Family Traditions: Generational Blessing with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Good morning.

How's everybody doing?

Awesome.

Man, we are so glad that you guys could make it to today's service.

If you're new to MetaCurch, my name is Noel, and I'm the worship pastor here, and I'm so honored to be able to preach to it, got you guys again this week.

Now, last week we opened our conversation talking about something kind of heavy, and I got a lot of questions after that sermon, and all those questions were, why didn't you play Family Tradition?

And so I thought, well, maybe we should play Family Tradition this week.

But joking aside, we started last week talking about generational curses.

And I was letting you guys know that growing up in the church, what I experienced generational curses being where people like talking about maybe one of their worst ways, maybe one of their sin patterns that they had in their life.

And these sin patterns were uh seemingly inherited maybe from a family member, possibly a parent or a grandparent.

But the conclusion that we came to last week is that while we do live under a curse, that curse did not start with our parents or even our parents' parents.

That curse started all the way back with Adam and Eve when they disobeyed God's one command and brought sin into this world.

Now, don't get me wrong, the family you grew up in probably gave you some predisposition dispositions.

Like there are things that you learn for sure, but you're not helpless against them.

They're not a curse.

When sin came into the world, there were consequences.

Women had painful childbirth, and men for the first time had to work hard for their food, and worst of all, death came into this world.

But God offers us redemption through Jesus.

And Jesus became the curse for us so that we wouldn't have to pay for our own debt and we could be reconciled with our Creator.

And this is great news because when we place our faith in Jesus, we no longer have to live under the curse or the penalty of sin.

So while there is definitely a generational curse, we're not helpless against it.

However, the question isn't just how do we escape the curse, but how do we live a life of generational blessing?

We pray with you.

Heavenly Father, we're so grateful for this time and this place for us to come and learn more about you, Father.

We pray that you would speak to us today, Holy Spirit.

God, I pray that you would uh guide my words, guide my thought past.

God, I've prepared as much as I can and I'm depending on you for the rest of it, Father.

And so I'm grateful to be here with all uh our friends today.

God, we love you so much, and we prayed in Jesus' name and everyone said together, Amen.

You know, talking about families is a rather difficult subject because for just as many people that are listening to me right now, there's that many experiences with family.

Now, if we took like a general look at our family, right?

If we took a very high view of our family, we could say whether we had a good family experience or possibly a bad family experience.

But if we went down just a little bit, we could see all the things that comprised our conclusion.

Like, if you had a good family, it wasn't probably all good.

There was probably some bad in there.

And if you think you had a bad family experience, then it probably wasn't all bad.

There's probably some good in there.

It's just that there's more of one than the other.

We're talking about generational blessings today.

It's the other side of the coin and family tradition.

We had generational curses, and now we have generational blessings that we're looking at today.

And you may have an idea of what a generational blessing could look like.

Like I knew kids growing up whose families had family businesses, right?

And they were not just family businesses, they were very successful family businesses.

And these kids that I grew up with knew that one day this family business would be theirs to run, theirs to operate.

And it's like before they even got out of school, their career path was set for them.

Like, that's certainly a blessing.

Most of us just kind of wander around and hope that we find our purpose through our work.

Maybe you or someone you know is set to inherit some amount of generational wealth.

Like someone who came before you is gonna leave you some money.

That's certainly a blessing, but not all blessings are materialistic.

Like my parents, for example.

My parents taught me and my brothers a very strong work ethic.

It was something that was very important to them.

And in turn, we taught our kids a strong work ethic.

My son's almost seven years old, and Jack knows that when we start a project, we are not gonna stop until that uh job is completely done.

And I know that this is gonna be something that I'm teaching him like his entire life, but I hope that it becomes important to him.

That it's something that he will uh teach his kids one day.

Maybe your parents taught you how to manage your money, right?

Like how to save your money and not to buy everything on impulse.

Save your cash, don't spend it on things uh that just catch your eye.

Better yet, don't spend cash that you don't have.

In other words, like don't go into debt to buy something, and now you find yourself as an adult and you have money in the bank and you don't owe it to anybody.

That's certainly a blessing to be taught how to manage your money.

But let's get real.

A lot of people don't come up with these blessings.

And maybe you would include yourself in that camp today.

Like, there's no family business for you to fall back on should your career go south.

There's no generational uh wealth that's gonna ensure your financial health in the future.

Instead, what you've inherited is your dad's addiction, and maybe you've inherited your mom's anxiety.

You have no real work ethic and you have no real world skills.

And we started the series talking about generational curses.

And do we want to escape a life that is ruled by the generational curse of sin?

Well, yes, of course we do.

If you want to live in your generational sin, that's not probably a good place to be.

Curses are not good things.

So, of course, we want to live outside of that curse.

But some part of you knows that there's more.

We don't want to just barely escape the curse and survive this life, but we actually want to live a life that thrives in blessing.

But how do we experience generational blessing when generational blessing is not a part of our family's story?

How do we pass on generational blessing when we've not inherited generational blessing from our parents?

Or maybe it is that you did inherit some generational blessing in your life.

If that's you, then you want to know how to make sure the next generation experiences that.

Maybe even make it greater, make it grow stronger.

But how do we do that?

To answer these questions, we're gonna go back to where we started last week.

We're gonna go back all the way to the beginning because for as long as humanity has existed, we've constantly tried to rebel against God.

I'm sure you can see this in your own life.

It didn't just start with Adam and Eve, it continued throughout all the generations.

God had a different plan for us when He created the world and created humans.

He had us to uh perfection for us to live in.

He had blessing for us to live in.

But through our disobedience, sin came into the world.

And it disrupted that plan.

But the good news is that God's been trying to restore it ever since it was disrupted.

And what's crazy is that God takes us lowly, imperfect, rebellious humans, and he lets us be a part of the plans that he's making to restore our lives.

And he does this through something called covenants.

And if you've never heard of the word covenant, a covenant is basically just an agreement between two people.

It can be between more, but it's an agreement to do or not do something that you've previously agreed on.

In other words, it's a deal.

And we see these covenants throughout the Bible.

There's a couple different kinds.

Really quickly, we'll talk about the first one.

It's called a conditional covenant.

And a conditional covenant is contingent on both parties, who's ever entered into this covenant, to hold up there into the deal for the covenant to stay true.

We see this in the Mosaic law.

We looked at this uh last week.

It was called the Mosaic Covenant.

And Moses uh passed down the Ten Commandments and a bunch of other laws that came through the oral tradition, through rabbis.

And basically it all amounted to this: God said, if the Jewish people, if my people will obey these laws, then I will bless them in the land that I've promised to them, the land that I am leading them to.

It was an if then.

If they do this, then I'll do this.

That's a conditional covenant.

Another type of covenant that God uses often is called the unconditional covenant.

And I know everybody in here is super smart, but an unconditional covenant simply has no conditions.

And when God makes this type of covenant with humans, it says, no matter what you humans do, I'm gonna hold up my end of the deal.

There's nothing for you to accomplish here, there's nothing for you to hold up.

I'm gonna hold up every piece of it.

To understand the blessed life that we want to live, we have to understand the covenant life.

And we're gonna look at a perfect example in Abraham today.

You may know Abraham as a father of Israel.

He was a patriarch of God's chosen people, and he was the beginning of the lineage that went all the way and brought us Jesus himself.

But what you may not know about Abraham is that he spent the first 70 years of his life living under a generational curse until God came and removed him from it.

Remember last week that the generational curse is sin, but how that plays out in our families is unique to our family.

For Abraham, his father Tarah, was an idolater.

This guy worshipped idols and he worshiped false gods, and this is what Abraham was brought up to do as well, until God called him out of that life of generational curse and into a life of blessing that led to God making a covenant with him.

We see this in Genesis 15, where God starts to establish a covenant with him.

In Genesis 15, 1, it says, After these events, the word of the Lord came to Abram, which was Abraham, in vi in a vision.

Do not be afraid, Abram.

I am your shield.

Your reward will be very great.

Now, this would be something I think all of us would be happy to hear, right?

Like, so all these things have happened, you've responded, well, I'm gonna give you a reward, and that reward is gonna be very great.

Like all of us kind of want to hear that from God at some point.

But Abraham wasn't so excited about this news.

In fact, he is more perplexed than anything, and he responds in verse 3, he says, Look, you have given me no offspring, so a slave born in my house will be my heir.

Abraham was in his 70s at this point, and my parents are just two years shy of being 70 themselves.

And I can tell you, at this point in their life, the most important thing to them is what they can leave their children and their grandchildren.

Some of it material, much more of it the lessons they've taught us along the way, and Abraham had no heir.

There was no one there to take his reward that God was promising him, other than a slave that was born in his own household.

So God tells him, This one, this slave, will not be your heir.

One who comes from your own body will be your heir.

He took him outside and said, Look at the sky and count the stars, if you're able to count them.

Your offspring will be that numerous.

I mean, can you even imagine such a promise?

Here's a man who's 70 years old, he has no kids, and now God's saying, Not only are you gonna have a kid, but that kid's gonna have a lot of kids, and you're gonna have like descendants that rival the number of stars in the sky.

And I don't know what your reaction would be.

My reaction would be like scoffing, probably, like there's no way.

This is almost adding insult to injury.

I can't believe you promised this to me.

But Abraham, he didn't respond that way at all.

His reaction was really simple but profound.

In fact, the Bible doesn't even say that he said anything.

Here's how the Bible says he reacted in verse 6.

He says, Abram believed the Lord.

And the Lord credited it to him as righteousness.

Of all the things that Abraham did right, and he did do a lot of things right.

The thing that he was considered righteous for was believing that God would do exactly what he said he would do.

And so God tells Abraham to get the animals ready to slaughter them because it was time to make a covenant with each other.

And back in that time, the way a covenant was made, is that once the conditions were agreed upon, once they decided what the terms of the covenant would be, they would take animals and they would cut them literally in half, and the house would fall to the left and to the right.

And in the middle, this uh kind of like a river of blood would be flowing.

And when the two people involved in this covenant would walk through it, that was their way of saying, Yes, I agree to this.

Like, aren't you so glad that doesn't happen now?

Can you imagine going to buy a new car and you like wheel and deal, you negotiate, and the car salesman's like, hey, why don't you wait in the in the lobby for a second?

We're gonna go wash your car, we're gonna go gas it up, and we're also gonna get the animals all cut up so we can walk through their blood.

Like, that's not what happens anymore, right?

We're very grateful for that.

But that was extremely normal in Abraham's time.

And so he did what God asked him to.

He got the animals, he prepared the site where they were to walk through the blood and enter into covenant with each other.

And then something very strange happens after he does all this work.

Abraham falls asleep.

Abraham takes a nap, but it wasn't because he was tired.

Abraham was made to fall asleep by God.

And you know what happened while he was sleeping?

God came through and he walked through the blood all on his own.

It's his way of saying to Abraham, this deal, this covenant that we're making, it's all on me.

This unconditional covenant is how Abraham escapes the effects of the generational curse.

He simply believed and it was credited to him as righteousness by the only one who could declare him righteous, God himself.

And this is what we saw last week, right?

That same moment of faith in Jesus brings us into this unconditional covenant of eternal life.

The same way God walked alone through that blood, Jesus went alone and shed his blood on a cross.

Abraham had now escaped the generational curse.

Now he could start living generational blessing, he could start changing his lineage.

But there was a problem, and it's the same problem he already had, he still didn't have a kid.

Like, who am I gonna leave all of this to?

And the next chapter of Abraham's life really demonstrates the difference between losing the curse and living the blessing.

And Abraham made plenty of w mistakes on his way to the blessing.

In fact, Abraham tried to take this generational blessing, this thing that God had promised him, and he tried to make it happen on his own.

He took another woman who was not his wife and slept with her in order to have an heir.

And I don't know if y'all know this about Jesus, but he is not a fan of that.

He doesn't want you to do that.

And that whole situation ended up in disaster.

God chastised Abraham, but he also challenged them.

He challenged them to have faith and patience and wait on him.

And finally, at a very old age, Abraham was in his 90s at this point.

He and Sarah had a child that they named Isaac.

And it's like, let the generational blessings begin, right?

I've been promised all these things.

I have a kid, I'm gonna have all these uh heirs to my to my namesake, it's gonna be great, but that's not what happened.

It was only a few years into them being proud parents that uh God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

Like he literally asked Abraham to climb a mountain with his son and to build an altar with his son and then to take his son and place him on the altar.

The hope of his generational blessing, the hope of his future generations, and to kill him.

It's like, how can generations be blessed if there are no generations to be found?

But again, Abraham obeyed God.

He did exactly as he was told.

And on that mountain, Abraham raised his knife into the sky, prepared to plunge it into the heart of all that he loved, all of his hopes and all of his dreams, his precious and then God stopped him.

God provided a ram for sacrifice instead of Isaac.

It was in that God reaffirmed his covenant.

In Genesis 22, 18, he says, All the nations of the earth will be blessed by your offspring.

Because you have obeyed my command.

Abraham showed that he could be trusted to carry out God's purposes for his nation of chosen people, the Israelites.

Because of one man's obedience, generation after generation, lived in the blessing that God had promised to him.

And that deal, that covenant that God made with Abraham all the way back then is still happening today, and you get to live under it too.

But this covenant has a word because in it.

And when we say the word because, that starts to sound a lot like a condition, but there's a difference.

First, Abraham believed and it was credited to him as righteousness.

No conditions.

Faith is not a work, and faith is not an act.

The Bible is very, very clear about that.

One moment of faith, and Abraham escapes the curse by entering into unconditional covenant with God.

This is how he escaped the generational curse.

However, we don't want to just leave the curse, do we?

We want to live a life of blessing.

The generational blessing comes when Abraham demonstrates the ultimate act of obedience by offering his own son as a sacrifice.

God said that eventually all the nations of earth would be blessed because of his obedience.

And that's good news for you because you live in one of those nations on earth and you are blessed by it.

Maybe you don't know how you're blessed by a man that did something thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago.

But Abraham was the beginning of Jesus' lineage.

Because of Abraham's faith and obedience, a pattern was set in place.

A generational blessing was set in place that came all the way to Jesus, who died for our sins, who was able to bring us back into right relationship and fellowship with God.

Jesus is like the do-over for us.

We were created in perfection and harmony, but through disobedience, we lost all of that.

Jesus came and died on a cross.

He restored us to harmony with God and to eventual perfection again in eternity.

Paul says in Romans 5, for if by one man's trespass the many died, how much more have the grace of God and the gift which comes through the grace of the one man Jesus Christ overflowed to the many?

You can escape the generational curse of sin through the unconditional promise of eternal life.

And all it takes is belief in Jesus.

It's the same way that righteousness was placed on Abraham through his moment of faith that God would do what he said he would do.

You can also live a life that creates generational blessing.

Maybe you didn't come from generational blessing, but you can live a life that creates generational blessing.

And all that takes is obedience to live your life the way God asks you to live your life.

It's the same way that Abraham was ultimately the reason all nations were blessed because of his obedience to follow what God had asked them to do.

You see, we leave the curse by belief, but we live the blessing through obedience.

We receive justification by grace through faith in Jesus.

Yeah, we were cursed by sin to death by the sin of one man, and that was Adam.

However, we've received this huge blessing and another man, Jesus, who brought us redemption.

When we put our faith in Jesus, he's unashamed to call us brothers and sisters.

And if he is a son of God, and he is the son of God, that means that we're adopted sons and daughters of God.

And do you know what that means for your life?

Doesn't matter if you had a good family experience or a bad family experience, it means you're a part of a new family tradition.

And your heavenly father has blessings for your life, and they're right in front of you.

But you have to be willing to live inside of them.

Maybe you didn't grow up in a blessed family.

Maybe you're convinced that you are actually cursed by your family tree.

But I have great news for you.

Abraham was one of the most blessed men to have ever walked this earth, and he grew up in a generational curse.

His family were literally pagans.

He was like 70 years old and had gone nowhere in life.

He was living in his mother's basement.

He was mooching off his dad's money.

He was like the saddest, oldest millennial of all time.

But God had something for Abraham.

He has something more for you.

We're all offered the unconditional opportunity of God's righteousness.

And that's not something you can earn, it's not something you can work for, and it's certainly not something you deserve.

It's a gift that's received through the act of putting our faith in Jesus.

That's how we escape the core of the curse.

And the core of the curse is sin.

But God also desires blessing in your life.

And the blessing happens when we choose to live our life according to God's plan.

Maybe you feel like you've screwed up too many times.

If that's you, you should read Genesis 12 through 25.

It's the story of Abraham, and you're gonna see how many times this great man of God really screwed up.

He gets impatient and he gets scared and he loses heart and he compromises.

However, each time he does one of those things, he comes back in obedience and he resumes his walk with the Lord.

You don't have to have the right lineage.

You don't have to have a perfect background, and you don't have to have this spotless record.

You can leave the curse and live in the blessing.

You know, some Sundays, as I stand in front of all of you, whether I'm leading worship or I'm preaching that day.

I can't help but think of how strange it is that I am where I am doing what I'm doing.

However, I know it's largely because I was raised in a family that pursued the blessed life.

I was raised in a really small church.

I remember the number every Sunday being somewhere around 60.

That's less people that are in service today.

But my parents, they had us in church every single Sunday morning.

They had us in church every single Sunday evening.

They had us in church every single Wednesday night.

There were no negotiations.

Like we couldn't complain enough to get out of going to church.

It was gonna happen.

Being raised with a solid foundation in Christ that came through regular church attendance and through constant and very present instruction from my parents set me on a path that's allowed me to avoid so many mistakes.

Now, don't get me wrong, I haven't avoided all mistakes because I'm human and therefore an idiot and I'm gonna make mistakes.

I know that, but I've also avoided a lot of mistakes.

Going to church with my family was a blessing in my life.

But it wasn't an accident.

I don't know when my family started going to church.

I don't know how many generations back that started, but I know it started on my mom's side, and I know that my mom's mom, my granny, was a big believer in pursuing the blessed life.

And part of the way she did that was by going to church.

She was a single mom.

Her husband died when my mother was very young.

She was three years old when her dad passed away.

My granny was a very poor woman.

Her family was very poor.

She had, she didn't have anything to leave her kids.

She didn't have money to disperse amongst her children.

She didn't have like property that the kids would divvy up.

She had some trinkets and mementos that her kids kept.

But what she did leave them with was a pursuit of living the blessed life.

She had three kids.

Those kids all had kids who were raised in the church.

My dad actually met my mom when he was a teenager.

My dad never went to church ever.

In fact, he was a lot like Abraham.

He told me one time that it wasn't about believing or not believing in God as he was growing up.

They literally never had the discussion in his house.

It wasn't even a thought in his mind, and yet he got around my mother's family and he saw that life could be different, and he gave his life to it.

All of my aunts and uncles' kids have pursued the blessed life.

We all are involved in church.

A lot of us are pastors or worship leaders in the church.

And it wasn't an accident.

Multiple generations are experiencing the blessing that came through the faithfulness of a woman that we hardly knew.

She died when I was young.

My parents didn't know I was gonna be a pastor, but they did know how important it was for me to be raised in the church, to have people who would come alongside me as I grew up.

And we at MetaCurch believe the same thing for you.

We do think it's important that you come here every single Sunday.

Now, it's not like my church.

At my church, we had like this wooden sign that had the attendance numbers from the week before.

We don't do that, and we're not keeping tabs on whether you came to church or not, but we do believe it's important for you to be here.

And even more important than you being here, it's important that you get your kids here.

It's important that you prioritize God over everything.

And you know, sometimes what we do, I feel like, is we make our priorities list, right?

And it's like this week I gotta do some grocery shopping, I gotta do cleaning, maybe I'll do some God's stuff, gotta take the kids to sports.

What you have to do if you really want to pursue the blessed life is you have to take God out of the priority list and put them in charge of the priority list.

That's how you're gonna see generational blessing in your life.

That's how you are gonna bless your family, and not just your family, you're gonna bless the people around you.

It's during this time on Sunday that we hope through biblical teaching we enlighten and inspire you to go into your unique communities and be Jesus to them.

Growing up at the end of most of our Sunday services, uh the whole church would circle up and we'd hold hands.

It looked like the last scene in how the grin stole Christmas, right?

Like we were all holding hands and we were singing.

We weren't singing into a Christmas tree, but we were singing a song, and that song, maybe some of you have heard it, it's an older one, it's called The Family of God.

And we'd always sing the same verse.

And that verse said this I'm so glad I'm a part of the family of God.

I've been washed in the fountain and cleansed by his blood.

Join heirs with Jesus as we travel aside, for I'm part of the family, the family of God.

The family that you grew up with may have left you with a great number of blessings, but maybe it didn't leave you with any.

Regardless of your family of origin, the blessed life, generational blessing, has always been something that's existed for you.

And it came because of Jesus' sacrifice.

You can be an adopted son or daughter of God.

You can be a part of the family of God.

The blessings that come from God will overflow into your families.

Regardless of where you've been or what you've done, you can be the catalyst that changes multiple future generations of your family.

You have the opportunity to change things in your lineage.

And I didn't write this down, but this is not a talk for only people who have kids.

You can do this backwards and sideways.

You have generations that are still alive in your family that came before you.

You can live a life of blessing that affects them still.

Because if they're not dead, God's not done with them.

They can live inside the blessing.

And it can start with you.

And it starts with faith.

And that faith helps us escape the curse.

But it continues through obedience.

And our obedience helps us embrace the blessing.

Will you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for the truths that you've given us in your word.

We are so grateful, God, that you've given us such an opportunity to change our families from the inside out.

God, that we're not held to this curse that existed before us and existed before our parents that through faith we can actually escape it.

We can actually live under a new truth, that we're a part of your family.

God, I pray that you would show us what it means to be obedient to you every single day of our lives, God.

That we would pursue you relentlessly.

Because when we pursue you, God, we are pursuing the blessed life.

We love you, Jesus.

It's in your name that we pray all these things.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit.

And you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys and I hope you have a great rest of your day.