Separated By Your Spiritual Choices by Apostle Emmanuel Iren: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Jeremiah 31:29-30

Ezekiel 18:2-4

There was once a spiritual parable repeated in scripture: that the fathers ate sour grapes and the children's teeth were set on edge, meaning children reap the consequence of their father's spiritual decisions. But both prophets declared this would no longer be said. God set forth a new principle: everyone gets to choose their own spiritual destiny. A person only inherits the dividends of their parents' choices if they refuse to choose for themselves. The lack of choice is itself a choice.

After You Choose, There Is a Separation

Isaiah 52:1

Depart, depart, go out from there, be clean, you who bear the vessels of the Lord. 2 Corinthians 6:17 Paul borrowed this same text: come out from among them and be separate, touch no unclean thing.

• Separation happens in salvation. Believers are translated from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's dear Son. On earth, two people may look close, even seated at the same table, but in spiritual reality there is a gulf between them because the choice to follow Jesus has separated one from the other.
• Separation can require a physical step of faith. God told Abraham to come out from his kindred to a place He would show him. In the Old Testament, God sometimes separated people physically, removing them from an environment of idolatry, because some sacrifices could only happen in a set apart place. This is what informed Jesus' discussion with the Samaritan woman about worshipping in Jerusalem versus on the mountain, an hour was coming, and had come, where true worshippers would worship the Father in spirit and truth, wherever they are, but there had once been a physical dimension to that separation.
• Separation can happen in devotional priorities within the same household. Genesis 4:26 After Cain departed and built a city in the land of Nod, Seth was born to Adam and Eve, and it was through Seth's line that men began to call on the name of the Lord. One sibling can build only with intellect, education, and business, while another builds altars as well.

Even the young men shall faint, and it is not only the financially illiterate who fail in business; sometimes a person is simply not positioned to carry a thing forward when something happens. But those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.

Two Kinds of Meetings

There are meetings where God meets a need immediately, and there are meetings that are more for the future than for the present, a spiritual reservoir filling a power bank for a time still to come. The same children of Israel who saw the Red Sea part in an instant later stood before the wall of Jericho, which did not fall on the first day, or the second, only after the appointed pattern was completed. A person can come boldly before the throne of grace to obtain mercy and find grace for a time of need in the same way an inverter stores power from the grid for the moment the lights go out.

Abraham prayed in Abimelech's house and everyone was healed instantly, but there was another kind of meeting with Abraham where nothing seemed to happen immediately. God told him to prepare a sacrifice, walked through the pieces, and said his descendants would be captive for four hundred years before being brought out into a great nation, a covenant Abraham was standing in on behalf of children not yet born. Genesis 12 separated Abraham from the idolatrous culture of his parents; Genesis 15 showed him his own future. Separation from a wrong past is not enough on its own; there must also be a revealing of what God has shown for what comes next.

Building With Intellect Alone Can Fail

In Genesis 11, a group came together to build a tower to reach heaven, an idea that looked good by every human measure, yet God scattered it. It was not a failure of intelligence or infrastructure; something spiritual determined its outcome. Alignment in life is not the same thing as intelligence. In Genesis 12, immediately after that scattering, God picked one man and said He would make his name great.

Breaking Generational Patterns

Jacob killed an animal and put its skin on himself to deceive his aging, dim eyed father into blessing him instead of his brother; years later, Jacob's own sons killed an animal, dipped Joseph's coat in its blood, and deceived their own aging father into believing Joseph was dead. The same spirit that lured one generation into an act of deception can try to repeat the identical pattern in the next: broken homes, financial irresponsibility, anger, violence, repeated from generation to generation, because repeated mistakes give the enemy a form of legal ground.

Romans 16:20

The God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly. There is a difference between positional victory and vital victory. Satan was already crushed positionally at the cross, it was prophesied that the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent, and it happened in salvation. But scripture does not stop there; believers are also given power to tread on that same defeated enemy, meaning there remains something decisive each person must do, standing on the finished work of Christ, to actually take authority over sickness, disease, and satanic manipulation in their own family rather than assuming Christ's finished work makes personal action unnecessary.