Family Traditions: Generational Curses with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaChurch.

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.

Awesome.

Man, as always, I'm so glad that you guys could join us for today's service.

I want to welcome everybody here at 151 over in Helotus and everyone watching online.

This is gonna be a great two-week series.

Sometimes we do really long series, sometimes we do a really short series, and I'm so excited to get started on this new one we're calling Family Tradition.

I actually had the idea for this series about seven years ago when I was working for another church, and it never the timing never really worked out for us to do it there.

So I pitched it to Clayton a couple months ago, and he was all for it.

And so I'm excited to share this content with you all.

But before we get into the message, why don't we all pray together?

Heavenly Father, we're so grateful that we have a place where we can come and we can learn about you, God.

I pray that truth would be heard today, God, not my opinion, but what you've revealed to me.

And so we're trusting you, Holy Spirit, to guide us and teach us and counsel us this morning.

I pray that we could leave here knowing something new that we can take into a hurting and broken world, God, and we can be your love and your light, simple reflections of who you are, Jesus.

We love you, and we pray it in your name.

And everyone said together, Amen.

Now I'm gonna start today's message with a confession.

I kind of tend to do this when I get the opportunity to preach, and I've never confessed this before, but I'm from a small town called Uvaldi.

Aha, see?

Y'all knew it, because I always confess this.

This is something I tell you all the time.

It's a big part of my life.

And in Uvaldi, there's like, even though there's a lot of music genres you could listen to, there's only two that you really have to listen to all the time.

It doesn't matter if you're down at the river or if you're in a bank, you're gonna hear one of two styles of music.

Anyone care to take a stab at what you hear?

What's one of them?

Country music, what's the second one?

Tejano, man, y'all been to Uvaldi, y'all just out of Texas.

That's perfect.

Yeah.

And I'm gonna be honest, I never really liked either one of these as a kid so much, but as I grew older, I had an appreciation for both of them.

Uh Tejano, as a matter of fact, was like way easier for me to like than country music, but I finally acquired the taste for country music at the age of 38.

When I'm working or driving in my truck or doing something like that, if I listen to music, it's gonna be country music.

And I don't mean like pop country, right?

Who likes pop country?

Nobody really likes pop country.

We all do the old stuff, right?

Like, give me some Willie Nelson or some Wayland Jennings, give me George Strait or Bob Wills, and I'm gonna be a happy man.

There's so many iconic names within country music, right?

But you can't really have a conversation about country music unless you talk about one of the pioneers, Hank Williams.

Anyone know Hank Williams?

Yeah, that's right.

Absolutely.

He's great.

He wrote many songs.

There's a good chance that even if you don't know who he is, that you've heard one of his songs, he wrote songs like Love Sick Blues, There's a Tear in My Beer, Hey, good looking, You're Cheatin' a Heart, I saw the light.

And he's been covered by just about every uh genre there is in music.

Everyone from Elvis Presley all the way to Hillsong Worship.

That's right, the people who brought us So Will I and Oceans covered a Hank Williams song on one of their albums.

He was very successful.

But despite his success, Hank struggled with addiction his entire life.

And I do mean almost his entire life.

He also had a very strong religious conviction that he was raised with.

He began his musical career relatively young at 14.

He got a gig playing backing music for radio shows and advertisements, but within a few years of getting this job, he was fired for being an alcoholic.

I mean, the guy was like 17 years old, and he was already a full-blown alcoholic to the point where he got fired because he couldn't even do his job correctly anymore.

This addiction followed him throughout his entire career.

He rose to fame as he got older.

He wrote more and more hits, but his addictions grew with his fame.

It was very problematic for him professionally.

He was known to be very late to almost every concert he played, if he even showed up at all.

And it didn't just stop there, this addiction plagued his personal life.

He had a tumultuous first marriage that ended in divorce.

And he had a very short second marriage that ended with his death, and he did die as a result of his addiction.

He actually died in the back of a car on his way to a performance.

This performance had been sold out for months, and people were waiting in the audience to hear him play, and the promoters came out and got on the microphone and they said, ladies and gentlemen, Hank Williams won't be joining us tonight because he died.

To which everybody broke out in laughter because it was almost a joke at this point that Hank Williams was gonna be late or that he wasn't gonna show up at all, but it wasn't a joke.

Hank Williams had actually died.

It was a huge loss for country music, but it was an even bigger loss for his family.

He was a son and he was a father and he left behind a three-year-old son.

His name is Hank Williams Jr.

Now, you may think that you've never heard of Hank Williams Jr.

before, but you've probably heard one of his songs.

Every Monday night for like a decade, he asked us a very important question, and that question was, Are you ready for some football?

Right?

That was Hank Williams Jr.

He wrote that song, and even though his father died when he was really young, the Country Music Society came around him and surrounded him and taught him about his father, and they taught him how to play music, and when he was eight years old, he had his very first performance, and in this performance he played all of his father's songs.

I mean, what else would Hank Williams' son play other than his dad's songs?

And this was something he did all the way into his adulthood until he started writing his own music.

And this music that he was writing was uh all about glorifying what he would call this outlaw way of living.

Everything had to do with his drug addiction and his alcohol addiction.

He had a song called Whiskey Bent and Hellbound, and in this song all he does is talk about all the things that make him sad and how he gets high or how he gets drunk in order to deal with it.

He even talks about his dad in the song.

At the end, he says, Don't go playing your cheating heart.

That's a Hank Williams song, because that'll tear me apart.

I'll get whiskey bent and hellbound.

Yeah, old Hank's songs always make me feel low down.

And he was a new Hank.

But he had the same old addictions.

It's like he picked up right where his father left off.

He played the same style of music.

Oftentimes he played the exact same songs as dad played, and he had the same addiction that his dad had.

Hank Jr.

had children of his own.

He had two daughters, daughters, and a son.

And I bet you'll never be able to guess what Hank Williams Jr.'s son's name is.

Anybody?

Hank Williams, yeah.

Hank Williams III, right?

They were really clever when they were naming all their kids, apparently.

Hank Williams III, a lot of people who listen to him call him Hank III, and you'll never guess what he sings about.

Go ahead and Google it if you want to, but I promise all he sings about is drinking, drugs, women, and going straight to hell.

That's all he sings about.

It's like he's gone all in on this outlaw rambling man kind of life.

It's like he's committed to living out the mistakes of his father and his grandfather.

It just makes me wonder like, how did this family get here?

Hank one was convicted about his addiction.

Hank Jr.

was conflicted about his addiction, but Hank three seems committed to his addiction.

It's almost like this family is cursed.

Now, I've mentioned this before too, but I grew up in church, and I know a lot of people in here grew up in church as well.

And when you grow up in church, you learn that there are certain ways that you talk within church to other church people, or if you see them like out and about at H E B, you start using language that you would never use around any of your other friends.

And there's actually a term that we use to describe this.

It's called Christianese, because it's like Christians' very own language.

And maybe some of you have avoided church because you don't like Christianese.

And if that's you, then I'm with you.

I don't like Christianese.

I don't speak it.

I'm not fluent in it.

And if you don't know what it sounds like, let me give you a quick example.

When I was in high school, I had a buddy that I would call on the phone every once in a while, and his mom always answered the phone, like all the times, like she sat right next to it.

And so I call and it'd be ringing bring bring bring.

That's how a phone sounds when it rings.

Bring, bring, bring, bring.

And she'd pick up the phone and she would say, Praise the Lord, Miller residence, who may ask, is speaking.

Who talks like that?

Like it always, I knew it was coming, and I still like was at a loss for words, and I would like have something spill out of my mouth, and I'd be like, uh, yes, blessed is he who sent thy servant.

Uh, this is dope.

Can I talk to Steve, please?

Steve, if you're watching, I'm very sorry I told that story.

It's a unique way that we talk to each other.

And within this language, there's a term that I heard going up.

I still hear it today, and that term is generational curse.

Have you all ever heard of that term before, generational curse?

A few of you.

Okay, well, let me tell you what a generational curse is.

It's usually something we say when we're talking about a sin pattern in our own life, or maybe this a sin pattern in the life of someone else that seems like it was inherited from a parent or a grandparent.

I mean, that's certainly what we would say was happening in Hank Williams' family, right?

Three generations of addicts.

What else would you call that?

And if we take a look at our lives, I think we'll see many things that we've picked up from our parents.

Like maybe it's uh a phrase that you heard a lot.

I do this all the time.

My dad has all these old man Texas sayings, this is what I call them.

And I did this to Clayton a couple weeks ago.

He was uh on his way to a meeting and he was talking to me, and I realized, you know, he's gonna be late if he doesn't leave, and I said, Hey man, you better beat feet out of here, you're gonna be late.

And he started laughing.

I was like, What are you laughing at?

And he said, I've never heard that before.

You know, I like it.

And I was like, Oh, well, I don't even know where it comes from, other than my dad says it all the time, and I learned it from him.

Or maybe it's the way you hold yourself, your nonverbal communication when you're listening to someone speak.

I mean, if you look uh back at when your kid was like two or three, or a niece or nephew was young, they would follow you around, right?

And what would they do?

They would mimic everything you did because it's how we learn to act.

It's how we learn to speak, it's how we learn to react.

Both positive and negative.

But when we're talking about a generational curse, we're definitely not talking about the positive things, right?

Curses aren't a positive thing.

They're the negative things that we picked up along the way from people who are close to us.

And for a lot of us, we know them when we do them.

They're the things that you do that you immediately start hating on yourself, right?

You start having this conversation with yourself inside your head, saying, like, why did I do this?

I can't believe I did it again.

Where did this come from?

And maybe you aren't aware that you have these things in your life, but here's some like obvious things, like an addiction, like Hank Williams' family, or maybe uh it's the way um you get physical when you get angry.

Maybe not towards a person, but maybe like you throw objects or something like that.

Those are pretty obvious things that you've probably learned from someone.

There's less obvious things.

Maybe you have like this pattern of disrespect that you show your husband or your wife, and you don't even realize you're doing it, or maybe it's how you uh make your kid feel like they're never quite living up to your expectations.

And we find our lives struggling from traits that obviously came down the gene pool, just like the Williams.

Hank one gave his addiction to Hank two, Hank two gave his addiction to Hank III, and if Hank III has kids, if nothing changes, then nothing changes.

He'll pass down that addiction cycle to his kids.

Maybe that's the point you're at today that you have something in your life and you're convinced that there's nothing you can do about it.

Like your dad left your mom, so obviously one day you're going to leave your wife.

Or maybe your mom is this ruthless gossip, right?

And so, sure, you're gonna gossip about people, it's what you know, it's your generational curse.

There's nothing you can do to change it.

But what if you could reverse the generational curse?

Now, I was a little bit misleading earlier.

Generational curse is more than Christian use.

It's not a term that you find in the Bible, but the concept of the generational curse is definitely in the Bible.

One of the first places that we see it is in Exodus.

It's right after the Jews leave Egypt.

And it comes right at the beginning of the Ten Commandments.

And here's what it says in Exodus 20, verse 2.

Exodus 20:2

It says, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery.

And most of us are familiar with the Jewish people's time in Egypt, right?

They what started out is like this open invitation for them to come into Egypt ended with them being enslaved for 400 years by the Egyptians.

And I don't want to gloss over that.

Like 400 years is a really, really long time.

It's actually like 154 more years than we've been a country.

America's been a country.

It's a long time for a group of people to be enslaved by another nation.

God had to start out with a reminder in these Ten Commandments.

He had to remind them who he was.

I am the Lord your God, what he did.

I brought you out of Egypt, out of the place of your enslavement.

And this was completely necessary for God to remind them of this because for four in those four centuries that the Jewish people were in Egypt, they had picked up a lot of Egyptian practices.

He goes on in verse 3, he says, Do not have other gods besides me.

Do not make an idol for yourself, whether in the shape of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth.

And I think that pretty much covers like everything you can make an idol out of, right?

I mean, that's that sums it up.

Every animal that exists exists in one of those three places.

Impressively, during those 400 years, uh the Jewish people at large didn't quit believing in their God.

They still believed in their God.

Unfortunately, they also started believing in a bunch of Egyptian gods, even though they believed in their still.

The Egyptians were a polytheistic society, right?

They they worshipped many different gods, not just one.

And so the Jewish people kind of followed suit with that.

And they did it because they thought their God was subservient, that he was subordinate to the Egyptian gods.

And they thought this because they themselves were subordinate to the Egyptians.

And so, of course, if their God uh is allowing them to be enslaved, then he must be subordinate to these other gods.

But God uh starts to clear up that picture very quickly.

He reminds them of who he is, he reminds them of what he's done, he reminds them of who he's not, and then he gives them one more command.

Says, do not bow and worship to them, and do not serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, bringing the consequences of the father's iniquity on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me.

And that reads kind of harsh, right?

The Bible sometimes reads kind of harsh, but there's a good reason for it.

It's because it actually was that harsh.

God was drawing a line in the sand with these uh Jewish people that he had just rescued from captivity.

Not only am I gonna punish you if you break this command, but I'm also gonna punish your kids and your kids' kids and your kids' kids' kids.

And we actually do go on to see this throughout the Israel's history.

They would turn to other gods, they would worship other idols, and sure enough, their children would be raised to do the exact same thing, and generations would go by living extremely difficult lives.

It was a generational curse.

But Exodus isn't the first place we hear about the generational curse.

If you want to look at where the generational curse actually starts, you need to go even further back.

You need to go to the beginning.

Right after God finished creating everything and after he had given man and woman good work to do, sin came into the world.

And this world wasn't designed to experience the fall that came through sin.

But it did.

And it happened because Adam and Eve wrote the one rule.

You only have one thing to not do.

You don't eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and you did it.

And because of that, sin came into the world.

It had very real consequences after they confess their sin to God.

He responds to each of them.

First to the woman, he says, I will intensify your labor pains.

You will bear children with painful effort.

Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you.

Now, I don't know how the ladies are feeling, but even that makes me uncomfortable just saying it, and it's in the Bible, which I believe, right?

It's like all the ladies should be saying, Thanks, La Eve, we had it good, and then you mess it up for us, but God wasn't done.

Man messed up too.

God says to the man, because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, do not eat from it.

The ground is cursed because of you.

You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.

You eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it.

For you are dust, and you will return to dust.

Right now it's a guy's turn.

Thanks, Adam.

You really screwed this up for us.

Now we gotta work really hard, but that sin brought in real consequences.

Women experienced painful childbirth, men experienced uh hard labor in order to eat.

And none of this was supposed to be this way.

In fact, they were not only gonna have those two things, the painful childbirth and the painful work, but they were gonna do all of that stuff in cycles until eventually they went back to the ground, otherwise known as dying.

And I think we can all say it together, right?

It wasn't, okay, it wasn't supposed to be that.

No, you guys have to say, you gotta say it together with me.

It wasn't supposed to be that way.

There we go.

That was so good.

Y'all did so you remember I'm a worship pastor, right?

Like participation is kind of my thing.

We're gonna get it right.

Uh, so do you feel like you're living under a generational curse?

Do you feel like you're stuck in a cycle that never quite works out for you?

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are.

You are in fact living under a generational curse.

But this generational curse that you're living under, it didn't start with your parents, and it didn't even start with your parents' parents.

It started way before that.

It started right after the beginning.

Sin brought the curse, and every generation lives under it.

That's the bad news.

But the great news is that the curse is not biological.

That means it's not in your blood.

Now, I'm not saying that if your parents are an alcoholic, that you're not gonna be predisposed to be an alcoholic.

I'm just saying that you're not destined to be an alcoholic.

You're not destined to follow what's been handed down to you.

Sin brought us physical death, but infinitely worse, it brought us eternal separation from God.

That separation is the cause of the curse.

That's exactly why God told the Israelites not to serve any other gods.

Those false gods and fake idols, they would lead them away from God, and away from God is where the curse rules and reigns.

The answer is always properly following God with your life.

In the Jewish book of 2 Chronicles, we read about how generations would reverse the curse.

It says in 2 Chronicles 15, for a long time Israel was without God, without a priest to teach, and without the law.

But in their distress, they turned to the Lord, the God of Israel, and sought him, and he was found by them.

This was pre-Jesus coming to earth.

The Jewish laws helped them navigate the fallen world.

However, the Jewish law was never the final answer for the curse of sin.

The final answer was found on an old record cross in an empty tomb.

Paul says in Galatians that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

Because it's written, curse is everyone who is hung on a tree.

Jesus redeemed us from the curse of the law.

The law that made us aware of our sin, the law that made us aware of the need for a savior that would ultimately give his life for us.

And I know we're all familiar with the word redeemed, but I sometimes think that we say words so often that we understand the connotation.

We don't actually get the depth of the word.

And so I looked this up.

This is a very pastorary thing to do.

I looked it up in the dictionary.

Redeemed means to gain or regain possession of something in exchange for payment, and that's what Jesus did for us.

It says in 2 Corinthians that he, God, made the one who did not know sin, become sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

So that we might become ripe with God.

You know, Hank III is convinced that he's an outlaw because he has his grandfather's blood running through his veins.

And he's like making the most he can out of this curse that he inherited, but scripture would say that this is a gross understanding of how life works.

The curses that we live under, those things that you experience growing up, those negative things that seem to plague multiple generations of your family tree, they didn't start with your family.

They started with Adam and Eve.

The sin curse that came from Adam and Eve's disobedience is the root cause of everything that's broken in this world.

That includes every negative tendency that's been passed down through the generations of our families.

I don't want to seem like we're just glossing over the very real problems that we see in families or the hurt that you've experienced in your own family.

But if we're gonna do something about all this hurt, all this negativity, then we have to know where it all comes from, and sin is the root cause of it all.

It's not an invalidation of what you've experienced, it's a confirmation of what sin has done to your life.

And it should be a catalyst for us to move away from that pattern.

I pastor you guys on the phone, y'all will call when you need pastoral counseling, I'll meet you for coffee.

And so I know the hurt that is experienced in families.

I know the hardest part is that a lot of times the people that hurt you will never apologize for it.

You never get like That healing, that closure that you want from it.

And so while I had everybody in the room listening to me, I wanted to apologize to you on behalf of those people that hurt you.

Because I am sorry that you had a physically or verbally abusive family member.

Because it wasn't supposed to be that way.

Sorry that you had to be the adult in your family when you should have just been a kid because your parents or your guardians couldn't get their stuff together.

It wasn't supposed to be that way.

I'm sorry that you were taught addiction as a coping mechanism because that's how your parents had to cope with the tensions in their own life.

But it wasn't supposed to be that way.

Sorry you don't know what a healthy relationship looks like because you've never seen what a healthy relationship looks like.

It wasn't supposed to be that way.

I'm sorry that you feel broken, and I'm sorry you feel helpless, and I'm sorry that you feel like you're completely out of options.

Because it was never supposed to be that way.

And it doesn't have to be.

You can make a change and give future generations of your family a different story.

Sin is a curse that separated us from our Creator, but Jesus came to break that curse and to redeem us.

He came to reclaim us as his own in exchange for a payment, and that payment was his life, and he gave it freely for you and me.

And when we started our time together today, I asked, how do we reverse the curse?

Like, are the problems that we experience simply in our blood, are they always gonna be a part of who we are?

And the answer is really a quite simple one.

We don't reverse the curse.

Undoing the penalty of sin, a problem that has plagued humanity almost as long as humanity has existed, was never in the realm of something that we are capable of doing.

We don't need to reverse the curse.

We need a cure for the curse.

The cure made itself known in the person and the work of Jesus Christ.

He became the curse for us so that the curse could be broken.

Yeah, you're jacked up, and yeah, you inherited uh some mess from your parents, but Jesus came to redeem your life, to regain the purpose that you're meant to live out in this world.

And what that means is that you are not captive to what's in your blood because you're covered by his blood.

And if you've never put your faith in Jesus, I want to let you know that there is a perfect Savior that knows every sin you've committed and loves you enough to give his life for you anyway.

He's desperate to redeem your life.

Putting your faith in him will do just that.

There's no special prayer you need to do that.

It's just a moment of faith in who he says he is, the Son of God, and what he said he did, died for your sins and was resurrected.

When that happens, you'll move from eternal separation to eternal unification with God the Father.

If you have put your faith in Jesus, maybe today's the day that you stop living in the curse.

It's like you've been freed from it, but you're still doing the same things that you've always done.

And so it's like you're living under something that you don't have to live under.

You're trying to pay a debt that's already been paid for.

I wish all of this was a silver bullet, but it's it's not.

Growing and maturing in your faith is something that takes time, and it's something that you're gonna get wrong a lot.

But hopefully, as you make each next right step, you'll get more of it right than you get wrong.

But it's gonna take time, and it's gonna take an extreme amount of grace.

And it's gonna take grace from you to you.

You've been given an unlimited amount of grace by God, and so you should give yourself that same amount of grace.

And I'm telling you, I get to be a pastor here, I cannot tell you how many things I get wrong.

It's a lot.

I get things wrong all the time.

And it's real easy for me to show grace to everyone in this room.

It's really hard for me to show myself grace, but I have to remind myself that I've been shown it, and so I should show it to myself.

Because the cure for the curse has been found.

And all it takes is one moment of faith in Jesus to start the healing you need from all those things that hurt you, and to keep future generations from having to experience those same things.

We guys pray with me.

Heavenly Father, we're so grateful for your truth, and we're so grateful for your word.

God, there's probably just as many family stories in here as there are people listening, and so uh, God, I just pray that you would take these words that you've given me to share and um bring healing in people's lives, Father.

We want to know the next right step, God.

And so we're trusting you, Holy Spirit, to guide and to teach us what that looks like.

Speak to us today, Father.

And we pray all in the precious and holy name of Jesus.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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