Breaking 8 Generational Barriers To Thriving Relationships (part 1) by Rev. Sam Oye: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Power of Sameness

Matthew 22:23-27 tells of seven brothers who, one after another, married the same widow and died, while everyone else simply watched it happen. Nobody rose up to stop it. The same thing happened to the first, the second, the third, all the way to the seventh, and even the woman who watched each one die did nothing about it, until there was nobody left to kill but her.

That is the power of sameness, how a pattern is allowed to run for so long that nobody dares to say enough is enough. Injustice anywhere becomes injustice everywhere, and what happens to one will, in time, happen to all who watch and stay silent.

Four Actors in Every Bloodline

In every family and every bloodline, there are four kinds of people.

• Initiators are the starters of positive or negative things, the first to open a gate, sow a seed, or set up an evil altar. Abraham lied first; Judah followed him into sexual compromise.
• Continuators are silent, compliant individuals who come into a bloodline, see something negative already running, and do nothing to challenge it. They inherit dysfunction and normalize it, tolerating what they should have confronted. Isaac did what his father Abraham did before him.
• Multiplicators amplify and intensify what they inherited, turning a mistake into an institution. Absalom did not correct his father David's failure, he multiplied it publicly. Solomon multiplied it further still.
• Terminators are the ones who say, "This will stop with me." Jesus himself came from David's bloodline, yet where David fell to a woman by a well, Jesus met a woman at a well in Samaria and left her better than he found her. Whatever has been running in a bloodline can be cornered, in someone's generation, to either be stood up to or fallen for.

Barrier One: Fatherlessness

One of the generational barriers to a thriving relationship and marriage is fatherlessness, the wound of an absent father during the developmental years of a child's life. This is not only the physical absence of a man from a house. It is often the absence of identity itself, because fathers are the ones who affirm a child and give that child a name and a place in the world.

• When John the Baptist was born, the family wanted to name him after his father, Zachariah, continuing the family pattern. His mother refused. The name John was chosen instead, marking a deliberate break from the bloodline, and scripture records no prophet greater than John.
• Before Jesus began his ministry, the first voice heard over him was the voice of his Father. Many struggle to step into what they are called to do because no father's voice has ever spoken over them.
• A daughter who is regularly hugged and affirmed by her father grows up unafraid to set boundaries with other men, because she needs nothing from them that she has not already received at home.

What Fatherlessness Does

Fatherlessness leaves marks that shape a person's whole outlook on life, even where there is no outward evidence of a wound.

• It makes the fatherhood of God hard to receive. Someone who grew up with a father who kept promising to come home and never did will struggle to trust the promises of God, even while reading the same Bible everyone else reads.
• It affects how women relate to men. A woman raised in a home where her mother led in her father's place can carry that same pattern into her own relationships, though leadership was never meant to be a woman's role to carry alone. A woman's role is to recognize who is leading and to strengthen him in it.
• It produces low self-esteem, fear of commitment, and a lack of boundaries. A son who never heard his father say "I'm proud of you" often struggles to commit to a woman in adulthood. A son never taught where the boundaries are with a woman will not know how to keep them.
• It creates difficulty trusting God and difficulty loving a spouse well. A man who never watched his own father love his mother will find it harder to know how to love his wife.

A Wound That Needs a Name

Many carry this wound without ever naming it. A woman once approached in tears, unable to speak, until she was finally able to say that her own father had abused her as a child. For someone with that history, calling God "Father" without care can become another trigger rather than a comfort, which is why those ministering healing must be sensitive to what the word "father" may carry for another person.

In one nation's own statistics, well over a third of households are now headed by women alone, and nearly half of all children are not living with both parents. Women were not designed to carry the weight of heading a home alone, and a child raised without a present father does not stop being gifted, called, or destined by God because of it. That child's story will meet your child's story somewhere, in a classroom, a church, a marriage, and how he or she was shaped will shape what they bring into it.

The Charge to Fathers

For any man estranged from the mother of his children, the charge is simple: humble yourself, go back, and stay present, even where the relationship with the mother remains unresolved. The children did not create that division and should not be made to suffer for it. Fathers are called to show up consistently, not perfectly, present enough that a son or daughter can say, one day, "my father told me."