Yesterday, during my PSSBC class, a pastor asked me a question about family patterns and why they are still seen in the lives of born-again Christians even after they have given their lives to Christ and ought to have become new creations. Why was it that people whose families have certain illnesses that are hereditary come into Christ and still have those same illnesses after coming to Christ, despite praying earnestly against the occurrence of such in their lives? Some families have cancer, diabetes, mental illness, barrenness, and other serious health issues as a recurring pattern in their families. Other families have recurring marital issues that have become a pattern from generation to generation. For example, some ladies find themselves ending up as the “other” woman. or second wife, instead of main wife or only wife, while some end up as baby mamas or single mothers. Still on the patterns consistent with marriage, some individuals find themselves dealing with issues of infidelity, insecurity, spousal abuse, separation, divorce, toxicity, and early spousal demise. Family patterns can also be observed in terms of longevity of life.
In some families, the male children do not live beyond a certain age. In some other families, it is observed that the men do not prosper while their wives do. In essence, their wives are the breadwinners of the family, and this is consistently so from generation to generation. In most cases, once these patterns are established, they become very difficult to change and consistently repeat themselves. This is where the born again christians find themselves in a quagmire. They have become new creations, and they know the handwriting of requirements against them has been blotted out by the blood of Jesus. So why do the patterns persist? The Bible says Watch and Pray. A lot of us do the praying without doing the WATCHING. Watching requires observation of the environment, behavioural patterns, and decision-making processes leading to certain logical conclusions.
If you change the input, the output will surely change. In the case of health issues, parents eat certain things and grow up in certain environments. They extend this to their children, with whom they share the same genes. Inevitably, the children will develop the same health issues. Most of the time, if the child changes the environment and the diet, the health pattern changes. Most believers just pray and ignore the watching aspect of their reality. You have a pattern of fibroids and conception issue and you notice this started in your thirties.
Your sisters have the same, and so did your mother. You have daughters, and you are not encouraging them to get pregnant and have children early because you are praying. May God deliver you from foolishness. A white wedding is not the goal; reproduction is. A wedding is a day event, children secure the unborn generation. You must tell yourself the truth and encourage your daughters to have their children in their early twenties, whether they are married or not. (You must also tell them why and instruct them to prepare their daughters too for an early marriage or conception) You must defeat nature, not play into its hands. On the issue of longevity, there is always an underlying issue. These issues are also genetic, and they could be obvious or hidden. Sometimes they are supernatural, and sometimes they are medical.
It is important to identify the root cause of issues and not just treat the symptoms or pray about the symptoms. If the issue can be rectified by medical intervention, you must do everything in your power to rectify it for yourself and prevent it for your unborn children. Prevention is usually achievable through deliberate gene selection when it comes to marriage and not following feelings sheepishly. We all know how short people often go out of their way to marry very tall people in order to correct the genetic issue in their children. In the same way, individuals with life-shortening genetic conditions must investigate and marry into families with longevity in order to correct the anomaly of early death. When it is discovered that the issue is spiritual, as in the case of a prevalent curse, affliction, or enchantment against the family, the right thing to do is pray earnestly, embrace the word of God that supports the imputation of eternal life and longevity in their reality, and confess this always.
Some people confess the word outwardly while they are afraid of the worst happening to them in their hearts. This ultimately defeats the purpose. Some others pray by reinforcing the pattern in their own hearing every day. “I shall not die but live” is the wrong approach. “I have been satisfied with long life in Christ Jesus,” Is the right approach. The cells in our body listen to us and act upon our instructions and belief systems. We must always be aware of this and use it to our advantage. In many cases, after we start praying the right way and our confessions begin to align with our belief systems, we will have divine instructions on how to handle extra-mundane realities. For example, I know a woman who started getting extremely sick at the age of forty. Her mother also died at about the same age due to the same illness.
This woman is a born-again Christian, while her mother died a muslim She wondered why she would die of the same disease that killed her mother. She had prayed against such a death since she became a believer. I shared with her our true reality in Christ and explained to her that, rather than keep praying against the spirit of early death as preached by her pastor, she should be embracing the Spirit of life by acknowledging life deliberately in her confession and belief system. She began to do this, and one night, she saw a vision in which the angel of the Lord appeared to her and told her to stop eating a particular food.
This food was her favourite, and it was also her mother’s favourite. She stopped eating it, and she got healed of the illness and was back on her feet within a year. A second example is that of a man who was born in one of the Lagoon shacks in Lagos. His father had drunk himself to death, and he had also developed an insatiable appetite for alcohol. It was a pattern in the family and one which none of them had been able to cure for six generations.
This man became a born-again Christian, and yet he couldn’t stop drinking. He said if he ate any food without drinking, it would make him nauseous and he would vomit the food. He tried therapy and other forms of treatment to no avail. When I met with him, I shared the word of God with him and told him to keep drinking but to confess the word of God relating to life and the Spirit of life which we have received in Christ Jesus.
He saw a vision in which he caught a basket full of a particular kind of fish, and gave it to his wife, and his wife made a pepper soup for him and his entire family. Then he heard a voice that said, “Eat and drink no more.” This particular kind of fish was taboo for them in their family; they never eat, touch, or sell it. The next day, he bought this fish and told his wife to prepare pepper soup for him and the family with it. He and his family ate it, and that was the end of his struggle with alcohol.
The desire for it just died completely. There are several other examples of great testimonies achieved by praying and being observant, so that certain patterns were broken permanently in many destinies. I will address one more, and this relates to marriage. Some people find themselves attracted to toxic partners. These partners come with both their good and bad sides, and they often only see the good aspect of their nature and never consider the bad side of it.
They find out after the marriage that they cannot cope with the bad side, and then they end up divorced, separated, or estranged from their partners. They do not objectively pay attention to what went wrong, and they repeat the same mistake again with other potential partners or even in their second marriages.
The worst is when they have children who grew up observing them and then make the same mistake when they get married, completing the cycle of error.
Prayer works wonders, but so does paying attention to fault lines. Individuals must teach themselves to overcome their idealistic tendencies and approach life on a practical footing. Having a strong provider for a wife might mean sacrificing a cooking wife and nurturing mother for a career woman. Having a strong provider for a husband might mean enduring spells of absence in the course of the marriage as he travels to handle his business interests.
The pros and cons are always hand in hand. If by nature you are a clingy type who would prefer your husband to cuddle you every night, perhaps it is best not to insist on marrying a choleric partner whose desire is to conquer the world of business. A lot of patterns repeat themselves based on the impracticality of our desires when matched with our choices and the consequences that come with them.
If you are a cheating man or woman, perhaps you avoid marriage entirely instead of assuming that marriage will cure you of your cheating tendencies.
A cheat is someone who naturally derives satisfaction from sleeping with many people within the same time frame. It is natural for some and learned by some. Those who learned this pattern or fell into it due to circumstances often adjust after marriage or when in a serious relationship. Natural cheats can’t be stopped by a wedding or marriage.
Those who marry cheats with the hope that they will change after the wedding are setting themselves up for a life of pain and emotional agony. There are those who don’t mind being with a cheating partner. It is best for cheats to be with such for the sake of everybody’s sanity. Marriage is good, but it is not advisable for everybody to get married.
It is marriage that led to the misfortune of some people, and instead of steering their children away from it, they also push their children into it because it is a societal requirement of sorts.
They then develop a pattern of marital failure, which they begin to pray against. We should train ourselves not to desire things that would destroy us. There is nothing shameful about being single or being a single parent BY CHOICE.
Being married, single, or a single parent due to circumstances outside of one’s control, and then living out our lives without any form of deliberateness, is the most SHAMEFUL aspect of adulthood for any believer. We are no longer slaves to anything or anyone in Christ.
We are children of God!