Breaking the Cycle

SERMON: 2010-07-18--g0510--breaking-the-cycle SOURCE DURATION: 00:45:53.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with the speaker delivering a practical illustration as part of the sermon exposition. The ending material is dominated by sustained acoustic music (00:42:48-00:45:51), which falls within segment [362], marking the conclusion of the sermon's content. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:42:48.760-00:45:51.460 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, I left you last Sunday morning with what I think is a very practical illustration of how the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and the fourth generation. I showed you, you will recall, this family genealogy, if you will, of a young couple that I have chosen to call Sonia and Brian. Very sobering when you see this chart and when you realize that every red square or rectangle there represents a history of divorce over the generations. And so out of the 31 some people that you see listed there, 23 have gone through marital divorce, 8 have not, but even in many instances their marriages have struggled and have not been very happy. For example, as I pointed out, the paternal grandmother and grandfather didn't get divorced, but the grandmother committed suicide. You don't commit suicide when you're in the middle of a very happy life and a very happy marriage. As well I've shared with you, Sonia and Brian together in their own life and in their relationship often on have struggled. So you look at that kind of family history, and this could be repeated many times over, then you ask yourself the question, "How can this be? How much bad luck can somebody experience?" And the answer, of course, is that bad luck has little, if anything, to do with it. Because what happens in situations where families are unhealthy is that they produce a two-fold mechanism that almost guarantees, apart from God's grace, that a pattern of brokenness will repeat from generation to generation. And let me take a few moments this morning and try to walk you through what that pattern looks like. And please listen carefully, I've never talked about this before, but it's very helpful, I think, if we can try to understand this. The first mechanism that passes dysfunction on from generation to generation is a thing that is known as a pathogenic belief system. Now the word pathogenic means disease-causing. It means toxic, poisonous. And there is something that happens in unhealthy families where a system of beliefs are imposed upon a child that are poisonous in nature, that is a false belief system, and that continues to bear bad fruit because as you believe in your heart, that's how you tend to live. Let me try to explain it this way. In a healthy family, the job of parents is to try to help their children sort out life. So you teach them right from wrong and hopefully they pick that up from you. And not only that, but you try to encourage them in the things that they're good at and you try to discipline or straighten them out in the places where they are wrong or crooked. And the whole purpose of that, as we have seen before, is to set our children free so that by the time they grow up, the values are internalized and they can go out into the world standing on their own two feet as responsible citizens of the country and hopefully responsible citizens in the kingdom of God. It's about the child. But remember, in unhealthy families, parents not only are not there for their children, parents take from their children. It's not about the children, it is about the parent who needs the child to keep himself or herself propped up. And so in that process, what happens is that those kind of parents, by example and by word, teach a wrong world and life view to their children. They for example, will blame them for things they have not done. How many times in an alcoholic family, for example, will the wife, if the husband is an alcoholic, or the children get blamed for his drinking? In how many households, for example, does a parent who loses his cool and we all do by times, but how many times isn't that blamed on the child whether it's legitimate or not? That's passing on blame. How many times in those kinds of families is a child accused of being something that they are not? I know of instances where people have been sexually abused, for example, by a father or a grandfather or some other significant relative. And then the story gets turned around as look at what you made me do. If you weren't there to seduce me like this, then I would not have done what I did. And how many times doesn't it happen that a child's legitimate needs and legitimate emotions are shamed? Like don't cry, not because you shouldn't be crying, but I can't stand your tears because it stirs up too many things in my own life. And so children learn to swallow themselves in order to maintain a relationship with their parents. Now, in those kinds of families then, when this happens repeatedly, and when this happens in an area or in a moment of vulnerability, the lie enters into your soul. And when the lie enters into your soul, this shapes now how you look at life. And I told you the story last week of my friend Wiba, with whom I've traveled through China in these most recent weeks. He tells the story, you will recall, that when he was little, there were times when his father would, in frustration, rage at him and say, "You can't do anything right," or words to that effect. And how deeply that went into his soul. And how much of his adult life in some ways he has spent trying to prove that what his father said was not true. These are pathogenic belief systems that enter into our lives. Now, experts in the field tell us that these lies that we buy into in families that are broken generally fall in three categories. Let me quickly walk you through those. The first is, I am fundamentally defective and unlovable. I told you last week the story of Helen, a young woman I met in China, who for most of her adult life has been struggling with feelings of, "I don't belong. I'm on the outside. I'm no good." And how much of her energy has gone into trying to be the best wife, the best teacher, the best mother that she can possibly be to the point where depression has been her constant companion. And how in our conversations together, all of a sudden, the Holy Spirit opened up her eyes and she began to understand that this goes back to the very roots of her conception. Her mother was not married when she got pregnant with her. Her mother was very ashamed of the pregnancy, tried to hide it by not eating. The child was born very small and then she had the misfortune in that rural China culture to be born as a girl. And with China's one child policy, what happens in rural areas to this day sometimes is the girls get shipped off so that nobody knows you've got her so that you can still try for your favorite boy. And so she gets shipped off to her grandparents and her grandparents raised her without a visit from her mother or her father, as I recall, until the grandparents could no longer take care of her. And then she came back home and then she had to play second fiddle to the favorite son who by this time had been born. Fundamentally defective. And most people who have not properly bonded with their mothers have a place in their heart that says, "I don't know if I should be here. I am illegitimate." And so they spend the rest of their life looking for something or somebody to legitimize their existence. Now this is not a conscious thing. Most of the time you won't even be aware of that. But every so often in certain situations those feelings come up. It's like you're standing behind a plate glass window. Everybody else gets loved. Everybody else can do relationships, but I don't belong. That's part of a pathogenic belief system that gets foisted deep into the soul of people in a broken world. And I'll tell you, their name today is Legion because there are so many born into less than ideal situations. Secondly, the world is an unmanageable or overwhelming place to be. That is to say, life is chaotic. It's out of control. And here again, part of what happens in a normal family is that we teach our children, especially in the context of the Christian faith, that with God's help and with the help of a family and community, we can do life. Kids have been given certain gifts. They've been given certain abilities. They know the difference between right and wrong. God's on their side in Christ. And life has purpose and life has meaning. It may not always go the way that you want it, but will help you bounce back and will help you survive the storm. In an unhealthy family, you not only don't have that kind of support, you've got nobody to kiss you better when you're hurting. What happens in fact is that the unhealthy parent or parents impose their own chaos on you. And so you come home and your mother is in the bedroom crying her eyes out because she can't cope with life and you have to put dinner on the table. Or you come home and your father is on a big bender and now you got to try to figure out how to make this place run because when the debt collectors come knocking on the door, who becomes the adult? Well, the adults are out of commission and so the children end up growing up with a sense of responsibility for which they are not equipped. And so life begins to feel chaotic. And when life feels chaotic, there's a deep conviction inside you that says at any given moment chaos can break out around me and I will not know what to do. So a false belief system manifests itself in that I'm fundamentally defective and unlovable. The world is unmanageable or overwhelming. And then the third principle that comes very close to that is that the future is therefore bleak and hopeless. There comes a moment I have decided in the lives of children who grow up under traumatic or significantly unhealthy relationships that I call the moment when the nail is driven into the coffin. Because you see again in a normal situation and in a normal family, a child is allowed to dream and hope. You have a vision for the future, things you'd like to be, things you'd like to become and why life can be bitter and you can be disappointed and not everything that you dream of as a child is going to survive the harsh reality of growing up. Nevertheless, there is hope and hope is like light at the end of the tunnel. It keeps people growing when otherwise life can be extremely difficult. But you see in this kind of chaotic environment there comes a moment where hope is lost. That's the moment where the child who has been looking for the day for the situation to change comes to the conclusion life will never ever be different. This is the moment when you stop dreaming that one day you're going to escape abuse. This is the moment when you stop dreaming that one day when you get away from the situation, you get away from your family, life will be given to you on a silver platter. This is when it dawns on you that you're fundamentally defective, that life is fundamentally chaotic and that you just better roll with the punches because who do you think you are? Anyway, the nail is driven in the coffin and now you begin to readjust your thinking so that you no longer hope, you no longer expect, you just roll with the punches because in rolling with the punches at least you can keep your emotional equilibrium to one degree or another. That's a pathogenic belief system and we all have measures of it because we all grow up in a fallen world but some people have a much bigger measure of it than other people do. Let me stop there for a moment and connect with you. Am I making sense here? All right, that's one mechanism of how one screwed up generation passes on their dysfunction to the next generation lies are written on the core of your heart. There's a second mechanism and that is this. It creates a faulty relational template, a faulty relational template. Let me explain that. A template is of course a pattern. Those of you who make dresses will more commonly than not follow a pattern. You'll either buy one or you'll make your own and if ever you've tried to mass produce a particular item then typically what do you do? You create a jig or a pattern and that pattern serves as the model for what you're going to produce. Well a relational pattern is the pattern we learn about how to relate to one another. It is incredible how much a child has to learn about doing life in the growing up years and again in a normal and unhealthy family a child learns by observation. We are imitators. We see our dads do this, we see our moms do that and from our parents we learn how to make friends, how to keep friends, how to solve conflicts and how to do life and that's all part of growing up. A faulty relational template is a template that has been messed up and we have learned wrong ways of relating. Let me give you a couple of examples to try to drive that home. Here's a false template for example. Never open up your heart to anybody because you will always get hurt. There are people who go through life with that mindset. That's a mindset that is often learned very early in the stages of life. If I'm vulnerable, if I show you my heart then I will always be taken advantage of and so wise people play things close to their chest and what's false about it is not that it's always safe to open up your heart to everybody but that not everybody is going to take you for a ride and part of growing up is to learn to reveal your heart to the degrees to which it is safe with the people that you are surrounded with. That way with healthy people you can have a healthy relationship. Unhealthy people you can get out. You know how to be the gatekeeper of your own heart. You're not indiscriminate in letting people in. I mean one of the characteristics of children who have not bonded with their mothers for example is that the gate doesn't function properly. They will often keep out people who are healthy because they don't trust them but on the other hand they'll let in people who are unhealthy because it feels right and if you've ever operated with people whose feelings are wrong then it's extremely difficult to deal with. Other example just very quickly, if I want to have a close relationship with somebody then I have to give up what I want or they will leave me. And how many people don't you know who can't truly be honest with their husbands because their husbands will turn cold towards them if they truly voice what lives on the inside. And how many people don't you know who always have to put on a face and a facade in order to receive love and affections and how many friends do you have that you can be truly authentic with even in Christian community without fearing that you're going to be rejected. And again you see I'm not saying that we just got to let it all hang out with everybody because that's not prudent and wise either. But it's this all or nothing thinking that illustrates a faulty relational template. There are some people who are safe and I can give them my heart. There are some people who are not safe and I need to hide my heart. Other example very closely tied into that I can't afford to be honest with my emotions because if I do I will not be loved. How many people don't you know who cannot allow themselves to feel needy who cannot allow themselves to weep who cannot allow themselves to be weak or to admit to weakness because the people around them cannot tolerate it and so they tell them to smarten up not because that's what they need but because that's what the other person needs. Now again when you grow up in a chaotic family that's what happens in a normal family you can be comforted you can be challenged you can be exhorted you can be helped to learn how to do life in a good and in a productive way. But in one of these crazy families all you learn is that you got to watch the way the wind blows because if you ever try to be who you are you're going to be taken advantage of people will walk all over you and so you'll learn to close off your heart and you learn to develop a whole series of mechanisms that surface repeatedly in life and in relationships and that of course becomes a pattern which now becomes so deeply ingrained in you that you automatically bring it with you into your adult world most people are not even aware as we'll see in a few moments of those patterns deeply established in their lives but they surface in the relationships of significant others and so what happens then is that this pathogenic belief system that I have about myself and about the world and wrong relational templates they come into conflict when I try to do life growing up and they produce a pattern that gets passed on from generation to generation and produces a great deal of heartache let me just quickly illustrate it by going back to the story of Sonya and Brian Brian grew up in a family with a mother who was emotionally all over the map left her husband on a number of occasions left him for good when the boy was 14 years of age and what the boy learned in his relationship with his mom was that it was a love-hate relationship on the one hand he desperately needed his mother who was not always emotionally available to him and on the other hand he really hated his mother because every time when he tried to get involved in her world she caused chaos in his world and so he developed a love-hate relationship he learned you need to be close to a woman to get the comfort that you need but you can't afford to be close to a woman for the comfort that you need because she'll mess with your head now put him in a marriage now he marries a woman who grew up with a father who left the marriage very early a mother who was emotionally extremely unhealthy and this girl grew up not knowing the needs of a man not knowing what boundaries were and not knowing how to effectively develop an adult relationship so she pushes in way too far he wants what she has to offer but then becomes extremely resentful at her neediness and the fact that he gets caught up in her turmoil and before you know it you've got trouble you look at any relationship that struggles and that doesn't yield easily to solutions you will find that underneath lies this two-fold mechanism a pathogenic belief system and a faulty relational template and so the big question is how can this cycle be broken can it be broken because you see increasingly in the world not only but in the church I hear voices that say we are who we are and we have tried so hard to be different from what we are and we have discovered it simply doesn't work so let me give up trying and I will just be what I am how often having you heard people say well you know I am who I am and you just better accept me for who I am and then we wonder why relationships fall apart at every level because people don't know how to do the dance the whole argument in the world about homosexuality and the increased tendency in our culture to normalize what used to be called brokenness is an example of how reality begins to shape our theology and once you get to that point then why not just be who you are because nothing is ever going to change but see that's a far cry from the gospel because the gospel teaches us that we have been given all things in Christ for life and godliness and I'll be the first to echo what John said earlier there are places of brokenness and life and in the world that will not be healed in the here and now that have to wait the coming of Jesus but I'll tell you this there are more places that Jesus is willing and able to heal than most Christians will ever give him credit for because he is Lord of all and he died on the cross and he rose from the dead to empower us to get at these deep core places to destroy what is wrong and to raise up what is right for the glory of God I wonder do you believe it. One verse in that regard that I come back to again and again is this verse from 1 Peter chapter 1 the verses 18 and 19 he says you know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers not with perishable things such as silver or gold but with the precious blood of Christ like that of a lamb without blemish or spot and in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 in the verses 9 10 and 11 the Apostle Paul puts it this way he says do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God did not be deceived neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God Paul always makes sure you don't miss his point he loves lists because he knows our tendency is to say I'm too far gone there is no hope for me then he goes on to say this and that oh I love this and that is what some of you are what were you you were thieves you were adulterers you were sexually immoral you were idolaters you were greedy you were drunkard you were slanderers you were swindlers you had no place in the kingdom of God and that's what some of you were but he goes on to say you are washed you are sanctified you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God we are more than conquerors through him who loved us so you say how do I experience this and in the time that remains let me give you the first of what I hope will be three points that we need to embrace if this is to be more than mere theory understand what a passion this is with me because over the years as I preach the gospel and people take the gospel at face value they come back to me and they say but here is my situation I don't know the answer to my situation I don't know how this is ever going to change all over the years from scripture and from experience I have learned a couple of very simple principles that are incredibly crucial if we are going to experience the saving power of Jesus particularly in these deep places where we are so broken so here is the first one that we want to talk about in the time that remains to us this morning we must take responsibility for our own lives we must take responsibility for our own lives the temptation and the tendency of course is to say as did Adam and Eve it is somebody else's fault I lose my cool it's the woman Lord that you gave me or if it weren't for these miserable kids I'd be a great parent or you know if it wasn't for other people in the church I would be a loving example of Christian discipleship welcome to the world people because the reality is that while yes many of our problems are contributed to by previous generations and by people all around us the reality is we can't do much about changing other people can we I mean anybody ever tried changing your spouse good luck even changing our children is tough enough we can only take responsibility for our own lives one of the things that really blessed me as I was traveling China with Weba was his transparent honesty about his own life and one of the stories that he told in many other places where we ministered to to people groups of different sizes was a story that was related to his marriage remember now I've said to you before his relationship with his father was not very good his father was a very closed man who did not know his son's emotional needs and could not really affirm him in the way that he needed to be affirmed so so Weba gets married and he says for the first 12 years his marriage was great I suspect because his wife met his emotional needs during those years and then the way that he describes it he says then came the seven bad years you know reminiscent of Joseph and Pharaoh and you've got to love the way that he communicates to Chinese groups because he's very animated and they understand him even if they don't understand any English and he says for those seven years I felt that my wife did not love me she was not giving me what I needed and he says I became so angry and he says I remained angry for seven years didn't know where it was gonna go this relationship but then he says there came a moment of revelation he says God spoke to him not in any audible voice but he put a thought in his mind which I know and he knows was really the Holy Spirit and the Lord said to him Weba listen to this you cannot change your wife but you can deal with your own attitude and suddenly adorned upon him that he had to take responsibility for his attitude and he had to leave his wife with the Lord and he said it only took a month before all the anger and the anguish had physically left his body you see we have to be renewed in this spirit of our mind and renewal begins with a sober self-evaluation an honest reflection of who I am what my circumstances are and what it is that I am responsible for I have to break through denial and I have to live in the real world now that sounds amazingly simple doesn't it isn't that simple it is extremely difficult and it's difficult for two reasons number one it is at odds with what we have come to expect as normal remember we talked about pathogenic belief systems why is it so hard do you think for people to change because what they know is what they know and it's all that they know and so deeply in their hearts there is rooted the notion that this is what reality is and I've often said to people if you were to grow up in a world where the sky was green and the grass was blue and you were to come along and tell me now that it's really the other way around I would look at you and I would say you're crazy man you haven't got it right and it's incredibly difficult for people to change because they default into this position where the lie has been embraced about their life let me illustrate from Helen's experience remember she grew up with this deep lie on the inside that said you're not wanted and you're not here for any good purpose and she has spent her whole life striving to get rid of that feeling of I don't belong and she is successful as a mom she is successful as a teacher she is top-notch in her field but I can tell you that it doesn't matter how many times she succeeds or how many times you tell her she is the greatest thing since sliced bread the first time something goes wrong or somebody rejects her all those old feelings will come back and for her to acknowledge that what she feels is not the truth is extremely difficult because it's all she knows am I making sense here when I say that normal is what you grow up with and if you grew up in a crazy family where nobody's good time for you in a family where it's chaotic in a family where your needs don't matter and where you have learned to adapt to the chaos as a way of relating then if somebody comes along and tells you that's not how the world operates you don't even have language to try to describe it because you have no ability to perceive that relational template second reason very closely tied into that is that it is shameful to get in touch with the places of pain every place where we are naked or feel deficient the human tendency is to put on fig leaves as Adam and Eve did to try to hide who we really are I mean how many of us sitting right here would like our inside world to be portrayed on the screen for everybody else to see we would die of shame and when shame kicks in the emotions are incredibly powerful and so everything inside me says I have to get away from this one quick illustration before we wind things up this morning last Sunday night at the communion service I told the story of this young woman who was present at one of our house church meetings in the city of Guangzhou her name is Lolita and she shared with me some of her journey grew up in a pretty decent loving family has been married for three years as mother to a child and during the early part of their courtship and their marriage her husband couldn't quit doting on her called her his princess she truly thought she had found a man who loved her deeply child is born she experiences some emotional issues herself probably postpartum would be my guess and in the middle of this whole journey her husband emotionally disconnects from her in fact she tells me the very sad story that when her baby was first born her husband was off carousing with his friends and an ex-girlfriend out drinking till all hours of the night and when to this friend she complained that she felt pretty put out by it his response was to say well you know something to the effect that you're a poor excuse as a wife so you can imagine what that did to her but as I probed a little bit further and we talked about her situation out came the deep base of shame in her husband's life because you see her husband had never really finished his schooling he never got the certification that he needed for the job he is a sales manager in a pharmaceutical company and he has done well in that job but he knows that he doesn't have the right kind of certification and he doesn't feel that he really has what it takes to do the work and so in the early years of the marriage and this is a tough one she made I think the mistake of thinking that she could help him and she would try to encourage him and she would do all the stuff that he couldn't do the writing and all of that sort of thing and you think the guy would prosper under his wife's administrations but guess what happened she triggered every bit of shame in his life so much so now that he has completely shut her out of his life he says the marriage doesn't matter all that matters is making money and raising his daughter and she emailed me just the other day and she said he's not interested in me we live together but no communication no sex no eye contact even sometimes I think myself as hollow man I'm standing outside of marriage and my husband's heart feeling lonely John I don't really know how to do it that's the reality of broken relationships in a broken world and what the gospel invites us to do is very contrary to nature because the gospel says we need to look at our nakedness if my marriage is a mess I need to admit that my marriage is a mess if my personal life is a mess I need to embrace that my personal life is a mess if my kids are off track then I don't have to spend time justifying that somehow or another they're okay and I did a good job no the remedy is to come to the cross to embrace the reality of my sin and my shortcoming and to cast myself upon the mercies of God here's how the psalmist put in Psalm 32 when I kept silent my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long for day at night your hand was heavy upon me my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer then I acknowledged my sin to you I did not cover up my iniquity I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the guilt of my sin how do we break the cycle it begins by taking responsibility for our own lives before God allowing God to speak into the deep places of our hearts knowing that God already knows our shame nothing is hidden from him he's not looking for us to present a good image he is looking for us to come just as we are without one plea but that his blood was shed for me and I can tell you for many years of experience that when God brings us to that point when we stop making excuses we stop pointing fingers we look at our own hearts and lives before God that is the first step in the journey towards wholeness because the sarcasticism teaches us so capably when I recognize my sin and misery then God prepares the stage so that I can turn to Jesus [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:42:48.760; remove through 00:45:53.000] in faith and discover how great is the [CUT] deliverance that he has come to bring God that thy blood was shed for me and that thou bid'st me come to thee O Lamb of God I come I come Just as I am now waiting now to read my soul upon the throne to thee whose blood can cleanse each spot O Lamb of God I come I come Just as I am now tossed about with many a conflict many a doubt find peace and peace within without O Lamb of God I come I come Just as I am poor ancient mind side rich as healing of the mind yea all I need in thee to find O Lamb of God I come I come Just as I am thou wilt receive will welcome part and cleanse me because I promise I believe O Lamb of God I come I come [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:45:53.000; resume after this marked segment]