Chapter 1: Cause of the Cause    

 In John 9, the Bible says “Jesus was passing by, and saw a man who was blind since his birth”.  His disciples asked him “was it the blind man who sinned, or if it was his parents?”
     In that time, as in current Eastern cultures, people believed that certain diseases were caused by sin. The disciples asked the question:  “Who is to be blamed for this sickness?”
     
     There is another passage, Proverbs 26:2, which says, “A curse, causeless, shall not come.”
     This means that there has to be a reason why a person is cursed.  
We are in an age and nation, where people come from everywhere with all kinds of backgrounds, and all kinds of religions. And because of background that we come from, many of us have inherited a curse.  
      Again, the Bible says that there must be a reason that a person has a curse.  A curse doesn’t come by accident.  There must be an open door for a curse in the life of a person that has it.  If a person is poor, it could be that his parents were poor.  If a person has a problem with drugs, it could be that someone in that person’s family had a problem with drugs.  Curses carry from generation to generation.
     A passage in Exodus 34:7 says: “Keeping mercy for thousands, forgetting iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation”.
     There is a word that should be addressed.  That word is Iniquity.  
The Bible mentions the word iniquity over three hundred times.  There must be a reason for this.  This word must have some special meaning.  
     The iniquity of the father or mother is passed on to their children, and their children’s children.  
     He was bruised for our iniquities.
     A wound is a bleeding mark on the outside of the body.  An iniquity is a mark on the inside.
     Often times, people who are bleeding don’t have to say, ‘I’m hurt’. You already know something is wrong.  On the other hand, there are people that have a nice job, a nice car, they live in a nice home, they seem to have a happy family environment that are very unhappy and depressed. What is the problem?  There is a good chance this individual has an iniquity that was passed on from his or her parents. And nobody knows it but that person.  
     Today there are countless people who may go to work, or social gatherings every week, and yet they are down and miserable.  There is no peace or joy in their hearts.
There is an iniquity inside of them that will not go away.
     
     Iniquity is a sin that causes you as an individual to be pressed or pushed to do something that you do not want to do.  There are people who have been born again, but still have not been healed of the iniquity inside of them.  They have physical abuse, mental abuse, social abuse, rejection, and many things that no one can really read, all inside of them.  
     The Bible says that only Jesus can heal the wounds inside of us.  No psychiatrist in the world can do that.  You may go to counseling sessions, spend hundreds and thousands of dollars, but still, there something inside of you that drives you, in the way an alcoholic wants to go back to the bottle.  There is a driving force inside that person.  Jesus calls this iniquity.
     Jesus has promised us deliverance from generational curses.  The Bible says that family curses can be broken.  And they will be broken.  You can start your life brand-new, because there is a promise from God’s word, that says when Jesus went to the cross, he not only took upon himself all your transgressions and all your sins, but also the hidden pain you have in your heart.  Only Jesus can do that, because he is the only one who died for all mankind.  
     No one can understand the mystery of iniquity.  What causes you to be depressed?  What causes you to become angry?  What causes your different moods?  What causes you to be unhappy?  It is the mystery of iniquity.  It is the driving force that causes us to move out of the will of God, instead of into His will.
     The Bible says the blood of Jesus not only washes away sins, but also washes away the iniquities inside of you.  
     The Bible says that the curse is only removed by the anointing of God.  The anointing actually means this:  The burden removing, yoke destroying power of God.
     Today, many people are burdened, burdened in and burdened out.  There may be a heavy yoke on your shoulders.  Youcan lose it with the burden-destroying power of God through prayer.  
     
     When Jesus died, he was bruised on the inside, as well as on the outside.  
Those whom he healed, before he was crucified, shouted, “Crucify him!”  
Those whom he gave life to, said, “Kill him.  Give us Barabas”.
Was Jesus hurting on the inside?  Yes he was.  He paid the price for all who had gone through the bruising.  All who went through the bruising of all their emotion, the bruising of their hearts, the rejection, and the abuse.  He was bruised for our iniquity.  
     James 5:16, says this:  “Confess your faults to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.”  
     Here, the word “fault” is like the crack left after an earthquake.  A “fault” is something that happened inside of you, not because you caused it, but because someone has left it inside of you.  The Bible says, that “if you are willing to confess with one another, your pain your hurts, God will heal you.”  God wants to heal the fault within you.  The Bible says that God is a compassionate God, and a loving God.  He is.    
     
     
     The Bible says that we are the Apple of God’s eye.  Do you know what happens when you take an apple that is bruised?  Generally speaking, that bruise will enlarge and enlarge.  If the other apples are touched by it, they too are infected.  So it is in a family.  It is especially so with many second marriages.  So too with runaway children who return home.  And with those who have been on drugs.  They come back to the fold, and the iniquity spreads in the family, spreads in the church, spreads in the community, and spreads in our country.  
     Isaiah, chapter sixty-one:  “I came to proclaim the year of Jubilee, when everything is restored back to you.”
     Healing can take place in your life.  And to those who are healed, “they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the ruined cities, and the desolation of many generations.  Praise God.
     
           
Chapter 2: Identifying The Curse
    

I once met a man, and I had a chance to sit and talk him.  The Lord spoke to me about him and said:  You need to restore this brother.  At the time, I didn’t know where he came from, I didn’t know about his family situation; I did not know anything about him at all.  
As we got to know each other, we began to talk and share about his family.  And we talked and discussed his future plans, and he said to me, “Don’t pray for my family”.  He said he made up his mind, and he did not want to give his wife any more of his time, and that he wanted out of his marriage.  As we continued to talk, I argued with him and said he shouldn’t do that.  I stood together with a group of people who believe in restoring marriages and prayed for him.  All of a sudden, he was addressing his wife as his “ex-wife”, or by her first name.  He was going through some very tough times, his finances were not straight, his car was broken down---things were not going right.  We knew that this was God.  Sometimes God does things that we don’t understand, and He can do whatever he wants to do because He is God.  God has a way of using situations to get you to do what is right.  One Tuesday night, we were in my living room, and he began to say, “You know what?  I miss my wife.  I wish she was here.”  It was the first time in five months that he addressed her as “my wife”.  He had been having trouble sleeping, and was using sleeping pills.  Shortly after we spoke, he took seven pills and was knocked out for almost forty-eight hours.  He crawled out of bed Thursday morning and called his wife.  He said to her, “ I’ve been under deception for all these years, and I want to come back home.”  His wife said, “I’ll send you a ticket to come home right now.”
       His deliverance came when he realized and acknowledged, that his actions and attitude toward his wife put him under a curse.   
     We blessed him. He is a friend of mine, a mighty man of God, and I love him dearly.  
     John 9:1-2 tells a story of a man born blind: “Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth.  And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?”     A number of years ago, I heard a philosopher say, “You are where you are, because that’s exactly where you want to be.”  Now I bought this idea, and I even taught it to others.  Then one night about twelve or thirteen years ago, I was driving to Toronto, and the roads I was taking were under repair. So I stopped at a gas station to ask for assistance.  The clerk pointed out the best routes for me to travel and even drew a map for me.  He assured me that if I followed this map, I would get where I needed to be with time to spare. I followed his directions, but somehow, I ended up about a hundred miles from where I should have been. At the time, I didn’t think that it was fair, because that was not where I wanted to be.  I was there because someone gave me the wrong instructions.  
     Let me say this, If you are broke, desponded, down in the dumps, or if you are not getting along well will your friends, associates, or spouse, if you are unhappy with your career, these are obviously not the conditions you want to be in.
Somehow you ended up in these conditions because someone has given you the wrong instructions, or you were influenced by some negative instruction to get to the place that you are in.
     Now don’t get too comfortable with the idea of blaming others for your problems.  If in the past you were not able to help your situations, after today, you have no one to blame but yourself.  Your future is in your very hands, and in the hands of God.
     After twenty years of being pastor of a church, I never believed that once you become a born-again Christian, you can still be commanded by demons.
    One day I was talking to one of our staff members that became a little of hand.  As I was talking with her, I became angry, belligerent and vicious. Then all of a sudden, it flashed before me that members of my family have had the same anger issues in their lives, and it was passed on to me.  And I was so ashamed and embarrassed.
    I did not want to do that.  It just came out of me.  The anger came out of my life.  
I called a friend who had experience with deliverance, and for one year, I went to his church on a weekly basis with some friends and prayed ofor God to deliver me from this anger.  
     There was another episode, this time with an evangelist at my church.  This mighty man of God, has so many gifts, so many talents, yet he was deceived by certain things in his life. In that situation, God told me that many people in ministry are also deceived by the enemy.  They need deliverance.  They need help.
     This is why I want to take the time to go through the Scriptures, and share with you, how to break generational curses that you may have had passed on to you, by your mother or your father. You cannot really help yourself, until you understand what God says about how you can be free from these curses.  This writing will teach you how to identify a generational curse.
     The Bible says in Hosea 4:6, and I’m going to phrase it like this, “My people perish because they do not know better.”  
     Some people are walking bible encyclopedias.  But that does not mean anything.  You can know the Bible, but that doesn’t mean you know the author of the Bible.  Knowing the truth and knowing the Word is not enough, you must be a doer of the Word.
So we must understand and practice what is taught here.
     The first step in identifying a family curse, logically, is to know that you are under a curse.
     Generational or family curses manifest themselves in many forms.  Often times, they are character defects, such as being greedy, or idolatrous.  People that have them could be fornicators or adulterers, thieves, or liars.  These are all generational curses, that can be passed on to you.
     Often times, if one’s parents are divorced, there is a good probability that they too, will become divorced.  
     
     I was in Africa about four years ago, and one of the pastors there came to see me.  He said, “we have over a hundred young people in our church, and we pray blessings on them, and we have activities for them, but the moment they get close to the Lord, they go back into sin.  They do not stick with the Gospel, and they are not maturing or growing in Christ.  Something pulls them and drives them away from the Gospel.  Do you know what this could be?”
     I was reading the book of Deuteronomy, and in chapter 23, verse2, it says this: “One of illegitimate birth shall not enter the assembly of the LORD.”  They had to stay out of the camp.
     That Sunday morning, I said to the congregation of the church, “How many of you are born as illegitimate children?” Over three hundred stood up.  Among these were the people that the pastor had spoken to me about. They were not able to get closer to God, or have the anointing or the power of God in their lives.  There was iniquity over their lives, something that drove them away from God. I told them, “It doesn’t matter how you were born, but you need to understand the truth of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, that you are no longer under the curse, but under the blessings of God, you need to break the curse over your life.”  So we gathered the young people, and their parents.  Some had only one parent; some had none.  We had some brothers and sisters stand next to those who had no parents.  But for those who had a parent, we prayed together and broke the curse over their lives.  
     And as I kept in touch with that pastor, he told me that God was rising up some of those young people to be leaders in that church.  Praise God.
     Going back to John 9:1-2, the disciples and Jesus were walking around, and they saw a man who was blind.  And the disciples said, “Who sinned, him or his parents?”
 
     In this age in America, we do not have this type of thinking.  We think everything is just a sickness or a disease.  Eastern thinking differs. When someone is not healthy, or is sickly, blind or lame, they think of it as a curse.  In our Western culture, we think, “Take medicine, and you’ll get better.”  We think that we can appropriate a name for every disease.  The likelihood is that there is a demon behind the affliction.  Whenever a person is under a  serious bondage with a disease, it is the enemy working.  Consider the curse of poverty, or suicide, or early age death. The blind man that Jesus and the disciples saw was bound to a life of begging from people passing by.  A man living a life of poverty is bound to a life of lack.  I know a family that at the age of forty, people die.  Nobody is taking the time to say, “This is a curse, and we must cast this demon out of you right now!”  
   A curse in Jesus’ day was something that was understood.  We need to understand curses today in order to properly help people.
   I was bound for many years, even as a Spirit filled believer -- even as a pastor.  I was angry.  I didn’t want to be angry.  I never got up in the morning and said, “ Today I’m going to get angry at my secretary.”  Something drove me.  It was an iniquity that came from my family.  
   If you are a born again Christian, and God is not healing you of iniquities, look at your life. If there is sin,  you know why you’re not healed.  But if there is no sin in your life, and you are not being healed, then something is wrong, and it must be a generational curse, and you must cut it off.  
     The disciples asked, “Lord, why is this man blind?”  They could’ve asked, “Lord, why is this man poor?”  Yes, poverty is a curse.  They could’ve said, “Lord, why is this man sick?  Why is this man divorced?
   Romans 5:12 says that “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned…”  
     We do not learn the works of the flesh, but they are inherited through Adam.  So therefore, is it possible to inherit a generational curse?  Of course.
     So when people ask, “Why this, or why that,” it is because it is a curse.
Exodus 34:7 speaks about “…Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation.”  The Bible says here that the iniquity of the father can be passed down to their children, and passed down through generations, making it a generational curse.
 We, as Christian fathers, need to get delivered.
     There was a time back the 70’s when in my anger, I put a hole in our church bus.  
You may ask, “Well, were you a Christian?”  Yeah, I was a pastor.  I want to be honest with you.  We had hundreds of people being picked up by our then seven buses, and I was very punctual.  One of those a days a bus worker didn’t come in or even call.  And I got so angry, that I broke a window of the bus.  People looked at me like, “This guy’s nuts!”
     That had to be tamed somehow.  I knew that I would have been very sorrowful years later to see my children with the same problem that I had.  I needed some help.  No one ever came and told me that I had a problem, but told me that I needed some rest.  I didn’t need rest; I needed deliverance! I’m no longer in bondage today.  Praise God, I’m free!
     Modern psychiatry agrees, that if a child has been abused, that child will grow up to be a child abuser.  If a man beats his wife, their children will beat their wives.  For alcoholics, the pattern continues with their children as well.  Why is that so?  
This is because of spiritual transferring.  
The iniquity of the fathers upon the children and their children’s children to the third and fourth generation.  
     Modern psychiatry is somewhat keen in realizing the problem with children, but they don’t know the answer.  They don’t know that the problem is spiritual.  That’s why psychiatrists prescribe drugs and chemicals, which can suppress the problem, but only temporarily.  You cannot treat spiritual problems with physical means.  Therefore, things like drunkenness, adultery, and spousal abuse, must be recognized as spiritual problems, and if a family history of the problem is discovered, you have uncovered a generational curse.  And unlike the world, we know that the answer to solving the problem is to break the curse, through the mighty power of Jesus Christ.
     
     When I got delivered from my anger, I said, “God, I’m tired of this.”  There was an anger arising from my spirit at the devil.  I said “Devil, you kept me bound for twenty of my preaching years, when I could’ve had a better relationship with the people of God, instead of criticizing them, and getting angry at them and not loving them the way I ought to have.  I had been so distant from them.  I started saying, “The blood of Jesus, I surrender.  Holy Spirit, I need you.  I receive the blood of Jesus to cover me right now, the top of my head to the bottom of my feet, and I give you permission Holy Spirit to flow in my life.  Remove any demons, remove hindrances, and remove any strongholds in my life…” As I began to speak, power flew over my life.  I became so light, and I began to hug and kiss people.  I went nuts.  And I called people whom I had wronged.  I told one of the people I called: “I know you left the church angry, and I would like to take you out for lunch.”.  He said, “Something happened to you.”
     Generational curses are passed down from your parent to you. Once you understand the power of the blood of Jesus, and the cleansing power of the word of God, your father no longer has the right to continue that curse on you.  If your father comes to and gets angry with you, you can say, “You can be angry, but I’m not angry anymore.”  You can stop the curse in the name of Jesus Christ, not only for you, but for your children as well.  
     
     It is important that we do more than control our anger, or lust, or alcoholism.  We need to change, and walk in a renewed mind.  Romans 12:2 says: “…Be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”.
     If you have a problem there is nothing intrinsically wrong with you. You may have a family curse.  If you have a family curse, you can rise up right now, in the power and authority of the blood of Jesus, and be cut off from that curse.  Simply say, Lord I come to you.  And I command this curse to be broken in my life.

Chapter 3: Reversing The Curse
     

    John 8:31-32 says: “Then Jesus said to those who believed, ‘If you abide in my word, you are my disciples indeed.  And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’” Are you free?  
The Bible says in Micah 7:19, that God “Will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.”  Some of you have not forgotten your sins.  That’s why you’re still in bondage.  The devil keeps them in your memory bank.  The devil says, “Remember thirty years ago when…”  
I once knew a man, and he was speaking to me concerning his wife and said, “My wife is very historical.”  I said, “ Oh, she’s into history.”  He said, “Yeah, every time we argue, she remembers things I did thirty years ago!”
You need to let go of yesterday, and start brand new, because today is the day of new beginnings.  Many of you go fishing for old memories.  That is dangerous.
     Ecclesiastes says, “This too, shall pass.”  
We need to believe this in our spirit.  God will see us through, because He is our refuge, He is our rock, He is our strong tower; Believe in God for your deliverance.  
     “This too, shall pass.”  
The devil tries to bring up our past.  But when the enemy reminds us of our past, remind him of his future.  
     
     This teaching will teach will teach on how to break the curse, and then how to reverse the curse, and walk into blessing. Breaking the curse is not enough.  We need to reverse the curse, and then walk in the Truth.  
     John 8:31-34: “Then Jesus said to those who believed him, ‘If you abide by my word then you are my disciples indeed.  And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.’  They answered him, ‘we are Abraham’s descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone.  How can you say, ‘We will be made free’?’
“Jesus answered them, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin.”.  Here Jesus says, that when you commit sin, you are not only a slave to that sin, but that you are in bondage to that sin.  You can be a born again Christian, Spirit-filled, a teacher of the Word, walking in the gifts, but still be in bondage, and not really free.  
     You can go up to the alter and ask God to forgive you of your sins, but it is not over.  The wound may be healed, but the scar is still there.
Jesus goes on to say in verse 35, “And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever.  Therefore, if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.”
     Jesus is not talking about knowing the Word to become a Bible encyclopedia; he is talking about living that type of life-style.
     “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
     The sin of David resulted in his children being murderers, drunkards and idolaters.  The consequences of his sin followed him all the way to the New Testament, but, thank God, the sin was broken with Jesus.How do we reverse the curse?
(1)    Know, that I am no longer, under the curse.
(2)    Become spiritually violent.
(3)    Take dominion over the devil.
(4)    Go and recover all that the devil has taken.
     First, you must know that you are no longer under a curse.  You must say and believe, that it doesn’t matter what my parents did, or what my great-grandparents did, I am no longer under a curse, Jesus Christ became a curse for me, I’m free.
     
    Number two, once you know that the devil has kept you under bondage because of your sin, you need to rise up and say, “Devil, for the longest time, I have believed  a lie.  As of today, I will deny your wicked thoughts that you put in my mind.  I’m going to come against you in the authority of the name of Jesus Christ.  He removed the consequences of my sin by his blood.”  Denounce the curse in the name of Jesus, and denounce that curse over your children.  Then start to reverse that curse in the name of Jesus.  If your curse is anger, pronounce peace over your life, and your children’s lives.  If it is lust, declare holiness over your life, and over your children.  Speak it and walk in it.  Do it over again, until you start to walk in victory and peace.  You may ask, “What happens if it comes back?  It won’t.
   Number three, demand that whatever he has taken away from you, he return sevenfold.  Proverbs 6:31 says, that when the enemy is caught, he must restore seven-fold.  You have the right to say, “I caught you!  I demand in the name of Jesus Christ, in the authority I have in his name, that you give back everything you stole!  When you do this, God will not only bring you to peace with yourself, but he’ll also bring peace to you and your spouse, your children, your neighbors, your parents, co-workers, and your enemies.  
    This is something I have done in my personal life, and I know it will work for you.  
There is something that I would like for you to pray with me: Father, you said that we have the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that whatever we shall bind on earth, shall be bound in Heaven.  Any spirits that are not the Spirit of God, in my life, and in the lives of all those called by your name; my spouse, my sons, my daughters, my parents, my family, my neighbors, my co-workers, those under me, my superiors, my church and my city.  In the name of Jesus, I loose unto those you have called to yourself, ministering spirits, according to Hebrews 1:14.
God has given you the power to bind and loose spirits, according to Matthew 16:19.
Bind and reverse them in the holy and might name of Jesus.
     
         Bind the spirit of rejection, in Jesus’ name.  Loosen the spirit of adoption.  
Bind the spirit of hatred in your life, and loose the spirit of love into your life.
Bind the spirit of fighting, and loose the spirit of reconciliation.  
Bind the spirit of violence, and loose the spirit of meekness.  
Bind the spirit of malice, slander, and gossip, and loose the spirit of sweetness and    gentleness.
Bind oppression, depression, and heaviness in Jesus’ name, and loose the spirit of joy.  
Bind the spirit of manipulation, and loose the spirit of ministering over God’s people.  
Bind poverty and release prosperity over your life.  
Bind sickness, and release God’s divine health.  
Bind that destructive spirit that destroys families, and release oneness and unity over your family.  
Bind adultery, and release commitment over your spouse and your family.  
Bind homosexuality/lesbianism, and release Godly order in you family.
Bind the spirit of antichrist, and release Christ likeness over you and your family, in Jesus’ name, over your city and over your government.  
Bind the spirit of feeble-mindedness, and release the spirit of self worth.  You’re worth something!  
Bind the spirit of Jezebel, and release submission over your life.  
Bind self-righteousness, and release Christ-righteousness.  
Bind any spirit that causes anger, and release self control over your life.  
Bind the spirit of pride, and release servant hood and humility.  
Bind the spirit of greed, which controls my finances, and loose the spirit of giving.  
And bind the spirit of witchcraft over the body of Christ, and release humility and submission to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Declare victory in the name of Jesus and be free!
    
Chapter 4: The Process Of Being Broken

    Luke 24:13-31 tells the story of two of Jesus’ disciples walking to Emmaus after the Crucifixion. Jesus appeared to them as a stranger,  the disciples couldn’t recognize him.
The disciples constrained Jesus to stay with them.  And the Bible says that when the bread was broken, they could see him.
     There is a divine order in being broken.  First, if you are willing, God takes you.  He takes you, whether or not you are on drugs, or whatever faults you may have.  The Bible says that after Jesus took the bread, he blessed it, and then broke it.  You cannot feed others with one solid loaf of bread, but you must break it, then you can give it to others, so that everyone may have a piece.
     God blessed Moses when He took him out of the river.  He put him into Pharaoh’s court.  Then Moses killed an Egyptian, and ran away into the wilderness.  It was there that God broke him.
     You might think, “But God, don’t you have any mercy or pity?  Moses was just trying to help his Hebrew brother.”  God does have mercy, but he cannot use us the way we are.  He has to break us and make us, according to his image.  We cannot be a blessing unless we are broken.  When Moses went back to Pharaoh, he went back broken.  And what happened, as Moses was able to be broken, he became the greatest leader in Israel.
     
   It was this same process of being blessed then broken that made men like Joseph and David great men of God.  Jesus was blessed, and then he was broken so that he could be given to the world.
     There is an old saying that goes no cross, no crown.  God wants us to die with him, to be broken with him.  This is to take out the garbage that is in us.
Unless God makes you a broken individual, God can never give you out.

Chapter 5: Living In The Blessing

   So far we have identified the curse, we learned how to break the curse and reverse it, and we discussed the process of being broken.  All of these are for breaking curses in our own lives, but I also believe that we are responsible for our neighbors.  We are responsible to reach someone in our lives, to be like the Good Samaritan, who was able to spend himself to help someone else.  Our nation and our cities are in dire need of prayer, and our young people need our support and our prayers.
     Many families, because of lack of prayer, have been torn asunder.  As we go to God’s word, we will see how we as members of the Body of Christ can break curses over our city and our nation, as well as ourselves.
     In Luke 4:18-19, Jesus was speaking, saying: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach the Good News to the poor, He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Since we are in a new millennium, God has promised his body, that this will be the Year of Jubilee, the year where God will have his favor over his people.
     Everything covered thus far leads up to this: Living in the Blessing.
It is the desire of God for every one of his children to live under his blessings.
The Bible says that when Jesus came out of the wilderness, he came in the power of the Holy Spirit when he returned to Galilee.  We need to move by the power of God in order to break curses and live in His blessings, not depend on our own power.
It is not by might, nor by power, it is by the Spirit of God.
     We have taken away prayer and the Ten Commandments from our public schools, and removed prayer from public life.   If you want to know why the state of our nation is in the disarray that it is in, it because of this: We have no faithfulness, no love and no acknowledgement of God (Hosea 4:1).
What happens when there is no knowledge of God?  Verse two:
“There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed.”
Verse three: Because of this, the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away.
Verse six: My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge.
Is there any hope?  Of course, there’s always hope in God.  Because God is a true hope, there is deliverance; there is a way out.  
     Rahab was a prostitute who lived on the wall of Jericho.  But when the spies came to spy out the land, she hid the spies. And because she performed this service unto God for the people of Israel, God saved her soul, and because of her, the Bible says, her entire household was saved.  God reversed the curse over her family, and they did not die.  If a father commits sin all his life, but then comes to the knowledge of Christ, and repents of that sin, the generational curse stops with him.  The Bible says that the sin of the father is visited to the third and fourth generation, if the sin is not repented of.   If  the father repents, the son is also cleansed and purified.
 
   Rahab was a Canaanite, and they were not a good lineage, they were sinful people.  But because she was saved by her service to the Lord, and by repenting, her lineage was also saved.  And as a result, her line brought fourth great men of God like David, and even the Lord Jesus Christ.  
     As mentioned earlier, a curse must not only be broken, but must also be reversed.
How did Rahab manage to reverse the curse she broke?  The Bible tells us that she married one of the twelve spies.  From them came a son named Obed, then Jesse, then King David, then later down the lineage, Our blessed Savior.
     
    Let’s go beyond family curses.  Lets go to our cities.  The Bible says in 2 Samuel 21:1-14, that there was a curse over the land of Israel for three years.  David went to God in prayer, and asked Him why there was this curse over their land, and why there was such poverty.  And the Lord said it was because of Saul, and his sin, his blood- thirsty ways.       David sought to change the curse over his land.  So he sought out the Gibeonites, and asked for a way to make restitution.  The result was that seven of Saul’s sons were hanged, and the Bible says in verse fourteen that upon the land, God changed the curse into blessing, and Israel became prosperous.  
Nehemiah also had a heart for the city of and people of God.  The Bible says that he began to weep before God, and asked for forgiveness of his sins, his family’s sin, and the sin of the people of God.  God wants you to rise to the occasion and intercede for the city.  We need to repent for our nation’s leaders.  Through Nehemiah’s repenting heart, the walls of the city of Jerusalem were rebuilt, and the city was restored.  
     The people in our schools, jobs, and neighborhoods are our mission field.  We need to pray for them and break the curseover their lives so that they too, may live under the blessings of God.  God is looking for people to stand in the gap for those who don’t know Him.  He is looking for men and women who will say, “I want to make a difference in my generation, and I will rise to the occasion, and do what it takes, for the glory of God.”  Reversing curses is not just for you alone.
     There is always a  reason why a curse comes.  Some people disobey the Bible and disregard the command to tithe.  The Bible says to those people that they are cursed with a curse.  The remedy is to “Come bring all the tithe and offering to my storehouse.”  Then you will have reversed the curse, and you will go on into blessing.
     Whatever the curse is, we need to find it, and say “I am willing to fast, or sacrifice whatever the cost might be in order tobreak the curse over my land.”
     When I was a teenager, I very seldom saw bedroom scenes on television.  Now many years later, sex is common to see on television, as are unwed mothers.  This is the curse Hosea was speaking about.  Some of our children at the age of twelve are having babies, and some children are killing their parents.  Our generation is cursed.  But thank God that if the church will go back to God, and repent, and remember the former things of God, and weep before him, God will favor us once again.Leviticus 40:26:
“If they confess their sins, and the iniquity of their fathers… then I will remember my covenant with them, and I will heal their cities, and their land.”