Overcoming Issues that can keep you or prevent you from moving forward to having a healthy marriage.
It is really important to understand that you attract who you are. That is the primary basis of it. When people have negative relationships, when people have unhealthy relationships, usually it’s connected to unhealthy thinking patterns. So for those who are already married, you’ll see some cycles and patterns that are not good, it’s most likely you guys attracted each other to each other. It works two ways – it works psychologically and it works spiritually. Psychologically, there’s been a lot of research when it comes to attraction and how people meet each other and things like that. One of the research was talking about if you’re a 6 you’re most likely gonna marry a 6 or a 7. It’s very unlikely that you’ll find someone that is a 10 that marries a 3. When we’re talking about the scale of looks. Make selection process that has been going on for hundreds of years that we kind of attract the mate that we feel like will be best suited not only for who we are. Women we attract mates when we look at a man based on whether they will be a good husband. Now, most people – it’s not subconscious – good father, because we all have maternal and men have paternal – but we all have these survival instincts. We were all wired to procreate. Science has found that when people are attracted to each other they look at things – men will look at will my offspring be attractive, will my offspring be smart, will my offspring be caring, will my offspring be giving. Women are usually thinking “I need to marry someone who can help protect my kids. Is he strong? Is he a protector? Is he smart? Those are usually a subconscious. However, if you have a jacked up upbringing or just some things that we are going to go through, you thinking can become convoluted, what you look for in a mate can be distorted. Naturally, we look for mates, not just for housing or to keep us warm at night, but really for procreation. That’s one of the main drives that even humans have when they’re looking for a mate.
So, the way that it works psychologically, we just tend to gravitate towards those people who have similar values, morals, etc. – which we should that’s if your thinking is not broken – if your emotions are not broken – if things are stable and normal and healthy – you’re going to attract someone with the same kind of values and so on and so forth. However, if you are struggling with suspicion, fear or low self-esteem, insecurity – you are usually attracting people that take advantage of your areas of brokenness. One of the ways that I have seen that a lot people that end up in abusive relationships over and over and over. It’s psychological but it’s also spiritual. The psychological has to do with how they view themselves. How the kind of worth they carry. If the person feels that they don’t carry any worth or that they don’t bring anything to the table, they will attract a person that views them the same way, that person will mistreat them and abuse them and so on and so forth. Now if you are the abuser in the relationship, if you tend to draw these people that are timid or shy or just say yes to everything that you say, there is a controlling thing that is going on with you that needs to be dealt with.
When we look at it spiritually, spirits attach to us and as Christians we should be filled with the Holy Spirit and that He should lead us. However, when there is any kind of brokenness or issues, if we do not deal with them, there will be problems.
For example, if I have an issue with lust and I don’t deal with it – I don’t get help, then there is a spirit of lust that is connected to me. It kind of just follows you. Because we are spiritual beings first before we are physical, another person with a severe spirit of lust can sense my demon and the spirits can make an agreement to be together and you find yourself back in that relationship where they don’t want to honor the vows made for marriage. Or you can’t stop having sex – they’re mean, they abusive but you just have to have sex because the sex is good. That’s a familiar spirit that has drawn you back into the same kind of cycle that causes you to repeat cycles or remain in demonization or to being able to move forward. If you have a pattern or cycles in our life of the kind of women or men you attract, you need to look at that. Now, if you’re already married, your homework is to say everything that I o through today, you’re gonna go back and deal with any of the areas that I bring up.
So here’s a sample: “We never went through deliverance. I think I’m dealing with this and with that.” You need to confess it to one another.
Who we are is a huge indication of who we become and who we marry. There are different things that shape our identity. Now this is really important. Your past is not necessarily an indication of your future, but it holds keys to your future. What I mean by that is, just because you’ve gone through pain or you are shy, that doesn’t mean you have to be like this all the time. The first part of this first section is to identify the areas of hindrance to a healthy marriage. If you are already married, you will probably see, that as we are going through some of these things, that you’ll find that the areas that you guys have been struggling are connected to some of these wounds or some of these areas that should have been dealt with before you were married. These are the things that if you are single, you should be dealing with. If you are courting you should be dealing with. If you are married and taking this course as an opportunity to deal with it but it should have been dealt with before you were married.
Our identify first comes from our family of origin. Who we are, what we think, what we think about ourselves, what we think about family, what we think about marriage – it’s all created out of our family of origin. Our family of origin ar those people who raised us. Mothers, fathers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, etc. whoever raised you from the time you were small. They are the greatest impactors of your early development of how you should think and how you should view the world. So if you have a crazy view of marriage or if you family of origin was really jacked up and you never saw a healthy view of marriage – until the Holy Spirit intervenes and begins to break cycles of patterns and you learn and study, you may begin to repeat the cycles that you saw because that is all that you know of marriage.
I’m going to mention just a couple or areas that really impact how marriage plays out if not dealt with.
- Mother wounds – have to do with the mother that was not there. So this could be the mother left; the mother didn’t want you, she was on drugs; or she was there but was ambivalent. Meaning you didn’t know if you was going to be in a good mood or bad mood. You didn’t know if she was going to hug you or slap you. Mothers who are ambivalent are not very nurturing. They don’t know how to cuddle. They don’t know how to bring the children close to their heart and just love on them. And usually it’s because nobody taught them that, but if you have this kind of mother, then some of the things you see in you as a person, a lot of times you have a difficult time with direction – where you’re going, what you’re called to do, always going from one place to another place. People with mother wounds are very indecisive. This goes for men and women. They don’t know how to make a decision and stick to it. They aren’t very good with affection. The job of a mother is to nurture, comfort and teach. If you don’t have a mother that doesn’t teach you those things then you, a lot of times become ambivalent. It usually turns out in one or two ways – you are super clingy. Every woman that they find it their spiritual mom. They just want to be under her and loved by her. Or even men, they abuse women. A lot of times men that have mother wounds are womanizers, they sleep with them, they do all these things. It’s a form of affection but convoluted and they don’t have a healthy view of women. So these mother wounds need to be dealt with because when you marry your wife she’s not your mother but her role is like a mother. It’s to nurture, to comfort and to teach. So if that was not healthy when you get into a marriage, then you see that you’re bucking back at her or having difficulty with adultery. A friend of mine right now is going through these issues and he’s messing up his whole life because he just can’t be faithful. There’s a mother wound there – he also has a father wound, but if you don’t deal with that it begins to show up in your relationships.
- Father Wounds – the job of the father is to provide, protect and give identity. If you grew up without a father, you could be very independent or very dependent. You’re always looking to people to fix things; always looking to people to make things better. These are the kind of girls that look for sugar daddies and someone that can just take care of them. These are the kind of girl that don’t care if the guy is a drug dealers but because he has a lot of money and because of the sense of provision and protection. So they will look for these kinds of things to find them. If a man has a father wound, it is very hard to walk as a man. It’s very hard for him to know his role as a husband. That has to be dealt with. The role of the mother is like the role of the Holy Spirit. So the way you hit a mother wound is to ask the Holy Spirit to begin to teach you and nurture you and comfort you. The way you heal a father wound, of course this is not a class on mother and father wounds. I don’t really have the time to break them down, but father wounds, the way that you heal is by replacing that with any areas where you are angry with your father. Any areas where you ____________. People with father wounds sometimes struggle with homosexuality. The men tend to cling to men because they are looking for a man like figure to love. The women sometimes run away from men and cling to women because of the wound that has been created with their father. It’s the same thing with the mother wound. You find that some women that struggle with mother wounds also tend to cling to men and the relationship becomes perverted. And so these areas have to be healed. The father wound is healed by inviting The Father into your life. One of the things Our Father told me in XXXXXX for those who are doing the Daniel Fast, that until I learned him as a Father, I could not be a good wife as a husband and so I started going on this journey of identifying God as my Father. I’m going to talk a little bit about lies and thinking patterns. My natural father, he was married to someone else. My mom got remarried but he did not take care of us. He did not provide, he was just out in the world. I developed this lie that every man that Ioved me was going to leave or that every man that I loved was not going to be there for me. I never had a lot of boyfriends. I was just this weird kid where the lord said I was marked. However, the two guys that I did date, I realized that I could fully commit in those relationships because I was always expecting them to leave. Because I created a subconscious belief that every man I loved was going to leave. And some of the relationships I would try to trick them to stay and some of you have done that to be co-dependent. Every man or woman you are with you are very clingy. It’s self preservation. If you don’t understand your thinking or you cycle, you’re going to see if manifesting in your relationships.
I wasn’t very clingy. I was more “whatever! I can do it on my own!”, because I didn’t have a father to give me provision or protection so I was very independent, so the Lord had to teach me to be dependent. Women cannot get married without being dependent. There’s this stupid girl that is writing these articles about how this man loved her because she changed the tire and she didn’t understand why he didn’t call her for another date because she changed the tire. She’s a woman and she should be able to solve problems. So what happened is they went on a date and got a flat tire. He calls AAA an they are waiting for AAA and she decides to fix the tire herself. The man doesn’t call her back and she’s wondering why. It’s not even a security issue. For men their job is to provide solutions. If the guy does not want to kneel down in his outfit or his suit, but he has provided a solutions – which is to call AAA – then the woman needs to allow that solution to play out. Women are always like “my man’s not leading!” it is because you do not allow him to. She already squashed him. By doing that she broke every rule, violated every line. I don’t know if she’s dated again because she just wrote another article about being a heavy weight or something. One of my followers on Facebook shares her stuff but it is just ridiculous. If you are that independent, you’re going to continuously run over the men that God brings into your life. For men, it’s not that big of a deal to be independent, except there’s all these where God is going to ask you to depend on him and to learn to trust him.
FAMILY OF ORIGIN – MOTHER WOUNDS/FATHER WOUNDS
What else comes out of our family of origin is our view of marriage. If you come out of a healthy family, your view is going to be very different if you come from a divorced family if it is not washed in the blood of Jesus, if you have not learned how marriage looks like in the Kingdom. You don’t have to come from a healthy marital family in order for you to have a healthy marriage. Your job is to study what marriage looks like in the Kingdom. We will go over the biblical marriage of model. You study that and then and mimic that. So both my husband and I we love both our parents but they just didn’t work out on both sides. But what that did for us was encourage us to make sure that we do and not of our own effort. We know that we need to rely on the Holy Spirit. We know that we don’t need to argue for prolonged periods of time. We know that we need to work on things no matter how hard thy get because of a generation curse that is in our family line and we’ve got to break it. So just because you came from parents who are not married or not together, does not mean that you cannot have a healthy marriage. What it means that God has to renew your thinking and you have to see marriage from the Kingdom perspective and not just your family.
Another thing that really impacts the way that we view marriage is our culture. If we did marriage the way that culture says to do marriage, we’re going to be in trouble because we live in a very liberal culture. We live in a very selfish culture. So when you’re looking at marriage, the culture you should be imitating is the Kingdom of God. Me and my husband always so this, we are african but african culture we adore our culture but there are certain things in our African culture that o not line up with out Kingdom principles, so therefore, we have to let those things go. The Kingdom superimposes or trumps over any natural culture. So if you have learned faulty things about marriage or you’ve learned that it’s just about your or a ring or a wedding date or sex or having someone to cook you food or take care of you, you have the wrong views of marriage from culture, you need to get bathed and baptized in the Kingdom culture – in the way the Kingdom runs and then begin to imitate that in your marriage.
Another area that really impacts how you view marriage or who you become – these are things that shape our identity are our spiritual beliefs and experiences. How has church impacted your view of marriage. So if you went to marriage that really focused on healthy marriages, then you will see a lot of marriages that are modeled – this is going to create a different view and mindset of marriage than the pastor has left the wife for the secretary – everybody’s sleeping with marriage. There’s no odel of a healthy marriage anywhere – your view is going to be very different. The same way if you got raped or molested in the church, your view of sex is going to be very different. You’re gonna think that it’s very spiritual. That’s it’s gross. It could be damaging if you’ve not gone through the healing and dealt with the trauma.
For those that were married before, this should be something that you probably could look back at your first marriage and say “Oh, my gosh! I didn’t look at that! I didn’t look at that! I didn’t cover that!” It’s good, so that you can learn how to move forward.
Faulty Perceptions
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Faulty perceptions create a blurred reality. So I gave you all an example. Not even if you got raped in church but if you were taught that sex – some people have been taught this and I have had to talk to some couples – that sex was just for making babies. You have sex, missionary position, is just for making babies. And then you get married to somebody who wants to explore and do different things and really enjoy the marriage bed, it’s going to be very hard for you to do that, because you have created this reality based on what you were taught or what you believe. It’s good that you all are taking this course but also to really get clarity on some things that you were taught spiritually or that you was in your family. Because if you have a faulty perception of something, then when you get into the throws of marriage, it’s going to be really hard to have a healthy marriage.
We need to correct faulty thinking and patterns. The way that we do this is by finding out what healthy patterns are and what healthy thinking looks like. Healthy thinking bears good fruit. Let’s say right now, you have this belief that you are never going to get married, right? That’s your belief, your inner vow. “I’ve been single so long, I’m 40 years old. I’ll never get married. You’ve created a thinking pattern, so most likely when you meet somebody that could be a potential mate the first thing that comes up in the back of your mind is probably not gonna work or he’s not going to be into me. These things are spiritual. That person can pick it up. They’ll say that person is closed off. They’re guarded, I’m not gonna even mess with them” Or, you can just be like a wall. We can look at you and know that you are not open, you don’t smile, you’re closed off. It all started with this thinking that came out of being disappointed or relationships that didn’t work out. If you are thinking is healthy, you’re going to see good fruit. If your thinking is negative, you’re going to see bad fruit. You’ve got to challenge your thinking. You have hope level. You have faith level. You’ve got to challenge little lies. People say these little lies people believe about marriage:
– Keep some money on the side for a rainy day! That’s bringing suspicion into the marriage. So you are bringing this idea that maybe this person is going to leave me. So you need to correct anything that does not line up with the kingdom of God. You study what marriage looks like in the kingdom and then you imitate it. You need to heal from your past in order to step into a healthy future. Areas that need to be dealt with early in the marriage, is the issue of rejection. This is a whole 4 week course, but the majority of us, if you’ve dealt with rejection in some point or another. Some of it can be as severe as someone using us, abusing us or abandoning us to not being accepted on the 6th grade basketball team. But, if you don’t deal with rejection, what happens is that you make your partner earn your love. People that struggle with rejection, never feel like it’s enough because they’ll create these thinking patterns that either that person is going to love me or leave me or their ony in this for something. they only want my money or they only want my body. It is connected to not having a strong self worth. Our self worth must come from our Father. We must know that we are loved and we belong. Once you have that wrong self worth, once you enter into a relationship and they say this doesn’t work, you do not go into a depression for six months. That partner was not a good match for me. God has somebody else for me and I can move on. However, rejection will make you push people away. You will sabotage. I have seen this over and over. People that deal with rejection – I’ve had to accept so many men. And the women, that do this really irk me. Rejection really shows up differently in men that it does in women. When a man approaches a woman, and asks for a date, or anything it will cause a lot of conflict. It’s not easy. Nobody likes to be rejected. For that woman to begin to play these games. “Oh, I don’t know, did you call the right phone number. Then the guy comes after to you and you say you will call them back and you never do. You play game after game after game. Maybe culture has taught us that’s the way to do it. That’s ridiculous because that’s not the way of the Kingdom. If someone is interested in you, you’re interested in them – get to the point. There’s no reason not to do this. However, people with rejection try to make people earn their love. They don’t really get to the point to “do you really love me”. They put up this air of “You’ve have to pursue me, you have chase me. And after while the guys get tired and leaves them and it leaves the woman with the idea that he’s always going to be rejected. Now in men it could be the same way. I’ve seen this a lot in men who are co-dependent. They get a girl and they are so thankful that someone wants to love them. They just want to be around them all the time, they don’t want them to leave their sight and it ends up a lot with co-dependence and control. Rejection looks like control in men. And even women, what we are afraid of, we try to control. For example, someone leaving and we’ll try to control them so they don’t leave. If we’re afraid of someone cheating, we’re going to control who they speak to. check their phones, check their bag, check this, check that so that they don’t leave. You need to check your rejection issues. You can see your rejection issues. If you have friends and they cross you the wrong way and you cut them off, you’re not ready for marriage. You need to heal from that rejection. If you get one friend and you are so happy that you cling to them and suffocate them, you’re not ready for marriage. If you can’t take correction and someone says “Hey, you should have done this differently and you get offended and mad, you need to get delivered from rejection. You need to study the spirit of rejection and really uproot it. Because you can think that it’s going to be finished in your marriage and it’s not. So for those who have already married and if you are struggling with this and your partner is making you earn their love and doing this and doing that – the person can never fill that void of rejection. Only God can because we find our self worth in Him. We find our love in Him. We find our devotion in Him. Until that is dealt with you are going from man to man and from woman to woman looking for them to possibly heal you. Looking for them to possibly deal with that rejection. So it’s really, really important that you deal with that right away.
Another one is abuse and trauma. If you’ve gone through physical abuse, it’s going to be really hard for you to not been healed from that if you’ve not gone through deliverance to allow anyone to touch you, to trust people and to allow people into your space. If it was very severe, some of it is root that we see in isolation. We tend to isolate ourselves, so even if people pursue us or want to be around us, because what abuse tends to do is breaks you physically but it also breaks you psychologically so you have to deal with the residue or the impact of that abuse. Most of the time, you can see it in your friendships. For those of you who are not married yet, you see it in how you deal with it in your friendships. It’s the same thing with trauma. There are different types of trauma. You can have a physical trauma where you were in a car accident and now you are afraid to drive. You were in a war trauma where you were in a war-torn state and now you’re afraid to leave your house. You were in a sexual trauma where you were penetrated, touched or fondled and usually the way this works out is that those who were sexually abused, which is a big one in marriage, and how things work out in marriage, is that they are very over sexualized – if they were children who were molested or hyper sexualized, they just have a lot of inappropriate sexual behavior – they touch themselves, they masturbate. They look for things to repeat whatever kind of sexual trauma that they experience. In older people, we just see promiscuity – just sleep with whatever you could find. What trauma does with sexual intrusion does with a person, especially a child, it tells them that that’s what love is. So with people who have had sexual trauma, their only solutions to problems in marriage is sex. “Let’s just have sex!” If a person gets angry, they want to have sex. If the person doesn’t want to be bother, let’s have sex with them because the only thing you think is valuable is your body. You’re always giving it over. If some of these things are major issues for you email us and sign up for inner healing at askdoctorfaith.com. If it’s really severe, you can be hyper-sexualized. On the other hand, you could not want to be touched at all. You can hate sex. You can loathe your partner. Some husbands have encountered they didn’t want their spouse to touch them in a whole year. I’m like, Jesus – guys please! You should not go without sex more than once a week. When it’s that severe, one of the things we’re going to assess is did you have any sexual trauma. We’re going to assess for any pain during sex because it could be a physical issue or a hormonal issue that’s going on and we’ll look at a number of things, but you need to deal with the trauma and it’s not something that we can deal with in a group trauma and we have to go to the root of the trauma and look and see if their are some spiritual things that go along with it. What you can do after tonight as part of your homework is when you are pressing in is write down areas where from your past would be a hindrance to having a healthy marriage. If you’re already married, then you can see the areas from your past that are a hindrance. People that struggle with abandonment is connected with the spirit of rejection. This is all connected to the orphan spirit if we look at it from spiritual perspective. The orphan spirit is connected to attachment issues, if we look at it from psychological basis. Abandonment you’re not going to be very good with commitment. For people who have been left, I’m not really talking about abandonment like left on the side of the road with a suitcase. I’m talking about you really loved someone, you were going to get married and they left you and didn’t want to be married. There is a sense of abandonment that attached to you and so that when people try to get close but then you sabotage. There’s a fear of commitment. You have a fear of fully giving yourself because it is usually connected to something that happened. It’s usually just pain. I always tell people to get over rejection is to get over it because the worse thing that can happen is that they reject you, doesn’t love you. It’s going to hurt, it’s going to be painful but you will leave. You will not die from rejection. You will not die from someone abandoning you. It’s your job to learn how to throw yourself into love. And that’s why it’s really important to learn from a clear biblical understanding of what love looks like in the Kingdom. 1 Corinthians is a good starting place. You’ll want to examine your marriage and relationships from that place. In this relationship is my partner kind, patient, do they have self control. You also want to assess yourself – do I have self control? Am I kind? Am I good? You want to match those things and see how God is showing up in your own life. It’s a good mirror for how we are to love one another. Not only friendships but in relationships as well.
The reason I started this course was for that very reason. I would get people in for marriage counseling and all this stuff should have been dealt with way before you were married. And the reason I dealt with this course is for the people who have been married for 3 years or less is because they still have time to repair it; they still have time to work on these things; to talk about it with each other and move forward.
INNER VOWS
Inner vows affect our mate selection and marriages. Inner vows are promises that we make to ourselves using our own strength and our own plan and our own agenda. We don’t include the Holy Spirit in them. We make those vows based off of what we see around us. So I’ve shared mine before about one of the inner vows that I made was that I will never marry an African. That inner vow wa made off of the experience with my father and one or two African that I had seen even though I had not dated them. Inner vows are created to keep you away from the very thing God has for you or to pull you into a direction so that the enemy can destroy. so, I made this inner vow and at around 25-26, the Lord starting talking to me about my life and marriage and He said “Let me plan this party out for you. Stop saying what you will have, what you won’t have, etc.” I said, “Lord, I will take whatever you have for me. I am open – Black, White, Asian, Korean, African, whatever. I am open. I broke my inner vows. When through Inner healing. Broke all that stuff. Well, there came my husband and I had specifically said, not a Nigerian. Actually, one of my mentors, said, when I told her, “I met my husband, he’s Nigerian, and it’s so funny because I used to say I would never marry a Nigerian.” She said, “I hope it wasn’t an inner vow.” I realized that it was. I had made this inner vow on what the enemy was trying to do was for me to agree with me in this little thing. He doesn’t know everything, but he has a sense, and so if I agreed with that vow and held onto it, I could have missed out on my husband, who is Nigerian, and could have missed out on the whole thing. But I had to break that vow. Sometimes you make vows based on what they have to look like. I’m not going to marry anyone who is white. I’m not going to marry anyone who looks like my mother. I’m not going to marry anyone who is a cheater. I’m not going to marry anyone like this or that. Now of course, don’t want to marry anyone who is a cheater, but we don’t want to make any vow without including the Holy Spirit. I call them the “I Nevers”. You want to pray and ask God to help me not marry someone who is promiscuous or a cheater. God help me in this process.” Because we usually run to the very thing we’re running away from. So the thing for singles, I talk a lot about this in the book “Journey to The Altar”, you want to look at your “I nevers”. Now, if you are already married, you “I nevers”, might be impacting your marriage. So if you said, I’ll never marry someone like my mother and you already have married someone like your mother. You need to break that vow and once you break that vow you’ll begin to see the behavior and even your wife in a new light or a new way. You need to look at your I nevers, that you were hoping to run away from that you have run right into. Now some of them are good, in terms of, usually your “I nevers” are an indication of what God has for you. The good “I nevers”. The “I nevers” that usually don’t make sense. Like I’ll never marry a “light-skinned” man. Why not? The reality is, most likely, you’re going to marry someone who is light skinned. “I’ll never marry a man who is short!” Stop saying that because most likely the person around the corner that God has for you is short. So you need to watch you “I nevers” you need to submit your desires to the Lord. This does not mean that you marry someone who you are not attracted to. I didn’t want to marry someone who is a basketball player. I wanted to marry a football player. My husband didn’t want to marry a “plump” girl. He wanted to marry a “Jackie Joyner-Kersey” kind of girl. But once we broke inner vows, this is before we met each other, we realized it was so much beyond that and we are both very attracted to each other. God began to show us who we really area and how we would love. For the most part, If you ask any married couple that’s happy, they will tell you they married the total opposite of their type. I have friends after friends, couples after couple, and then I have some people who were adamant that they were going to marry their type but sometimes it does not end up very well. One thing that you do have to know is that God wants you to be attracted to your mate and it’s going to be fine and it’s going to be healthy, but don’t be so closed off with your inner vows. It’s not how they look, but how they are going to do marriage. You might have looked at a couple at church, and said “I’m never doing something like that or I’m never going to be like that wife, she’s so submissive, why does she do everything she’s done, why does she always have to ask her husband? Well, you better figure it out. Because if you have that inner vow and you won’t run anything by your spouse, you are independent, you are making your decisions, you’re going to have a whole set of other problems. You need to go back and begin to ask the Holy Spirit – “God what are some of the inner vows that are now impacting my marriage and simply pray, “God, I bring this inner vow before you, I renounce it and I come out of agreement with it and I am open to what you have for me. Or, help me not to be _________. Or help me not to marry someone like this. But you want to bring God into it. We do not make vows to ourselves or other things. We ask the Holy Spirit to help us in every step.
Another thing that you need to be aware of, and we’re going to talk about courtship, but it’s generational curses. These are some of the things you want to talk about when you are courting. Courting is when you both have prayed. Your parents, pastors and mentors have all said yes and then you can prepared to get married. If your parents are not in the Lord, they don’t always have to say yes, but we’ll talk about that then. but you need to talk about generational curses. If you are married, you need to sit down and pray. If you don’t know – a generational curse is a cycle or pattern that is perpetuated by the enemy that is passed down from one generation to the next generation to the next generation. If you don’t know what the generational curses are in your family, look at th cycles and patterns – divorce, women having children before they get married, prison, drug addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, adultery, etc. Those are generational curses and spirits are attached that push those things onto every generation. You need to break every generational curse that is in your life. You meet your mate, or if you are already married, you need to discuss what generational curses are on your side of the family and what generational curses are on mine because those are the things that will come after you. Once you are aware of them you learn how to combat them, fight against them and go to Go together against those things.
STEPPING INTO THE TRUE YOU
The question about rejection, you’ll know that you’re healed because your identity is in Jesus and what that means is that, I love my husband so much. I absolutely love him and I adore him. If he ever left me, I would be very very sad but I would not die, because my identity, while he’s a big part of it, my identity is firmly rooted in Christ. He is my provider, my protector, He is the one that gives me identity as a husband, as a Father and as a maker. In that, I can freely love my husband, because I am not expecting him to do everything perfectly. I’m not expecting him to always do it right. I’m not expecting him who loves me who cuddles me and takes care of me and does everything for me because I have a Father. This goes for both men and women because on the other hand, if our identity is not solid in who we are in God, if we don’t understand and that we love and belong, we are going to looking for that affection and approval from relationships or from our spouses. So understanding salvation, that when we got saved, the Greek word is “sozo” – it means deliverance, healing and redemption. You are all those things. Now there are things you need to come out of agreement with, things you need to renounce and that’s why we do this course so you can get the help you need to get so you can fully walk in who Go has called you to be so you can fully love people. Most people that are not healed from rejection or any other things, they are afraid of fully loving because they are afraid of what’s going to happen on the other end, or they could be wreckless and jump and attach to everybody. I love you after two days. You need to find your identity and your core in Jesus Christ.
You need to develop an intimacy with the Father. This will help you develop intimacy with your spouse. Don’t wait until I get married and have the bomb worship time and we’re going to pray together. No, you should have individual worship times and intimate worship times with the Father. That’s when god ministers to you about your spouse and who you are and so you can go and be really good to your spouse. Then afterward, you can have a time where you are ministering together. As a single, you need to learn what it means to be fully devoted to Jesus. You need to learn what it means to have Him as your spouse. That should be the man that is on your mind day and night. Men and women, it needs to know what it looks like to be truly devoted to God. As we develop a deep intimacy and love beyond ourselves and selfishness, then we will be open to love others. If we are only loving God for something – we need something from Him, or we are afraid of him or we think He’s this mean Father, you’re going to see that parallel in your relationships.
The other thing you need to do is beyond being intimate with the Father, you need to know your purpose because every believer has gifts that they carry and gifts that they have to release to the Kingdom of God and so it is really important that you know what those are so that when you meet your spouse, and for those who are already married, there are spiritual gift assessments that you can take. Hopefully, you are in a healthy church where you can ask “How do I find out my spiritual gifts”. Most of the times they are going to be complimentary and figure out how they are going to work together. Preparing for marriage, is know your purpose. If you’re already married and you don’t know those things, it’s time to get on that.
The next thing you need to do and develop in healing and preparing, is grow in prayer. Grow in reading the word. Grow in fellowship with other believers. You cannot be unhealthy Christian and have a healthy marriage. You cannot be an unhealthy Christian and have a healthy marriage. What you find is unhealthy Christians is have unhealthy marriage. There is no other way around it. So what you want to do is develop a lifestyle of prayer. You’re going to spend a lot of time praying for your spouse, your children, your household. This is for both men and women. You need the Word of God. It gives you direction – gives you correction even to your family that needs to be part of your repertoire for preparing for marriage or laying the foundation of your marriage.
FELLOWSHIP
If the person you are dating doesn’t have friends, it’s a red flag. I always tell people, if the person you are dating doesn’t have friends, is a red flag. I’m not just talking about people you can hang out with. I’m talking about 2 or 3 that you can call on, that know your heart, that you can cry on their shoulder. You need to have friends because you don’t want to, when you get married, you don’t want to overwhelm your spouse because you don’t have anyone else to hang out with. When you are first married that first year or two years, that’s fine because you are honeymooning. And you should be honeymooning long-term, But afterwhile, it’s okay. We’ll be okay. When I first got married, leaving my husband for 5 hours was painful. When I started traveling again and preaching, I was like “Two days?” What am I going to do. Then you grow and you realize that the distance makes you grow fonder and you get closer but you really do miss your spouse and that’s the bond that comes with marriage. But have some friends. It’s really good to encourage your spouse to have friends. Don’t discourage your spouse to have friends. That means you are co-dependent that you issues going on there. Give him some space to breathe as long as they are healthy relationships and upbuilding and they are beneficial for the marriage.
HOW GOD SEES YOU!
Learning how God sees you, is spent in prayer. It’s also based on community and the church you are in but luckily we have Youtube and Periscope where you can find a lot of good teachers. I mean some of my favorite teachers are Graham Cooke, Bill Johnson, Kris Valloton, Heidi Baker – that I would listen to and love. These people, a lot of the foundation of why I teach, I learned and gathered from them. There are a lot of good teachers out there how to learn and seek God. Even if you are not in a good church, these are things you can study and God will begin to reveal yourself to you. You need to understand your temperament. Your likes and your dislikes because this will show you the kind of people that you’re a good match for and you will have a lot of work with if your temperaments are not beneficial.
DISCOVERING YOUR PURPOSE AND WHY YOU ARE HERE
If you don’t know that you’re always going to have a hole in your heart. You’re always going to be searching. We were all made to live a purposeful life. We are all made to do something with our lies. Marriage is not the only thing. Your purpose is something you bring to your marriage. It’s something your spouse brings to your marriage. In that, you begin to merge your vision and what God has called you to do and go from there. You need to know what you bring to the table is huge. Don’t com to the table with nothing – just a bunch of debt. Don’t do that. You want to make sure is the things that my husband love is I am energetic! I can go go go but sometimes it can wear him out because he’s a more laid back kind of person but God puts us with opposites to balance us out. But beyond that, I am smart, it’s not like he’s talking to a tree stump. He knew that I was a problem solver and that I would be a good mother. Those are things, when you are courting and you are asking “Why do you want to marry me again? What are those things you love about me?” If someone can’t list why thy love you, then it’s not a good match. They should be able to list it. Your friends can tell you the areas you need to work on if you’re not already married. If you are married, you guys can sit at the table and and say what are you bringing and what are we building. All of us should bring something to the table. Men think differently than women. Women see things differently than men. When we learn to work together as a team, we can really do great things for the Lord. You need to know your value. You need to know where it lies in your heart. What is most important to you. These are things that are more important in your marriage that you know and that you understand.
You need to allow God to heal your emotions. If you are up and down, easily angered, give everyone the silent treatment, don’t know how to speak kindly, you probably want some healing in your emotions. You need to learn how to handle stress. When something happens and you are flipping out “Oh Jesus, what am I going to do!” and you enter into a depression. You’re not ready for marriage. You need to learn how to handle stress in a healthy way. If you start over-eating and you eat a whole jar of ice cream. If you get angry when stressed, you need to learn how to handle it, because in a marriage,in raise a family there will be stress. So if you are already married, these are things that you need to deal with. You need to know how to handle pain, because the people that you love the most when they do something that is mean, it hurts the most because you love them. There are going to be times, believe it or not singles, says something that really hurt you or does something that really hurt you, you’ll have to figure out how this pain sticks in my heart and grow a big boulder or do I just let it go. Do I forgive? Do I release for the the benefit of our relationship? For the benefit of where we are going? Now if this thing is happening over and over, every week – this is not the pain I am talking about. I’m talking about once in awhile, because we are human, we are infallible, I always say that marriage is two imperfect people trying to make a perfect union. We are going to have pain and it’s going to be really difficult but we choose to get over it. If right now that when someone hurts you think they owe you something or you think the world owes you for your pain, you’re not ready for marriage. We’ve talked about rejection a lot but you have to be willing to not quickly retaliate, not give up, not quit just because someone has rejected you. If you don’t have the strength to keep going when someone says no, it’s going to be difficult when you and your spouse have different opinions and seeing things differently. If you take it personal when people don’t listen to you, then you really need to work on that.
Lastly, how well do you love. Are you in this thing because you want love so much are not be alone anymore? Or do you have so much love to give and you are willing to pour it out and willing to make a covenant to give someone your love, over and over and chose them over and over for the rest of your life. You need to assess these things and go from there.
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