Breaking 8 Generational Barriers To A Thriving Relationship - Part 2 by Rev. Sam Oye: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Breaking Generational Barriers to a Thriving Relationship

Matthew 22:23-27. The Sadducees told Jesus of seven brothers who married the same woman in succession, each dying without children, and the same thing happening to the next, and the next, right down to the seventh. That pattern of repetition is exactly what happens in a bloodline when nothing interrupts it. Whatever is not stopped in one generation does not simply continue into the next, it gets worse.

We all desire healthy relationships and glorious marriages, but for many of us, what we desire is not what we are seeing. The entire Bible is a book of relationship: between divinity and humanity, between human beings, and between humanity and creation. In Genesis, God did not first give humanity a church, he gave humanity a family. Even after Adam sinned and lost the garden, he did not lose his marriage or his family; those two things carried on. Relationship is the platform marriage is built on, marriage is the platform family is built on, and family is the platform the world is built on. So if something is wrong with society, check the family. If something is wrong with the family, check the marriage. If something is wrong with the marriage, check the relationship. If something is wrong with the relationship, check the individual.

Fatherlessness

If you were not raised by a healthy, functional father, it affects you, and without intervention the same absence tends to repeat itself with your own children.

• There are four parenting styles, and most people lead the way they were raised unless new revelation changes their disposition. Authoritarian parenting is rules and regulation without relationship: instructions, chores, correction, but no warmth, no time simply spent together. A child raised this way often grows into an adult who only knows how to work, who cannot rest, relax, or receive care, because work was the only language of value modeled at home.
• Children raised without healthy affirmation grow up starved for praise, which makes them easy to manipulate. Anyone who compliments them generously can gain influence over them, because nobody goes looking for food who has already been well fed.

Matrifocalism

This is different from matriarchy. Matriarchy is about who holds power in society; matrifocalism is about who leads inside the house, a family structure where the mother functions as both mother and father.

• A boy raised under a mother who constantly gives commands will either grow into a man a woman can easily control, or swing to the opposite extreme and resist any woman's direction, even an innocent request, because it triggers the memory of being commanded as a child.
• Such men often marry "the available" rather than "the desirable": a passive, easily controlled partner instead of an accomplished, self-possessed one, because an ambitious or goal-driven woman feels to them like their controlling mother all over again.
• The desire for the desirable does not disappear just because a man has settled for the available. This is what happened with Jacob: even after Leah was given to him, he still worked seven more years for Rachel, the one he actually preferred.
• Many affairs do not begin with romance, they begin with conversation. A man who cannot discuss ideas, goals, or vision with his wife at home will often gravitate toward a woman he can actually talk to, not because he set out looking for adultery, but because intellectual connection was missing at home. The church should be slower to condemn and quicker to understand why people end up where they do.
• In a matrifocal home, mothers carry both roles and become exhausted, physically and emotionally, which shortens their temper and can turn ordinary correction into damaging outbursts.

Mismatch

Picture a turkey and an eagle joined together in marriage. The eagle's nature is to fly to the horizon; the turkey's nature is to walk. Neither bird is bad, but the pairing is. If the union is to survive, the eagle must give up its altitude, and the moment it loses its altitude, it loses its identity. You cannot be happy in a marriage where you are not permitted to be yourself.

• A mismatch is often disguised by attraction: the eagle may be drawn to the turkey's beauty and size without recognizing that beauty is not the same as compatibility.
• When two eagles marry within the same community of faith, disputes have a shared reference point and a trusted mediator; when an eagle marries a turkey from an entirely different world, there may be no shared authority both parties respect, and what one calls a serious violation the other calls normal.

Closing Prayer of Release and Inner Healing

There is deep healing available for wounds carried since childhood, wounds of abandonment, of abuse, of a father or mother who was not present. Letting go does not mean the damage did not happen; it means refusing to let it continue defining the man or woman you are becoming.