represent him and when we describe him as well.

And if we're not careful, we'll lean more towards one side and completely ignore the other side.

God says of himself, the Lord who is merciful.

I am merciful, I am gracious, I am slow to anger.

These are the ways that God defines himself.

These are not the characteristics of a self-help guru or preacher who doesn't want to preach on conviction.

These are parts of the very character of God.

But he also says these words: forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but I don't clear the conscience of the guilty.

These things will be visited on the next generation.

I want us to see something here.

Look at that, Transformer.

Y'all didn't know we had it like that.

Don't play with me, man.

Bow.

Bow.

Like I'm just trying to let y'all know, man, we're moving up.

So watch this, watch this.

God uses three terms.

He says, sin, transgression, and iniquity.

And sometimes when we think of these three words, we can sometimes use them interchangeably.

We can even mistakenly believe that they're the same thing, but but they're not.

Sin is the most basic of them, and sin simply means to miss the target.

It means to miss the mark.

It's an archery term, actually.

It means that there's a target, there's a standard that you're trying to hit, and sin means you just fell short of it.

Just yesterday, my son took me to one of those tactical places where you get a chance to like play like you're a soldier for a day.

It was amazing.

Like you used to crawl around, you're shooting at things.

There was a lot of sin that day because I missed a lot of shots.

Not as much as my son, but there was a lot of mark missing that took place on that day.

I'm shooting, but but I'm missing.

That's what it means to be a human being.

We're missing God's perfect standard.

That's something that's acceptable and that's expected of all of us and our sin condition.

But then he also says transgression.

Transgression is a little bit different because what transgression means is it means when you deliberately cross the line.

It literally means to trespass.

It literally, if we were to change it in one term, it means rebellion.

So this is why scripture says, don't make provision for your flesh, because there's a big difference between being a person who has a sin nature and you miss the mark.

And as human beings, we miss the mark.

Sometimes I miss the mark with my children.

Sometimes I miss the mark with my wife.

These are moments that's a part of our humanity, but transgression is saying, I know that the mark is here and I'm willingly going to step over it.

I'm willingly going to ignore what God's standard is.

I'm willingly going to engage in these things.

So a transgression has a significant weight in the theology of God because He's saying you're choosing to rebel.

You didn't accidentally do this, you didn't stumble upon this, you made a decision to do this.

Paul says, Don't make provision for your flesh.

Don't get into this space where you're strategizing it.

And this is where we have to be careful.

Because we have looked at God being so graceful and so merciful, and we think that that could be permission to live a life of transgression without realizing that the consequences of that still will ripple through our generations to come.

He speaks about transgression, but then he gets to the next one, and that is iniquity.

Iniquity literally means crookedness, it means the bend.

And this is where we're going to spend the rest of our time.

Iniquity means it's the tendency.

Because we are sinful beings, because of the patterns that we have absorbed, it's possible that you can be born with a tendency that someone else isn't born with.

You can be born with a temperament, you can be born with a leaning as a result of these generational things that you're just born with.

That's the iniquity.

That's the tendency that exists within all of us.

That pattern that's there, that that default response that is there.

This is what God was saying when He was saying to the children of Israel that when we don't deal with this iniquity, it gets passed on to the next generation.

Let me put it to you this way: When the Israelites rebelled and made an idol of the golden calf, their children saw that.

And because their children saw that, they saw what transgression, rebellion, and iniquity looks like, and that became a rhythm that was a normal thing for them.

I want you to hear me.

God will forgive you for the sin, but it doesn't erase the trauma that you created in your children.

Let me say it this way: you don't get to be abusive to your wife, and then you're surprised when your son is abusive to your daughter.

He's picked that up, and now that becomes a pattern that now has to be worked out through surrender, submission, and doing some deep work.

What God is saying that I will forgive you, but the repercussions of that will have a ripple effect if we're not careful.

All of us have this tendency that we wrestle with.

This is why David in Psalm 51, when he was talking about himself after he committed this grievous sin of sleeping with Bathsheba, getting her pregnant, having her husband killed.

Nathan confronts him about it, and then he's like, Man, like I really was wrong.

He runs to God, and when he runs to God, he's like, Lord, I know, I have mercy on me according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgression, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me of my sin.

David is using all three words because he knows that there is a difference.

Verse number five is one that we famously will quote, because he says, I was born in sin and shaped in iniquity.

David was not blaming his mother, and he's not excusing himself.

But what he's saying is, this bend, this tendency that I have, it didn't start with my choices.

It was there before I was even conceived.

Paul talks about this in detail in Romans chapter 5, where he begins to talk about the way that sin and sin nature gets passed down to the next generation.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

At verse number 12, he says, When Adam sinned, sin entered the world, and Adam's sin brought death, and death spread to everyone because everyone has sinned.

What he's breaking down is this pipeline and pattern of the crookedness that gets passed on from one generation to the next.

Paul begins to articulate this in more detail in Romans chapter number seven.

Paul says, Man, I don't know what's wrong with myself.

I want to do good, but evil's yet with me.

The things that I want to do, I don't do, and the things I don't want to do, I still end up doing.

This is Paul, the scholar, the theologian, and yet he's saying to himself, after all that he's seen, after all that he's experienced, he still wrestles with this iniquity, this crookedness that's in him.

And no matter how much Holy Spirit he has, no matter how much divine revelation he has, he still wrestles with this.

Why do we think that no matter how much scripture we read, that no matter how much we go to church, no matter how much we lift our hands in worship, that we're still about five seconds away from allowing that old version of ourselves to come back to life.

Don't let me preach to myself in here, church.

I know how we get down.

I know that it's amazing to me that you can you can have your lips filled with worship, but you let somebody cut you off on I4.

Paul is saying that, man, like there's there's something inside of me that it always seems like it's fighting against me.

I deal with this all the time.

Do you know that as a pastor, as a man of faith, I've been walking with God for almost three decades?

And I've never been so consumed in thinking that I've graduated from needing the grace of God.

Because the truth of the matter is, that old Northeast version of me, he's still very much there.

And there are moments where people provoke it, and I have to choose to be kind.

And I get in my car, and that old version of me, like, yo, bro, you're gonna really let them talk to you like that.

You would have never let that slide back in the day.

What has happened to you?

And I'm fighting this.

This is what Paul's saying in Romans 7.

I want to do good, but evil's yet with me.

I'm like, Lord, I want to lay hands and I'm not talking about prayer, but I gotta keep it contained on the inside of me.

Paul is saying that there's something inside of us, that crookedness, that's easy to come out if it's provoked with the right situations.

It's all over the Bible.

And once you begin to look at it, you can't miss it.

Let's talk about Abraham for a moment, the father of the faith.

We know the story that in Genesis 11 we're introduced to Abraham.

By Genesis 12, he's called to be the destined family by which Jesus was going to come through.

Amazing story.

But you know what this man of faith storyline includes?

It includes that when the pressure was on, he lied and said that his wife wasn't his wife.

Twice.

I couldn't get away with that once.

But two times he lied and said, Nah, that's not my wife.

That's not my wife.

Two times he did that.

Watch this.

Then his son Isaac is born.

He's in the exact same region.

And guess what happens?

When the pressure's on Isaac and he's confronted with some people, you know what he says?

He denies his wife two times, too.

We see the generational pattern beginning to pass down.

Abraham does it, and now we see, now we see that his son does it.

But it gives even further because his son has a son named Jacob, which name literally means deceiver.

And he lived up to it.

He literally deceived his father, he deceived his brother, he stole the birthright.

He was a man who literally lived up to the pattern that was passed down in his family from generation to generation.

And then he was on the receiving end of the deception because his uncle deceived him.

And then his own kids deceived him when they said that the son Joseph got killed.

And so we see this whole cycle of deception that all started with the father, the grandfather saying, I don't know who this woman is.

This is how patterns get passed down from one generation to the next.

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and now even with us.

It shows up in our household where it has the person that says that I would never treat my kids the way that I was treated, but yet you still find yourself running that same default script.

It starts in a household where we never quite learn how to talk through our emotions.

And so when I'm in my household now, it's still easy for me to shut down and I just say that's just a part of the way that I process things.

While people have to walk on eggshells around you not knowing if there's going to be an explosion.

That's not a personality, that's a generational pattern that needs to be broken off of us.

And if that was the end of the message, this would be the most hopeless message I've ever preached.

Like if I say, okay, worship's gonna come back out, good luck.

That would be it.

But thanks be to God, there's more to this story.

Thanks be to God, there's a way that this can all be changed in a moment.

The text tells us in Exodus 34 that God says that even though the iniquity may be visited on three and four generations, he also says that I have a steadfast love that extends for thousands of generations.

I want you to see this.

The consequences of the things that we do, it may go two or three generations before that trauma has been released.

Here's a fact when when families who survived the Holocaust had children, those children were parented by people who endured significant trauma, and that affected the way that they treated their kids.

It affected the way that they saw the world, and that became a pattern that they had to then live out.

The descendants of slaves, when they had to go through slavery, Jim Crow, that gets in you.

That changes the way you view the world, it changes the way you operate around things, and it continues to ripple until it has another path that is chosen.

This is the consequence of these things that can be built in.

But thanks be to God.

That may go for three to four generations, but God's love extends for thousands.

In other words, the promise will outlast the trauma.

Galatians 3 13 says it this way that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming the curse for us.

It is written, curse is everyone who hangs on a tree.

Christ went on the tree to become the curse that breaks the generational curse's pattern and power in your life.

The curse that ran down the family line of humanity until it reached a man on a hill.

And he took his body, he carried it and gave it on a Friday, and the cross became the place where the curse ran out of road.

What was handed down from one generation to the next can be laid down in one moment.

I want you to hear me, church.

It may run in your family, but it stops with you.

It may run in my family, but it stops with me.

Addiction may run in my family, but it stops with me.

Divorce may run in my family, but it stops with me.

Poverty being broke by the 15th.

Money always slipping through our hands, that may run in my family, but it stops with me.

Anger may run in my family, but that stops with me.

Silence may run in my family, but it stops with me.

Abuse and being abusive verbally, emotionally, or physically, all of those things that may run in my family, but it stops with me.

Anxiety and depression, it may run in my family, but today it stops with me.

Unfaithful men may run in my family, but it stops with me.

Bitterness and rage may run in my family, but it stops with me.

Being a prayerless person that says I'm a follower of Christ on Sunday, but you don't see it on Monday or Tuesday.

It stops with me.

We're not going to be casual Christians anymore.

As for me and my house, we're going to serve the Lord.

It stops with me.

We have to make a decision, and that decision means we have to say, these things are real.

This bend, this iniquity is real, but it stops with me.

But now that we have the inspiration, we actually need the activation.

And there's a couple of things I'm going to move through pretty quick in hopes that we can do some practical things to help us break this off of our lives.

Here's the first thing we have to do if we're ever going to really be free from this thing.

We have to recognize it.

You cannot heal what you don't address.

You're only as free as your secret.

In Psalm 51, when David is saying, For I know my transgressions and my sin are ever before me, he names it before he asks God to treat it.

I see these things in my life, Lord, and now I want to invite you into it.

We have to begin to recognize it.

We have to call it what it is.

We have to stop saying, that's just how I was raised.

That's just part of my culture.

That's just how my family did things.

That continues to pattern.

We recognize it for what it is.

This is unhealthy.

I'm calling it by its name.

We can never get healed if we don't call it what it is.

Here's the second thing we have to do.

We have to take responsibility.

If I spelled this wrong, it's not because I'm illiterate.

I'm just so used to Siri correcting myself that I've gotten to a place where I don't even consider it anymore.

So blame her.

I've been conditioned.

It's part of my iniquity.

Um take responsibility.

Here's a part that gets very delicate.

Because this is the hardest part for many people.

We can see things in our life, but taking responsibility can go one of two ways.

One, we take all the blame and we drown in shame and we carry something that was never ours to carry.

Or we take none of the blame, we hide behind.

This is just how we are.

But freedom walks a more narrow path and it says, I will not carry the shame from what I've gone through, but I will not surrender my power to say that it's broken off of me.

We have to be willing to take responsibility.

It may not be my fault, but it stops with me.

Exodus says that iniquity visits the children for the third and fourth generation.

Key emphasis is visits.

It does not say that it possesses them, it does not say that it moves in.

There's a big difference between somebody who visits you and someone who moves in.

Visiting is not living.

That means that when someone is a visitor, you can say, you don't gotta go home, but you can't stay here anymore.

When the text is telling us that iniquity will visit us, we actually have the power to say, you can't stay here any longer.

But it starts with us recognizing it and taking responsibility for it.

Here's the third thing.

We now have to renounce it.

Renouncing it is so, so important.

Because once we take responsibility, we now have to break agreement with it.

When we begin to break agreement, we begin to verbally communicate that I am no longer in alignment with this.

This is why confession is so important.

We're going to be talking about that in a couple of weeks, so I won't spend too much time on this.

But 1 John 1 9 is where it says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and forgive and cleanse us of our unrighteousness.

To confess, it means to come into agreement with God.

It means to renounce the things that you once used to participate in, and you're breaking your agreement with the pattern, and you're starting with your agreement with God.

You're breaking the contract.

Why do we do it out loud?

It's because these patterns survive on secrecy.

The bend that we have, it grows in the dark.

The unspoken family rule that we don't talk about becomes the chain that keeps it alive.

The young lady who was molested by her uncle, we don't talk about it.

We don't talk about Bruno.

Because we don't talk about it, it continues to perpetuate itself until we bring it into the light.

We have to bring it into the light.

We have to drag it out in the open.

We're not saying that it's not my master anymore.

The pattern that fed on silence stars in the light.

We have to be willing to bring it to the light.

Here's the fourth thing we have to do.

After we renounce it, we now have to receive.

Here's why this is so important.

You cannot fix the family problems with your family's resources.

Let that settle for a minute.

Julian's having a moment over there.

He's like, oh.

You can't expect the ecosystem that created the trauma to be the exact same ecosystem that invites you into healing.

It requires you to get outside of that ecosystem so that you can actually have the perspective and the strength that you need.

Willpower isn't the issue.

The grandfather had willpower.

The father had willpower.

Willpower was never missing, but what breaks the curse's grips in your life is the beautiful exchange.

The Bible reminds us that in Galatians, that Christ became the curse for us.

So that 2 Corinthians 5.17 becomes a reality.

Therefore, anyone who's in Christ is a new creation.

The old has passed away.

Behold, the new has come.

New is not the old you with better habits, it's the lineage.

You're creating a new pipeline of who you are.

You've been grafted into the family of Christ, but you have to receive what Christ did on the cross.

You cannot break the generational curse in your family.

The cross already did that for you.

You have to receive it.

This is what the text is telling us.

I have to receive it.

I have to receive the forgiveness from God.

I have to receive the redemptive work of Christ in my life.

I have to begin to put it into practice.

It's not about power, it's not about strength, it's about surrender.

We have to receive it.

And then here is the fifth and final thing.

Now we were build.

This is important.

Paul says in Romans 12, too, do not be conformed to the image of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Transform literally means in Greek metamorpho, which is where we get the word metamorphosis.

That's a structural change, not a temporary mood.

And it comes with the renewing of our mind.

This takes process and doesn't happen in a moment.

Did you know that your brain can learn new patterns and new rhythms?

Our synaptic pathways are pretty much these grooves that get set in our brain that allows us to have a default response.

That's the iniquity, the bending.

That's the way that our brains are responding to our nature versus nurture.

But did you know that our brain, through neuroplasticity, which is having new rhythms, new patterns, new systems, that you can actually carve new pathways that then allow you to have a new default response even to old situations.

But that happens over time.

You have to repeat it over and over again.

But those new rhythms create new patterns, which creates a new lifestyle.

It's more important for you to understand that I don't just stop doing the old thing, but I gotta start doing the new thing.

This is why Jesus says when he's speaking to his disciples, he says, When an unclean spirit goes out of a person, it goes off into dry places, finding nowhere to find rest.

It goes back to its old home, finding it clean and swept, it comes in, brings in seven more wicked than itself.

I'm gonna do a whole series slash book on this, but let me give you the synoptic version of this.

What God is ultimately communicating to us is that it's not good enough to just stop doing something.

You gotta fill that emptiness with something else.

Otherwise, you're going to run the risk of having a vacancy so that when an enemy shows up, you come off in a worse condition than when you were started.

So the Bible is saying it's not good enough to just stop doing this, but you gotta start having healthy rhythms.

You gotta start engaging the things of God, and as you do that, it creates new rhythms and patterns in your life.

This is how we get a chance to live a redemptive story.

It may run in your family, but it stops with me.

That's God's word for us.

So let me let me bring it to a close because I don't want this just to be information that you file away, but I want this to be something that leads us to a place, a transformation.

Because for some of us, when we really begin to reflect on where we are with Christ, we know that we haven't even received Christ to even put these things into practice.

And there's an opportunity for you to respond in a moment.

But I also know that for some of us, in order for us to get to this space where we can renounce the things in our life, we have to first recognize it.

With every eye closed and every head bowed.

Not because this is a secret, but I want to I want to lead us into a space of just stillness where we can take a deep breath and allow God to begin to search our minds and our hearts.

And in this moment, I want to invite you to invite the Holy Spirit, Lord, examine my mind, examine my heart, examine my life, examine me.

What is the sin in my life?

What is the transgression?

The rebellion?

What are the iniquities, those patterns that just seem to keep reproducing themselves?

When you sit with God, He begins to show you these patterns.

It's from that space that you break agreement with it and renounce its influence on your life.

Lord, I thank you so much for your faithfulness.

I thank you for your goodness, Lord, and I thank you for your grace.

You said of your own self that you are merciful, that you are you are gracious, you are kind, that you will forgive iniquity, transgressions, and sin.

But we have work to do.

Lord, I pray over every precious person right now.

Those who have generational trauma, those who have circumstances that they didn't create, that they have been forced to live in and they've turned into survivors and they have not yet begun to thrive.

But Lord, we can't walk in healing if we're not willing to address and acknowledge the things that have caused the wound.

So Lord, I pray that as we sit in this moment, that you reveal these patterns, these proclivities, these bending, these leanings that exist within us.

Lord, right now we renounce, we repent, we turn from every sin, every transgression, open acts of rebellions where we're choosing to go against your word and your will.

God, I pray in the name of Jesus we break agreement with it right now in the name of Jesus.

It will not have rule in us, it will not have rule in our family.

It may run in our family, but it stops today.

In the name of Jesus.

Lord, help us to be more aware of your presence.

Help us to be more aware of your grace.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

I want to give us some homework.

And I think that's fitting for a series called Summer School.

We have resources available that we want you to read.

We have a longer version of my message transcripts because there's a million things I didn't even get a chance to share.

That's all available in our app.

But one of the things I want to encourage you to do is I want you to do a genogram or a family map, is what we call it.

And what that is, is a version of this right here.

And it starts with you having both sides of your family, your mother's side and your father's side.

Go up to the grandfather, father, and then yourself, and just write down these boxes and just begin to identify things that you've witnessed and observed in your family.

It doesn't have to be all bad things, but it's important that we begin to slow down and identify these patterns and rhythms.

Wow, man, my my great-grandfather cheated on my grandmother, my great-grandmother.

Man, my my grandfather, he left my family.

My dad did.

Oh, like that's a that's a pattern that if I'm not careful, I can I can repeat the same thing.

I I got this bend in me, and I didn't even realize that there's this leaning towards this.

Now that I see it, I'm breaking an agreement with that, and I'm gonna have some other rhythms in my life to ensure that I don't repeat that.

It may run in my family, but it stops with me.

But we can't we can't walk in the straight path that God has for us while we continue to allow the crooked paths to still be a part of the way that we live.

And this is just an entry point of how we can do that.

So I want to encourage you.

I've done this a few times, and it confronts us, it makes us really examine who we are and where we are.

You can't fix everything overnight, but when you know what you're struggling with, you can invite the power of God because the battle's not yours, it's the Lord's.

Can we get a good amen to that?

Can we get a good amen to that church?

Come on, let's stand on our feet.

I want to pray a blessing on us before we leave, but before you head out, I want to remind you of a couple of things.

Um, we have an amazing experience outside, and and you're not going to want to miss it.

Pastor Nate's gonna come up in just a moment to give you some instructions on how to engage it.

But listen to me, family.

We love you, we're for you.

Lean in and make sure you allow those iniquities and those patterns to be broken off your life in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for joining us to learn more about Celebration Orlando, a church devoted to reaching the lost, equipping the found, and helping the hurting.

Follow us on social media using the handle at celebrationorl or visit our website, celebrationorl.org.