I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.
2 Timothy 1:5
Timothy’s faith was something that came to him through his mother and grandmother. God always intended faith to be generational. Over and over in the Old and New Testaments, God reminds us that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Exodus 3:6, 15; Matthew 22:32; Acts 3:13). He is the God who passes blessing from one generation to the next. He is the God who remembers the promises He made to the last generation in order to fulfill them in the present generation.
Yet, the enemy tries to exploit this generational truth. If an ancestor of ours sins and that sin goes unaccounted for by the blood of Jesus, the enemy uses that as a legal precedent to invade the family line and pass down generational curses. This is one reason why we see common patters of sin passed down in families from one generation to the next (alcoholism, sexual sin, abuse, anger, poverty, curses from Freemasonry and other cults and false religions, etc).
The good news of the gospel is that we now have the authority, in Christ, to apply the blood of Jesus to any sin of our ancestor and see it canceled in Jesus’ name! That is our new inheritance in Christ. But we must be intentional about it.
The Lord warned the Hebrew people about the cost of disobedience in the family line:
The Lord passed by before him and proclaimed: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness, keeping loyal love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But he by no means leaves the guilty unpunished, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children and children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”
Exodus 34:5-7
God’s character is described clearly here. He is compassionate and gracious. He is slow to anger and abounding in unconditional love. He is loyal and loves to pass blessing down from one generation to the next. He loves to forgive and show grace.
Yet, God is also perfectly just. It is impossible for Him to be unjust. Sin must be accounted for. That is why He sent His own Son to die for us. So that when we apply the blood of Jesus to the doorframe of our lives, the enemy will have no access. But if we are unaware that the enemy will sometimes try to use the sin of our parents, grandparents and ancestors against us, we don’t know to apply the blood of Jesus to it.
Below is a simple prayer you can pray to separate you from the sin of each preceding generation in your family line. Do this back to the 4th generation as a biblical precedent.
“In the name of Jesus, I declare the blood of Jesus to stand between me and (my parents, my grandparents, the 3rd, the 4th) generation as a wall of separation. I cancel every assignment of darkness. I remove every right of the demonic to afflict me because of the sin of that generation. And I call to me my righteous inheritance and blessings of that generation.”
(Rodney Hogue, Empowered)
Fire and Light 