Bad Habits, Or Something More?

As a child, I was raised in a God-fearing home since birth. We did everything a Christian family would.

We attended regular Sunday services, volunteered, went to youth group, prayed before our meals, and had regular conversations about our faith that united us more and more as a family.

I’m so thankful for the family the Lord put me in, I look at each member and can see how blessed I am to be loved by them and love them in return.

Was my family perfect? No, but we were a family that endeavored to walk in grace by faith and grow in Christ Jesus.

But even still, as a spirit filled Jesus loving family, there was a lot of pain, trauma, and brokenness intertwined within the family unit.
 
Brokenness that showed itself in my mother and fathers lives mirrored the same brokenness in their mother and father, and their mother and father.

There were patterns of hardship and spiritual rebellion and sin in my families’ generations on my mother and fathers’ side…and some of them had found their way into my family.
Into my life.

At a very young age, as a child still exploring the idea of a loving, Heavenly Father, I stumbled into sin that led to addiction, bondage, and the living of a double life.

I didn’t know others struggled with what I was, and i didn’t know my family generations had struggled with the same thing.
 
I had a natural bent towards this specific sin (though my participation in it was my own responsibility, we can choose whether or not to participate in something regardless of how long they have been present in our family lines.)

I went from a child of innocence, to one of secrecy, fear, and deep shame.

I felt like I had ruined my own life. That no one was going to love me if they knew what I was hiding…so I needed to fix it.

I needed to fix myself.

How could I turn to God with what I was doing and ask for help? Aren’t I supposed to be sinless? Won’t he be angry with me? I was too messy, dirty, and unworthy…I didn’t want to abuse His grace, so I sought to clean myself up before I came to Him again.

It was a heavy burden for anyone to bare, let alone a child.

But there was something inside of me that constantly pulled to, craved, and leaned towards what i was trying to not do.
 
Despite my best efforts, I failed continually to free myself from my sin.

And maybe the “bad habits” you’re struggling with don’t feel as heavy as mine did, but the Lord doesn’t want you to live bound to cycles and patterns.
 
The world would have looked at me and my addiction and said it was a “bad habit”

They would have given me tips and tricks on how to resist, be stronger, ignore it, or some would even excuse my way of living (though hopefully not at such a young age) and declared it was my freedom and a form of liberty.

But that wasn’t how the spiritual realm saw it.
 
Satan doesn’t care that we use terms like “bad habit” or excuse our actions by saying “I saw my parents do it, I grew up with it, it’s just how I am.” because he knows that if we sweep our bad habits and tendencies under the rug, hush hush, then he can keep us in bondage.

Satan doesn’t care about the intentions of our hearts; he just looks for open doors.

Psalm 51:5: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
As the psalmist writes here…he, like everyone else was brought forth (birthed) in iniquity, and even goes as far as to say that even at his conception, sin was present within His mother’s life.

The moment we are conceived we are then brought forth into a world where we traded perfection for deception, and wholeness for just one bite.

Generational Iniquity is sin and crookedness that resides within our generations that wasn’t repented for and thus, passes down the generational line.

Generational sin is like a farmer planting a field of wheat. He sows, toils, labors over their care, and yet he fails to notice the weeds that are growing amongst the stalks.

“It’s fine” he says once he notices, “There aren’t that many!”

So, he ignores them, or every now and again hastily pulls the tops of them up, not bothering with the roots. Just to say he did something.

But overtime, as the crop grows, they become increasingly harder to ignore.

He harvests his crop, though not without difficulty, for the weeds had done more damage than he thought they would.

The farmer retires his field to his son, as old age has overcome him.

The son of the farmer goes to plant his seeds, he toils, works, but find the weeds that weren’t delt with properly before keep choking his seedlings out.

Nothing will grow, and whatever does is stunted, and sparse.

It is now on the son to either continue to ignore the weeds or finally pull them from the root.
This is generational iniquity.


Here is an example of a bad habit that’s really generational iniquity.

As a child, I always had a bent to overeat.

Thus, I had gained an unhealthy amount of weight and carried it off and on into my adolescent years and into adulthood.

I also hated my body, operated in comparison, and dieted off and on which led to me losing weight, only to gain it all back again.

I couldn't shake the habit of overeating, over consuming.

But neither could my mother, or her mother, and many of my family members on her side.
Once I realize this was a generational sin, and that I needed to repent and did deliverance over gluttony, looking for comfort in food instead of the Lord, and self-hate, I started to notice my desire to overeat began to fall off.

I didn’t feel as if I had to eat as much as possible.

I noticed overtime, with intentional prayer and asking the Lord to help me to honor him with my body (and also repenting and doing deliverance if i found i slipped back into old patterns) my desire for food began to change.

I could diet, restrict, cut out, strive, perform, all day long. But it was bringing this generational sin and my own part in it to the Lord that began to heal and change me.
Suddenly, that bad habit of overeating didn’t feel so heavy anymore.

I found I had more and more of a desire to say, “No!” and it didn’t come from anything other than submitting to the Lord and using the provisions of spiritual warfare to shut the door on the enemy.

 Many Christians, well meaning, try and wrestle and bootstrap their way into freedom.
Whether their bad habits come in the form of:

Alcohol
Money
Sex
Food
Perfectionism
Self-critical talk
etc.

Most of our first reactions are to just try harder.

But while the Lord wants you to take responsibility and ownership of our sin, He doesn’t expect us to handle it alone.

Coming from someone who tried to wrestle herself into “righteousness” …what I was missing all along was a revelation of God’s truth.

Of holy, biblical understanding and knowledge of who I was in Christ, and the provisions of my faith that were made ready and available to me because of Jesus’s death on the cross.

I needed to know…God wasn’t angry with me. And He didn’t expect me to pull myself together and rely on my own strength to fix these cycles that I knew needed to end.

I didn’t need to clean myself up or make sure I had a certain day streak of doing good before I came before Him.

Because The Lord already sees into the deepest, darkest parts of our hearts. And yet He still sent His only son to die for us so that we could be reconciled to Him and live with Him in eternity.

So how can you finally find freedom from the thing you struggle with, and your parent struggled with, and their parent struggled with? (this also goes for cycles and addictions you yourself struggle with, a cycle is a cycle, and there is freedom from sin whether its generational or not)

Through repentance, Deliverance, and renewing your mind in Christ Jesus.

Ephesians 6:11-12 “Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
We know as believers that ultimately, we might have a problem in the natural world (things here on earth) but their root is spiritual.

We have to pull up the spiritual roots of sin through deliverance, prayer, and a renewing of the mind in Christ Jesus to find healing from the sin in our lives.



At SonRise Church and Ministries, our goal is to help you do exactly that through our free teachings and online, recorded deliverance sessions.

To learn more about the spiritual realities of sin, grace, repentance, deliverance, and find healing, visit our free app or website and start “The Principality Series” today!

For questions on the website, deliverance, or if you need prayer, message us on our social medias or send in a prayer request on our app or website!