Chapter 22 - How To Identify Curses

Leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

Your brother has the ability to bind you, to speak words against you, and to bring a curse against you that will prevent God from blessing you.

Why is this? It is because God works through the agency of man in the earth. Man has the power to release the forces of God in blessing, but he also has the power to release the forces of evil in a curse. 

Man has that power in the earth, but especially those who are believers. When they speak a negative word using the amplified power that they have in their spirit, let me tell you it is devastating. There are plenty of examples in Scripture of that happening. 

When Ananias and Sapphira came before Peter, and he spoke a word before them, they fell down dead. There was a power there. There was an authority in the words that were spoken. There is the power to bless and the power to curse.

Curses by Association

There are curses that come by association with another person. When you associate with somebody else your spirit becomes linked to their spirit.

In 1 Timothy 5:22 Paul says, Lay hands suddenly on no man, neither be a partaker of other men's sins: keep yourself pure.

Do not be a partaker of other men's sins by laying hands on them. What is he talking about?

What happens when you lay hands on somebody? You are actually uniting your spirit with that person's spirit. There is an impartation.

I do not know how it works. I don't know if it has anything to do with the nerve endings in the hand that somehow link with where your spirit connects with your body, but somehow there is power in your hands.

When you lay your hands on somebody, the power that is in your spirit flows out through your body. It flows through your hands and into that person. 

I have found that if I ask a person to put their hands on mine, there comes a union between their spirit and my spirit. And in the Holy Spirit I can tell what is going on in their spirit.

I can sense and discern, and I can feel what is going on inside of them. There is a link that seems to take place. 

When you link your spirit with the spirit of another person who is walking in a curse, who is walking in sin and has given Satan place in their life, you run the danger of coming under a contamination from that person's spirit that affects your spirit. 

So Paul says, "Don't do it suddenly." 

What he was speaking about here was the laying on of hands to identify when you recognized somebody's ministry; when you laid your hands on them, united your heart with them and said, "We recognize you, and we accept you as one that God has chosen and called." 

He was speaking about ordination and that sort of thing. 

Transmitted Through Speech

You need to be very careful about who you are associated with. This is because as soon as you associate with people and make contact with them, you pick up what is in their spirits. 

How else do you pick up what comes from a person's spirit? How does a person communicate what is in their spirit?

You do it through words. When a person speaks words, they send forth into the earth words that are containers holding what was in their spirit. 

When a person speaks words, they speak forth the power that is in their spirits. We have seen that.

But what if the words that they are speaking forth come from a spirit that is contaminated and is not yielded to God? What about a person filled with sin that is under a curse? Then they speak forth words that contain a curse. 

You say, "But they said such nice things. They spoke so beautifully and were so loving. They were friendly and I didn't sense any curse there. They weren't saying horrible things." 

No they were not. It did not make any difference what they said. They could have said, "Mary had a little lamb." The words came out of their spirit, and their spirit contaminated the words.

Does it sound way out? Let me tell you, when you get into conversation with somebody who is under a curse, you come under the same curse.

That is all you need. Hold a conversation and receive their words. Open your heart to them in interaction and conversation. As you do that you open your heart to the curses that are in the heart of that person. 

Sometimes you are not even aware of it because their words sounded good. Unless you can discern and detect in the spirit what is coming from them you could be having poison.

It may taste very nice. It may be sweet, but there could be strychnine or cyanide in there. Be very careful when you open your heart in interaction with a person who is not walking in the blessing of the Lord. 

Of course by the same token, if you share with somebody who is walking in blessing, you pick up their blessing. You feel inspired and lifted up.

You feel charged up. You get closer to the Lord and good things start to happen. Wherever a person goes they are carriers of either a blessing or a curse. 

Look for the Signs

How do you know if a person is a carrier of a blessing or if they are a carrier of a curse?

Watch what follows them. What are the three signs of blessing and what are the three signs of a curse?

Do they bring blessing wherever they go? Are people prospered by being associated with them? Are people brought into love and harmony by being associated with them? Do they feel secure as a result of being with them? 

We discovered something that became a joke until we realized that it was not coincidence. We found that every time we went into a public place like a shop, and we would stand in one place for a while, suddenly things would get busy.

People would start to gather around us. And before we knew it that end of the shop would be all crowded. 

We would go and visit somebody. And after we had been sitting chatting for a while we would keep getting interrupted by phone calls. 

They would say, "I can't understand what has happened. Ever since you've arrived I just keep getting phone calls for business. What is going on?" 

We have learned not to stay in one place for too long. It starts to become too crowded then and you have people all around you.

Am I bragging? No, it should be what every believer is walking in. Your blessing starts to radiate forth, and when people come into your presence they start to pick it up. 

It is like a contagious disease. They start to catch it. The Scripture speaks about us giving off a savor of life or death.

You give off an aroma. You are like a rose walking about or you are like a skunk. What are you giving off? 

Be careful whom you associate with. Check to see whether you are walking in blessing.

Do you find that when you have been with a specific person, certain things start to go wrong in your life? The blessing starts to wane. You start having financial problems or ill health.

Plans that you had set in motion suddenly turn sour and you cannot understand why. You think back and you begin to realize, "Hold it, this all started since I met old Joe that I haven't seen for so many years.

We bumped into each other in town the other day and we had a long chat. Since then things have started to go wrong." 

Be very careful who you associate with. Am I getting paranoid now? No I am not. God wants us to walk in blessing.

If a curse is coming into your life instead of blessing then take note of it. Do this especially if you have been applying the principles that I have been sharing and you have been speaking forth in faith, hope and love. 

You may have been praying and crying out to the Lord saying, "Lord I don't know what is happening here. What is going on? Lord why aren't you answering my prayers? Lord why are you not delivering me?" 

You have come under a curse from somewhere. That is what has happened.

I will cover all the different ways that a curse can come in, but this is one of the most common ones - association with people and interaction in conversation with people whose lives are filled with a curse.

Your spirit becomes contaminated because you receive their words into your heart, and poison comes in with it.

Family Generational Curses

In Exodus 20, when God gave the Ten Commandments to the Israelites, the number one commandment was this: You shall have no other Gods before me.

He was saying, "You must not worship demons, because that is all another god is. It is an evil power."

God said to them, I am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children's children, to the third and fourth generations.

Your spirit is contaminated by what was in the spirit of your mother and father, what was in the spirit of their parents, and what was in the spirit of their parents. If you count back you will see that this involves quite a few people. 

If one of those in your third and fourth generations was involved in worshipping demons, or got involved in the occult and the New Age, then you have had a contamination passed down to you from them.

It is like an umbilical cord; a thread that is passed down that needs to be cut. 

You say, "But I'm a Christian now. I've accepted the Lord and Jesus has come into my life. The Holy Spirit has come to take up His residence in me and I'm born again." 

Yes you are, but you have not stopped sinning have you? Your spirit still has the capability to be contaminated does it not? And the contamination that was passed down to your spirit needs to be dealt with.

It needs to be cut off and removed. It is not a very complicated thing, and I will share with you shortly how we can deal with these curses and remove them. 

If you look at families you often see certain sins, weaknesses and diseases that run in the family. They try to say to us, "It's in your genes." 

No, it is not in your genes. It is in your spirit and it is a curse. 

You say, "You know we have cancer in our family." 

It is a curse and a curse is a spiritual thing. It is a family generational curse and you need to break it. 

You say, "Well in our family a lot of the people committed suicide." It is a curse. 

Or you say, "In our family there are a lot of people that are accident prone and they keep having bad luck." 

It is a curse. Watch out for these things. Do not assume anything. It is a family generation curse and you do not have to accept it. 

After God had spoken those words He said, "But I give my blessing upon thousands." 

You see the curse can only go for four generations, but the blessing of God is boundless. It has no limitation. 

Family Generational Blessing

There is also family generational blessing. 

Paul wrote to Timothy and he said, "I am glad of the faith that is in you that used to be in your grandmother, and then in your mother, and now I can see it is in you as well." 

Do you know what power we have as parents to impart the blessing of God to our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren? 

Pass the blessing of God down. Let's get rid of the curse, let's deal with it and cut it off, and let's pass blessing in its place. 

If you are walking under a curse, the chances are you do not know where it is coming from and you cannot seem to shake it. Check your family history, and if you can see it in your family generations then cut it off. 

I do not know who my great grandparents were. I never met them. I don't know what they did.

But I am not going to take any chances. I am going to cut it off anyway just in case. Every believer should be doing that. You should be cutting off every single link. 

Breaking Spiritual Links

You need to cut off links with one another. You need to break spiritual links with your parents.

I am not saying that you must turn your back on them. You just need to cut your spirit off from theirs.

You need to cut your spirit off from your husband or your wife. Yes God has made you one, but if there is a contamination that takes place in the one spirit, it is going to affect the other. 

Your spirit has to be a separate entity before the Lord. It has to be your own spirit. It has to be unique and controlled by God and by Him alone, not by another person.

If you put yourself in subjection to another person, you unite your heart and your spirit with them. 

When a man and a woman are divorced there is a spiritual bond there that most times is not severed. After they have gone through the divorce, and the courts have legally divorced them and they have separated, there is still a unity in their hearts towards each other. 

Such people become involved in a second marriage and a third one, and they just cannot seem to settle in the next marriage because they are still 'married' to the first person.

Their spirit is still bound to the first person. It has to be cut off. 

You have to cut your spirit off from every other human being and unite with God's Holy Spirit alone. You must not be united with anybody else, not in that way.

Yes there is union of spirits. There is sharing, especially in a husband/wife relationship and especially amongst believers in a church. This is where Jesus said, Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in their midst.

There is a lovely fellowship in the Spirit and we flow together in one Spirit in the Holy Ghost.

But your spirit must be independent and separate and not under the control or influence of another, otherwise the enemy knows how to get to you. He just gets to the other person who is weak. 

If you are united with them he will get to them, and through them he will get to you. It will be communicated and you will go down spiritually. You cannot understand where it is coming from. Cut your spiritual ties and be very careful of them. 

Cursed Objects

The final thing that brings a curse is an inanimate object. God told the Israelites,

"You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not worship or bow yourself down to worship them." 

Then He said, "You will not make any graven images. You will not make something out of the materials of this earth. You will not make an object and bow down and worship that." 

You say, "Well that's pretty primitive you know. In those days people would go and bow down to idols. We don't do that anymore today." 

Do you think those people were so stupid as to think that a piece of wood was their god?

No, it was not the piece of wood they were bowing down to. It was the spirit that was in that piece of wood. You see an idol is simply an object that is being used by a spirit to link into this world. 

Do you remember I said previously that only a spirit living in a body made from the materials of this world is able to bring about any influence in this world?

Satan and his demon spirits have no authority or power to bring a direct influence in this world until a man gives that license to them. But somehow it seems that spiritual essence can be contained in the elements of this world. 

Spiritual Power in an Object

Somehow a spiritual power can be imparted to and contained within a physical object.

That physical object then becomes a means of communication between the spirit world and the physical world. Contact is then made via the object with that spirit. 

This does not only apply to demon spirits. The Scripture tells us that God wrought special miracles by the hand of Paul; that aprons and cloths were laid on Paul's body, while the anointing of the Holy Spirit was upon him. 

Those pieces of material were then taken and laid on sick people and they were healed. They were laid on people who were demon possessed and the demons left.

There was a spiritual power contained in those objects. It seems strange but there was a power there. 

When the Ark of the Covenant was captured by the Philistines and they took it and put it in front of their god Dagon, Dagon could not stand the power. He fell down on his knees.

When that same Ark was taken to the house of Obededom, God blessed the whole household. There was a spirit contained in that object. 

When Joshua went into the land of Canaan after they had conquered Jericho, he warned each one of the soldiers who went in with them and said,

"When we go to plunder that city, destroy everything. You do not take anything that belongs to these people. These people are demon worshippers. They are contaminated. Do not touch the cursed things." 

The Scripture calls it, 'the accursed thing'. It says, Touch not the accursed thing. 

We know how Achan went and stole a garment, some gold and silver and went and hid them under his tent. As soon as he did that a curse came into the camp of Israel.

They went out against the small little city of Ai. They should have wiped them out, but as they arrived there suddenly fear took hold of them. 

Where does fear come from? What is fear a sign of? It is a curse. There was a curse in the camp that brought them under fear. They could not conquer the enemy.

God weeded out Achan and his household. And because his family had already become so contaminated by these things being in their home, God ordered that the whole family be destroyed. 

Do you know why? It is because the only way that you could get rid of the contamination in an idol was to destroy it. We will look at that shortly as we end this and see how we can deal with these things. 



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Way of Blessing Part 1 - Discovering Your Blessing - Chapter 22 of 26