Breaking The Cycle of Dysfunction

All right, well, welcome, everybody. Welcome all of our campuses in Bismarck, if you will. I'm grateful that you're here. My name is Josh, and I'm the lead pastor here at Evangel. Just nice to meet you if we've never met. And I'm gonna dive right in today. I wanna talk about our families, and I wanna talk about some of the challenges that we face with families. There's two forces at work in every family. One of those forces is the patterns that get passed down from generation to generation to generation to generation. And the other force at work is the cooperative grace of Jesus that breaks patterns in our lives and in our families. But cooperative grace, I mean, it's you doing your part and God's redeeming work in you, and you create a different future and a redeemed sense of story and family from maybe where it is that you started. How many of you know you don't just inherit eye color or ear size or these different physical attributes from your family, but there are patterns, there are tendencies, there are defaults, there are worldviews that are often handed down from one generation to the next. Our kids pattern their lives after their parents. I turned around to one of my kids in the car yesterday, my littlest, I'm really trying to keep her a baby

as long as possible. I'm just like, it's painful now how big she is. And I turned around and I looked at her and I said, Berkeley, I have to tell you something really serious. And she goes, that you love me? And I said, yeah, how'd you know? She goes, because you say that all the time. And I thought, well, that's the pattern I'm producing. I'm not sorry, okay? Because me, like you, there's other things that I know I'm producing in the life of my kids that I go, oh, they said that, I'm responsible for that. Or, oh, they acted that way, that looks a little bit like me. And I need God's cooperating grace as I parent just like the rest of us. Because what we nurture in our kids and what was nurtured in us eventually comes out of us. Or a lack of nurturing eventually comes out of us. So what happens when what is passed down to us from our parents or what we pass on to our kids is dysfunctional? What happens when there's things, and every family has dysfunction. And sometimes it takes you getting married or around other people for your new spouse to look at you and go, I love your family, but that thing they do is weird. It's so weird. We all have a little bit of dysfunction in us.

And so this is not just calling out one family. All of us exist. We're all trying to meet the mark of becoming more like Christ Jesus every day in our lives. So every family has a sense of dysfunction. How we address dysfunction varies among families. So how we address it can vary. And I specifically wanna get at what can happen in many of our families, especially in a culture that doesn't love confrontation. A culture like ours that is very honoring of family is what eventually happens is we have kind of this tendency to sweep things under the rug in our family. And to, sorry. Stay. We have this tendency to recognize or maybe not recognize that there's dysfunction in our families. And sometimes it's easier to just not deal with it. It's easier to pretend it doesn't exist. It's easy if a family member comes and tries to address dysfunction to be defensive or to say, no, like blood is thicker than water. You need to don't disrupt the family system, right? It's easier to do that. It's like sweeping things under a rug in your living room. At first it works, right? Everything looks clean and shiny. But then all of a sudden, people are walking through the home of your life

and they begin to trip over something that they were never meant to trip over. They begin to have to tiptoe around the baggage that now is present in the family. They say, we don't have dysfunction, we're fine. He's talking to everybody else in the room except our family. But what actually happens is we go on social media and we post things about our family that aren't actually a true representation of what's going on in our home. We have this need to like put on the perfect face. We treat each other really, really well in public or we're in church, knock it off. Act like a normal human and not an animal. But at home, maybe we're actually really passive aggressive. We don't deal with what's actually going on in our family. We just, we treat each other nice when people are watching, but we ignore each other or we're angry at each other or we're volcanic in our emotions when people are watching. Or maybe it's that there's things in your family that are actually really hurtful, but anytime you bring it up, people just get sarcastic and they joke it away and they tell you to just stop being so. sensitive, act more like a man and don't worry about that thing that actually hurt you or maybe you know there's secrets in your family that are that are dysfunctional or actually painful or actually abusive and you're like just don't talk about that because you have to protect the family and you have to protect the honor of the family name or maybe you use humor to avoid real conversations about what's going on in your family or maybe you work and sign up for sports and get

involved in a lot of activities and keep your kids running around and everybody gets up in the morning and gets out the door and gets home and makes dinner and turns on the tv so we never actually have to talk about the pain that's going on in our family and eventually you look around and you think it's kind of messy in here and there's a few different things that you can do when you realize there's dysfunction in your family there's a few different ways that you can interact in this service some of you this will hit really close to home and your immediate reaction is going to be we don't talk about that the rule of my family is you don't talk about the dysfunction don't bring it up and what we actually learn to do in our families is we take all of this and it's like when company shows up and you didn't know company was coming and you're like kids quick put it all in the closet and we go there's nothing there everything's normal and a kid tries to surface a conversation or adult kid tries to surface a conversation and it's shut down because we don't want to admit that there's anything under the rug but all of a sudden what was meant to be smooth walking becomes something that you can trip on or you step into that family system and you go there's something going on under the surface there is something happening or you you're in a family system where you have to tiptoe around certain things because we just don't talk about those things and so today what i want to get at is how do we break the cycle of dysfunction when we know there's dysfunction and i have a lot of material i have a lot of different types of dysfunction i'm not going to get to all of it today i'm just going to scrape the surface and i'm going to trust you and trust the holy spirit in you to dive in deeper as god illuminates in your own heart and in your family what is true or as he convicts and says this is something i want you to not ignore but i actually want you to look at it and what i'm actually just encouraging you to do is not to sweep problems under the rug but to actually sweep the house let's let's sweep the house let's be honest about what it's like to live here let's be honest about how we do conflict let's be honest about the ways that we were hurt and the pains that we have and there's this actually real crazy thing happening where there's all these people who are no longer talking to their parents and parents who are no longer talking to their kids because there's a disagreement about this and i'm encouraging you let's invite the conversation if you're if you're the parent you have to have an open heart that says you know what i know i didn't do things perfectly and i know that your story carries pain and i can validate that without carrying the hurt and if you're a child you can look at your parent and say hey there's a few things that happened that

caused pain or dysfunction in our family but i also understand that you parented according to how you were parented and you did the best with what you had and so it's not about who's right and who's wrong and who's bad it's about let's align our family and our family tree in a way that is honoring to christ and in a way that is is redemptive so let me show you i'm just no matter how bad your family is i'm going to show you a terrible one in scripture here's what the bible says the pattern is it says in exodus 20 i lay the sins of the parents upon their children so mom and dad miss the mark and it comes down to the next generation the entire family is affected so if you're parented a way that caused you pain i want to validate that if you parented according to what you thought was best and it caused pain even though you're doing your best i want to validate that it happens the entire family is affected even children in the third and fourth generations it can move through the family of those who reject me so it's for those who aren't following jesus this gets perpetuated over and over but if we follow christ it says i lavish unfailing love for a thousand generations what does love do love covers a multitude of sins i lavish unfailing love for a thousand generations what is the broken way three or four generations what is god's way love on a thousand generations on those who love me and obey my commands. God redeems the family. God changes family trees. God's grace abounds far more than our failures, amen? Exceedingly, abundantly more than we would think or imagine. And so, as we, if you uncover the early story of scripture, and if you're not familiar, let me just walk you through it. In Genesis 12 and Genesis 20, there's a guy named Abraham, one of the fathers of the faith. And Abraham comes into a situation in Genesis 12, 13, where he looks at his wife and he says, please tell Pharaoh, please tell Abimelech that you're my sister. Because if they find out that you're my wife, they're gonna kill me because of their interest in you. So, you're like, well, that's a little white lie to preserve Abraham's life. What's the problem? Because under the lie, under the surface, it's not just a lie, it is, I have to protect myself because I don't trust God to protect me. Underneath the dysfunctional approach is a lie of what I have to do to make up for where God might fall short. What happens next is that they perpetuate the lie. You go one generation down and you get to Isaac, Abraham's son. Isaac is standing before Abimelech and standing before the men of Gerar, and he tells them that Rebekah, his wife, is his sister to preserve his life. Here's what it says, when the men who lived there asked Isaac about his wife, Rebekah, she was very

beautiful. They were inquiring about her. He said, yeah, she's my sister. He was afraid to say she's my wife. He thought they will kill me to get to her because she is so beautiful. It gets a little funny, but sometime later, Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out his window and saw Isaac caressing Rebekah. And he goes, either that guy lied or something weird, really dysfunctional, is going on. And he says, immediately, Abimelech called for Isaac and exclaimed, she is obviously your wife. Why did you say she is my sister? Watch this. Isaac repeats the same lie as Abraham out of the same sense of fear using the same justification as his father. So you do something that seems right to you, but your children are watching. And the misalignment in you is now represented in your children. The misalignment in Abraham is now represented in Isaac. What happens next? Isaac and Rebekah have a son named Jacob. Jacob begins to work together with Rebekah, his mom, to deceive his father Isaac in Genesis 27 into believing that he's actually his brother Esau, so that Jacob can deceive his father. You see what's running in the family? Into giving him his brother's blessing. So Jacob's name actually means deceiver. So now you've gone from situational deception into a lifestyle of deception. Jacob's very name means deceiver. What happens next? Jacob has many sons. These sons collectively deceive their father into thinking their brother Joseph was killed when they sell him into slavery. And then they perpetuate the lie for years and years and years. Out of a motive of fear-based survival? No, out of jealousy and convenience. Abraham starts it. His son Isaac repeats it. His son Jacob becomes it. Jacob's sons collectively own it. How did my family get the way that my family is? One starts it, another repeats it, another becomes it, and now it's just the way that our family works. Dysfunctional, will deepen until it's dealt with. It doesn't just continue, it multiplies. The patterns of our families have a way of continuing unless we change the pattern. What is unaddressed in one generation becomes embedded in the next. So we have to break the cycle. You are empowered by Christ Jesus and his blood and the spirit of God at work in you to break the cycle of your family. You can honor your parents, you can honor your family name and still be honored. about what's under the rug. Parents, your children can honor you and still be honest about where the dysfunction was. And that is where we actually find healing in the midst of our dysfunction.

So there's several different, I don't have time to go through them, I'm not even gonna try today. This is one of those messages where I'm gonna open the can of worms, I'm going to hand it to you, and I'm gonna say, in Jesus' name, go home, read your Bible, trust the Holy Spirit, and get the help you need, dig into it, and find healing and wholeness. It doesn't all depend on me, and I release that, the pressure on myself right now that I feel to heal you, and I entrust it to Holy Spirit, to Jesus, who loves you more than I do. And his love will cover a multitude of sins. So one of the dysfunctions that we see in family is the chaotic family, a dysfunction of chaos. When a family lives in perpetual instability, this instability can be because of schedules, it can be because of erratic attitudes or responses. Ultimately, it's a lack of priorities. I've heard from our team before, you know, kids feel pressure to have a faith that their parents fail to embody. That mom and dad don't prioritize the things that they want to see in their family at the end, and yet they expect their kids to still embody those things. If you want your kid to have faith,

you gotta prioritize church. If you want your kid to have faith, you gotta prioritize reading your Bible. If you want your kid to have faith, you gotta prioritize praying more than, come Lord Jesus, be our guest. May this food to us be blessed, amen. You need to, it has to be a culture in your home of we follow Jesus. The Bible says Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The world is constantly gonna change, and if your family is busy chasing schedules and changing moods and chasing trends and chasing all these other priorities in life, we're not teaching our kids what comes first. What our children need to know is Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. So even if the world changes, mom and dad are anchored in Christ. We are anchored in Him, and that can't just be words. That has to be the lifestyle of people who are following Christ Jesus. I don't have time to say more about it today, but decide what the mission of your family is gonna be and live out that mission. Here's another system. Will you guys give me the next one? Next is the conflict-driven family. This is a dysfunction.

When a family lives in perpetual tension, every family has tension, but not every family should live in consistent, unresolved tension. This is sometimes what's under the rug is there's always a sense of, are mom and dad okay? There's always a sense of, are mom and dad angry? There's a sense of volcanic lava under the surface, and you never know when the top is gonna blow. Anybody know what I'm talking about? Tension is always gonna come up, but our arguments that are frequent, we should get help to get them resolved. Our tensions that are volcanic, we have to have a spirit of self-control and godliness in how we approach one another, even in conflict. I wanna say so much more about it, just not able to today. Tension is normal, but unresolved tension is not, and so we have to deal with conflict in a godly, healthy way. Let me give you the third one. The abusive family. When a family lives in perpetual harm, I didn't even talk about this one in the first service, but I wanna be clear about it today. An abusive family is when power is used to harm people, emotionally, physically, or verbal, and it's a home that ultimately is driven in fear and driven in anger. The safety of the home is compromised,

and I wanna be clear that abuse is never God's design. Some people act as though the worst possible thing they could go through is a failed marriage, but tolerating abuse, in my opinion, is worse because God sides with the oppressed, and he values your safety and your dignity more than maintaining an image. If you're being harmed, that is not conflict. That is abuse. And so, if that's your situation today, tell someone safe, a counselor, an authority figure, a trusted leader. Seek refuge. Don't stay silent, don't stay stuck. The Bible says defend the weak, rescue the weak. The church needs to seriously consider how we help people who are in this situation, and I just wanna give an appeal to parents. Most parents think, that won't happen to my kids. One in seven parents are wrong. And so part of your stewardship of your family's life is protecting your kids. is teaching them what is right, what is wrong, what is safe, what is unsafe. And this quickly makes a family dysfunctional. I don't wanna rush because I know this is a real part of people's lives and I wanna give you permission to get out and to find healing, hear me. I wanna give you permission to get out and to find healing. Let me give you the next one. Another dysfunction we see in families

is the unattuned family. When a family lives in a perpetual state of disconnection or neglect, this is emotional needs of people in the family being overlooked or minimized or ignored. Let me just say briefly, we have a whole generation of people who say, you know what, I was neglected because my dad never told me he loved me. He never told me he was proud of me. He offered everything for my family. He provided everything except himself. And what I really needed was him, more than all the things he provided. I'm telling you, parents, grandparents, that same risk is very, very prevalent today because we sit in rooms with our children and with our grandchildren while we look at everybody else's lives on social media and they're talking to us and we're not hearing it. I'm telling you, the screens, the screens, the screens, the social media, the distraction of watching somebody else's life go by is causing you to miss key moments in your own family. I'm not saying you can't have any of it, but you gotta have tight boundaries around where we bring our phones and when we spend time on our phones because what the last generation said, my parents didn't show me love in what they said. The next generation is gonna say,

my parents didn't show me love because of their neglect. They were distracted. They were distracted. And so let me encourage you to not only share about Jesus with your family, but share about your own life. Bring your full self to your family. Your family needs your presence. They need your presence in meaningful moments. They need your presence in emotional moments. They need your presence when they have needs that need to be met. You need to go in at bedtime and sit with your kids and not just lock them in their room and say, go to sleep, leave me alone. I had a long day. I got a show to watch. And I'm telling you, I'm not judging you. It's easy because I can spend all my emotions at this job. There's a lot to do. There's a lot going on if you haven't noticed. There's a lot happening. And I can go home at five o'clock every day, depleted and have nothing emotionally to give to my family and forget. And I want you to know, you're not the most important people in my life. My wife and my children are the most important people in my lives. And sometimes I say no to you so I can say yes to them

and I don't apologize for that. And it's okay for you to say no to other places. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world or to have a great job and yet forfeit his own family, forfeit his own soul? Shut off the screens, talk around the dinner table. I've told many, many guys in my life, leave your phone in the car when you get home and then go get it at eight or nine o'clock after you've had quality time with your family. Engage the hard stuff and be present. I don't have time to give you any more. Let me just bring this to resolution. You don't have to hate your family to admit the order was off. Parents, if your kids surface something that caused them pain when they were growing up, it doesn't mean that you failed. And if it does, we all fail. We all fall short. And some, there's so much to say. It's okay to say, hey, the priority was off. The order was off. We didn't handle conflict well. It's okay. You can't overcome something that you can't name. And if you refuse to let people name something, they will struggle to overcome. And if they do overcome, they'll struggle to include you in that journey.

So name it, call it out so that you can overcome it. It's not about blaming where you came from or where other people fell short. It's about deciding what will I carry forward in my family? Because you have three choices. You can hide dysfunction and pretend it's not there. You can normalize it and say, well, this is the way my parents were. This is just the way that we are. Blood is thicker than water. Don't challenge the family or you can redeem it. And you can say, we want to invite God into the dysfunction. Aren't you glad he gets in your dysfunction? Aren't you glad that he got into your sin condition and he set you free? He redeemed you. He changed you. So invite him into the dysfunction because God is faithful. Even when people. or not. He gives us opportunities to redeem our dysfunction and choose a new path. So let me bring the story to resolution. Joseph, cast off by his brothers, by their deception. His father doesn't even know he's alive. He's in Egypt. He's risen to a position of power. He has real authority. And guess what? All of a sudden his brothers show up in front of him. And he has the authority to exact revenge. And actually he starts out that way. He starts by, they don't recognize him. He's wearing Egyptian clothing and he probably has Egyptian makeup on and they don't even recognize that it's their brother that they sold off into slavery. And at first Joseph puts a cup in his younger brother's bag so they look guilty and they have to come back to Egypt. He deceives them. It's the pattern of deception that was passed from Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and on to Joseph. The deception is there. They don't recognize his face. He doesn't say who he is. But then

in Genesis 45, Joseph makes a decision that others in his family line refuse to make. And I love this part of scripture because Joseph is in this emotional turmoil of trying to figure out what to do. Do I trust God that he's able to protect, that he's able to heal? Or do I just kind of deal with people the way my family has always dealt with people? And in Genesis 45 he turns his face to the side and he weeps bitterly and then he goes, I am Joseph. And all the dysfunction and all the deception is laid bare. He reveals himself. He stops normalizing. He stops hiding the dysfunction and he breaks the cycle. Because what is revealed can be dealt with. And dysfunction revealed can be healed. Why was Joseph able to react differently? Because he made one inspired choice? No, because Joseph was formed differently. In Genesis 50, 20, he says what you intended for harm, God intended for good. You tried to break me. You introduced dysfunction. You followed the family line. But God saved me. He redeemed my story. And how now a whole nation of people, 2 million people later will be saved and will be the offspring of Joseph. Because he chose a different path. He refused to get stuck on what people did to him and he focused instead on what God was able to do through it. Come on, don't get stuck on what people did to you. Get focused on what God wants to do through your brokenness. Don't just look backwards at the pain. Look forward towards God's redemption. What he might do because of it. He revealed himself because God had already healed in him what people broke. He responds not out of what he had been through, but out of who he had become. Your family history can explain who you are, but it does not need to continue to define who you are. Why? Because, hallelujah, hallelujah. It's only by the blood. It's only by the blood. It's not about performance, or perfection, or striving. It's about the blood of Jesus that says you were this, and now you're that. You were here, and I have called you out, and I have set you apart for a purpose, for a plan, for a cause that I have for you. And so I want to take a moment today, not of emotion, but of quiet reflection, to say, Jesus, where did I receive something that was dysfunction? Where did I perpetuate dysfunction? Where have I hidden dysfunction? Because God will get in your story. He will radically transform you. But you are going to have to stop and invite him, and say, I apply the blood of Jesus to the way my family has done conflict, and in Jesus' name, I come out of agreement with the idea that it has to be avoided, and conflict is always bad, and I follow the path of Jesus that says the truth

in love. I come out of a pattern that says I have to be this way, and I follow the pattern of Christ Jesus. I forgive and I release people who cause me harm, and I turn my attention not to what they did, but what Christ Jesus, who redeems and heals and restores what he might do through it. The healing is not found in exploring the past only. The healing is found in inviting Christ into the future. What do you want to do next? So all across this room, across all our campuses, there's probably areas already that you've been thinking about where there's been dysfunction that you received or that you're perpetuating. And like I said, I don't, I'm not responsible. I'm trying to be as much as I can be, but ultimately the Holy Spirit needs to come and give you wisdom, give you peace, give you direction. So across this room, across all our campuses, close your eyes. Dickinson, Garrison, State Penitentiary, wherever you're at today. And now you, in your personal dynamic relationship with Christ Jesus, invite him in. Invite him in to those places of dysfunction and invite the healing work of the blood of Jesus to begin to restore, to begin to redeem, to begin to heal. Lord, where there's been emotion, I ask for godly wisdom and direction. Where there's been pain right now, Holy Spirit, would you come and touch and bring healing and wholeness.

Where there's been reactivity, we ask that you would bring resolution. Where families have been closed off to conversation, we ask for openness right now. Lord, we ask that what's under the rug would be exposed so that healing can come.