V.         THE FAMILY OF MAN

In the Epistle which he sent to the Ephesian Church, Paul wrote what has been called the Prayer for Families:

        For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
        Now to Him who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, to Him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.
(Ephesians 3:14-20 RSV)

God ordained the family as the framework within which His children come to know the riches of His glory. Through this visible evidence of our Heavenly Father's love, communicated to us by our earthly father within the family relationship, we come to be strengthened in our spirit, so that Christ might readily be brought to dwell in us. Thus, we come to know the totality of the love of God in Christ, in order that we might pass it on to our children. That the love of the Living Christ was not known to us for such a long time is a result of our having been spent our early years amid families rooted and grounded not in love, but in pain. These families could not function as God ordained.

God models for us the father's role of spiritual headship within the family structure by His unconditional love for us: not only by warmly affirming our special place in His heart, but by refusing to mitigate the consequences of our disobedience. This discipline is balanced by His ready forgiveness of the repentant in heart. Today, as Christians, through His power at work in us, we strive to restore this order that was missing from our families of origin into the families of our procreation. By doing this, daily we build and guarantee the blessing of a strong foundation to future generations.

Elsewhere in Ephesians, we learn more of what the family is intended to be. It begins with a perfect union. Paul writes:

"For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one." This is a great mystery, and I take it to mean Christ and the Church. (Ephesians 5:31-32 RSV)

The Father God created human children and, in His desire for their well being, gave commandments and laws to direct their behavior. Later Christ the Bridegroom, through His love and sacrifice, empowered His Church to become a pure and spotless Bride. In the same manner, a family exists through the creation, direction, sacrifice, and empowerment by the husband and father. The spiritual headship of his family has been delegated to the man for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church (Ephesians 5:23 RSV).

A man's family becomes a direct reflection of his capacity to know and obey God. Because all relationships within the family structure are given order from the top down, the head of the family is to mirror the perfect relationship God desires to have with all His children. As He is not a despot, men are not to force their will upon their families. They are to love their wives as Christ loved the Church - even unto death and as they love themselves. Furthermore, although the wife submits to her husband as the head of the family, her husband also is to be submitted unto her (Ephesians 5:21-27). They no longer exist separately but are synergized, the initiative and expression of an idea whose time has come. Members of a perfect union actively seek to know each other's will and to conform themselves to please each other. They do this as a reflection of God's love for us, who wants to spend time with us, to know us, to give us the desires of our heart, even as the desire to know Him comes to eclipse all others. Finally, as the Creator is revealed in the creation, the union is known by its fruit, the children. Parents are to raise their children according to the admonition of the Lord, to nourish and guide them but not frustrate or humiliate them, as these short term solutions are always counterproductive (Ephesians 6: 1-4).

Because we must develop within our families behavior which we rarely saw modeled as children, we often find ourselves battling the residue of dysfunction, ingrained and inherited. We've been through the Recovery process, but victory over the negative compulsions that were killing us doesn't mean that we don't still find ourselves struggling with our socially acceptable obsessions, like perfectionism, workaholism, cleanliness, appearance, or fitness. Therefore, we sacrifice our children on these altars too.

We can only rise above our roots through total surrender to our Father God. In His perfect time, through the instruction of His Word and the manifestation of His Spirit within us, He matures us. We are His perfectible children, capable of becoming wise, discerning, mature parents, through His process of straining and releasing. Thus, we scruff off our bondages and simultaneously grow out of "the legalisms of childhood, the narcissisms of adolescence, [and] the perfectionisms of an adulthood spent futilely seeking self-acceptance."[1] When we are finally free to see ourselves as He sees us, we can accept ourselves as He accepts us, filled with imperfections but ever striving for that perfect heart.

At the very center of this book is the conclusion: that we cannot change ourselves from the outside in. True change must come outward from within. Secular psychology, in all its very credible strengths, cannot penetrate to the very core of our being, that spirit man - in which we were dead, into which came new life. There is no therapy apart from surrender to God with the ability to accomplish the miracle that changes people who are dug into themselves - as those under rejection always are - because they filter everything through spiritual darkness. And every impulse that tries to penetrate the walls is interpreted as an attack upon the very essence of that wounded, struggling self.

Our maturation is conditional upon our recognition and acceptance of the Lord's ability to heal the past. You can't stuff it into a back closet and nail it up, that hurt you suffered in the past at the hands of those parents whom God appointed to love and nurture you. As the past loses its ability to wound, the curse of rejection is broken.

THE DISINTEGRATING FAMILY

If the family is ordained by God to be the vehicle through which He is first perceived, it should not surprise us that in a society where families are disintegrating, God is becoming more distant. The absence of the natural father from the family of his creation is the single greatest problem in this nation today, in terms of body, soul, and spirit. In this void can be found the root of rejection causing today's social decay, as children grow up without male bonding, without discipline, without role models, and without the ability to trust in others for love and security.

Children need those parents whose souls united in their creation. Nowhere is the relationship of body, soul, and spirit so intertwined or revealed as it is in this process by which personhood is achieved. If some part of the structure is uprooted before the cycle of life is complete, before the child experiences a complete evolution in the relationship with his parents that is necessary to develop him and move him into adulthood, something is likely to remain missing from his character.

First, there is the nature of the loss itself. Behavioral pediatrician Dr. Paul Warren writes:

The most devastating thing that can happen in a kid's life, bar none, is to lose either a parent or the parents' marriage union. The loss and the rupture of that union, whether avoidable or not, constitute abandonment. [2]

Secondly, there is the shame. The impact of this most visible form of rejection - having a father who has proved that he doesn't want to be around you--cannot be underestimated. When we are children, the spirit of rejection translates the pain of this great loss into rejection of ourselves; as we mature, it projects our suffering, for our survival, onto others.

In addition, children raised in one parent-families often lack a completed identity. The divine tension God has ordained to exist in a marriage union, that pull and tug between a man's outward directedness and a woman's inward directedness, is instrumental in developing rounded character. A child grows up believing, absorbing from, and imitating parents. In the same way, your relationship with your parents, whether healthy or dysfunctional, determines your spiritual equilibrium. Thus, throughout your life, the spirit will unfailingly strive against the unfamiliar to restore the conditions of the familiar, for better or worse, as the place where your life appears to be in balance.

A model of Life Development Stages was mapped out by Erik Erikson, who hypothesized that a child must resolve a crisis at each stage of maturation (see below). [3] The child of a single parent, whose father or mother will not or cannot participate in the development process, often fails to accomplish one or more of these tasks, while the likely result of each failure makes each succeeding step more difficult.

THE LEGACY OF DIVORCE

Jesus did not hold with the teachings of Moses' day permitting divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1-4). Instead, He based his teachings on what God told the Prophet Malachi: I hate divorce (2:16 RSV). It was less important to consider the way in which people's feelings for one another can change, than it was to consider spiritual laws. Upon marriage the two become one; despite how they feel, they can never again be not-one. Jesus said: What therefore God has joined together let no man put asunder (Matthew 19:7). Whenever a person puts self-will above God's will, there will be spiritual consequences.

All authority in the kingdom of God flows downward from above. Therefore, a man has been given authority over and responsibility for his household. However, fallen man will not submit to God, nor fallen woman to her husband's authority. Therefore, our society, like that of Moses' day, believes it can regulate marriage more effectively than God.

People divorce because their hearts are hardened. Caught in emotional upheaval, they do not rationally decide to divorce. As they stumble their way through the unraveling of lives, trapped in rejection's self-protection mode, they can only see things their own way. No one deliberately sets out to be a bad parent.

Most families end when the father leaves. Many divorced women will tell you that their children are better off than when their fathers were around. It is true that not all fathers are whole fathers. A father who is present in the home but is unable to fulfill his responsibilities for the physical, psychological, and spiritual development of his children is not a whole father. Certainly the presence of an abusive or chemically dependent father is not often an improvement over no father at all. A mother's duty to her children begins with physical protection.

Paul tells us: No man hates his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it (Ephesians 5:29). It follows therefore that if a man hates the wife he is one with or the children who are part of him, it is not his doing. It is the imprint of spiritual darkness, flowing down the generations. People spoil or beat their children as they were spoiled or beaten.

Stress related family problems are all compounded when a single parent must bear the burden of raising the children alone. In a South Carolina jail is a troubled young woman whose father's suicide prevented identity completion. Buckling under the stress of another broken relationship and vexed by a spirit of suicide, she took the lives of the precious babies whose identities she could not unmesh from her own - in search of equilibrium. [4] What a great price society is paying for saying that fathers need not be present to participate in the raising of their children.

Not surprisingly, many single mothers had unhappy relationships with their own fathers. An African American friend, whose college age daughter was raised in a stable two-parent home, spoke of her daughter's friends, most of whom were pregnant or had young children out of wedlock. "She tells me that they hate their fathers, that they say just awful things about them--for deserting them, for never coming around. And now look, they have done the exact same thing to their own children."

The family is the traditional vehicle for socialization, for teaching the next generation the lessons of society. However, people invariably imitate those behaviors that they see modeled. As I talk to my classes, I find that as single parents they have little appreciation of the concept of socialization. How do we teach people to stay married if no one in the family stays married? On the contrary, women grow harder, while men grow less responsible.

To say that married couples with children should stay together is more idealistic than real-life, even in the Christian community. Former drug czar William Bennet recently maintained that divorce is far more damaging than the homosexual movement, if you look at "what divorce has done to this society."[5] Yet how often do we hear preaching about divorce? If we project the repercussions of the trend to separate, rather than work problems out, beyond the obvious poverty and lack of discipline, into the realm of spiritual identity, we would see that the two issues are not that far apart.

Whether raised in single parent homes, in blended families by step fathers, or most especially in "rainbow" households, of two "mothers" or "fathers" unaffirmed in their own gender identity, children of disrupted homes have a much harder time finding the masculine influence necessary to properly complete life stage tasks. Children raised without fathers are far more likely to have identity development problems that manifest as homosexuality. In the escalating stress of the end-times, will we put our own house in order? Noncommitment teaches noncommitment, just as a strong female role model as head of the house conditions gender confusion.

THE PROCESS OF BECOMING

The identity formation process, as described by Christian psychologist Leanne Payne, is both simple and complex. As a child, you begin life as an extension of your mother, first of her body, then of her soul, her personality. After your physical separation from her, your mother continues to nurture you and provide for all your physical and emotional needs, while the father's role during these early years is to provide stability and, through the laying down and enforcing of laws, to teach limits. Where bonding is secure, though identity remains mother-centered, the circle grows. A stable male presence enhances the sense of security with the balance it provides. With the onset of those physical changes which culminate in adulthood, the father's role becomes predominate. His affirming masculine presence influences two areas crucial to wholeness: independence and gender identity.[6]

Generally speaking, in psychological terms, although each relationship is unique, even within a single family, there are some clear distinctions between the role of each parent in identity development. The spiritual consequences of identity development follow from the capacity of each parent to fulfill his or her God-given role, for ultimately masculine and feminine transcend the human body. They are spiritual conditions. Each person must develop both a masculine and feminine side. In the parents' ability to be both a parent and a role model is the proper balance achieved.

First, the role of your father is to complete a child's identity, both psychologically and spiritually. He has the capacity to recognize and affirm the growing child as a distinct human being, capable of making decisions, worthy of both guidance and respect. Thus, he enables the cutting loose of identity--"cutting the cord," as we hear it called, followed by "cutting the apron strings." Spiritually, a mother's love is central to her being. Manifesting in protection, it is a blind love, transcending circumstance, appearance, or behavior. Psychologically, the feminine relationship-dependent nature of the mother means that her reluctantance to "cut the cord" needs to be offset by the robust, independence-centered masculine presence.

This process must be realized in both young men and young women if they are to become whole as adults. Payne writes:

        It is the father (or father substitute) who affirms sons and daughters in their sexual identity and therefore as persons. The most important [reason] is that at puberty and adolescence we are listening for the masculine voice. It is the strong, masculine love and affirmation coming through that voice that convinces us that we are truly and finally separate from our mothers. We are born not knowing ourselves as separate from her. If we came to a sense of well-being or of being at all, it was through her love--or that of a good mother substitute. Her eyes, as we nestled in her arms, became the umbilical cord, the life-giving conduit of love through which our sense of being was affirmed, and we began to understand that we were separate and worthy entities in our own right. In other words, we slowly began the arduous task of separating our identity from hers.
        The crisis in masculinity consists in the fact that this separation and affirmation of identity is not happening today. We do not come out of puberty and adolescence affirmed as persons. Psychologists have long pointed out that the progression from infancy to maturity involves many steps of psychosocial development, and when we miss one of these we are in trouble. The step of self-acceptance ideally comes just after puberty. The key to taking this step, on the ordinary human level, lies in the love and affirmation of a whole father. Just as the mother is so vital in those first months of life, so is the father in this later period. No matter how whole the mother is psychologically and spiritually, she cannot bridge the gap left by the missing father.[7]

In many families today the mother has the dominant role, and the spiritual headship of the family, for better or worse, has become hers. When the father is unaffirmed in his own identity, he cannot pass affirmation on to his children. In our society, many children do not break loose from their mother's identity. The child grows but does not mature, can never know self acceptance. Inside, the child remains, waiting and manipulating circumstances to attain the instant gratification that is equated with love.

An intensification of this problem comes when the identity cannot form. A dominant, domineering mother (like may simply refuse to allow her child a separate existence, just as a wheedling, dependent mother can hold the identity in bondage. The child's life stays mother centered. The suppressed identity then becomes destructive, of the self or the mother, to force the separation.[8]Lee Harvey Oswald's mother's overwhelming personality can be partially blamed for the death of President Kennedy, as her son's blind bid to gain identity forever linked his name to that of his famous victim.

In addition to identity formation during the early years of life, a father plays a crucial role in instilling gender identity in children of both sexes as they go through adolescence. For the growing boy, the father both provides a role model and gives encouragement to developing masculine traits. Of equal importance, he instills in a growing girl confidence in her role in relation to the opposite sex. A New York psychotherapist summed up the father's contribution: "A boy has to know what it's like to be a man. A girl has to know a man can love her." [9]

The importance of a masculine role model in the life of a growing boy cannot be overestimated. The father is the primary avenue through which a young man forms his own gender identity apart from his mother. If the masculine presence is missing, he is always lacking a part of himself. He may complicate matters more by using his mother as a role model, developing effeminate mannerisms that further suppress his masculine development. The result is often homosexuality, an eroticization of a stage of identity development that is never passed through. Driven to repeatedly try to "cannibalize" the missing part of himself by possessing other men, begun at an early age in indulged sexual fantasies, overt homosexual behavior is both a surrender to lust and a quest for self. The main reason why so many homosexual relationships are so intense and yet so fleeting is that no one can put on the rest of their identity in a union with another person. [10]That is the definition of codependent love.

More than any other compulsive behavior, homosexuality, born of an identity development crisis, plays into Satan's hands. Without God, it is virtually impossible to break out of it. Indeed, secular psychology throws up its hands and calls the doomed, guilt-ridden behavior of suffering people a natural factor of birth, a self-affirming lifestyle choice. Instead, it is a sad legacy of masculine identity development that could not be completed.

But the saddest fact of all is that, in blind tests, homosexuals have proved to be no less well adjusted than most straight people. This is an era of identity crisis, compounding and causing a variety of weaknesses that bring sin and further unhappiness. Male or female, you must be complete in and of yourself before you can give yourself in love to another. And it is hard to be whole when you didn't have all the pieces necessary for completeness in place and functioning when you needed them, as you were working your way through the developmental stages of your life.

The father's role in a daughter's development is equally crucial. For the developing girl, the father who provides affirmation of her physical womanness furnishes a positive form of male love that conditions her relationships with men for the rest of her life. If she has this affirmation, she can develop as an independent person, outgrowing the dependencies of youth, to be able to give herself to her husband as a whole person and for the right reasons. Without it, she takes to the streets to find the man who loves her. Secular psychology has at last recognized this trend:

Girls whose relationships with their fathers have been severely damaged by divorce or their parents' nonmarriage are more likely to engage in a frantic quest for male approval and to seek love through early sex than are girls from intact families. [11]

Spiritually, a heavy toll is paid by the girl who is continually driven to rebel against, while at the same time frantically trying to gain, masculine love and affirmation. She repeats the failed spiritual relationship with her father again and again, like a broken record, each time confident of success, but each time learning the same lesson of rejection, just dressed up as different men. She too may turn to homosexuality, to escape this pattern of abuse, especially if her relationship with her mother was not close. She, too, cries for completion.

HONORING GOD'S PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE

Altogether too many women suffer from rejection. To a greater or lesser extent, it goes with the territory. Satan, the accuser of the brethren, has a direct line to our heart. Women under rejection drive their anger inward. We seldom open up with automatic weapons in the post office or the local McDonalds, but we put our efforts instead to self-destruction. Rather than busting people up, we take pills, drink and do drugs, starve ourselves, gorge and purge ourselves, or make ourselves available to every man who comes along. We are desperate for love but will settle for equilibrium as a substitute, or oblivion as a last resort. And then, what we went through we visit helplessly upon our kids, so that they might go the way that we went, to break our hearts again.

We have this great and ongoing need for love. Typical also, that we should automatically blame ourselves if we can't get it. We over-correct, we deny, we pretend, we make do - but all the while that little girl within is searching the bottom of the pit for the unconditional acceptance that we've never trusted anyone to give us, that's the missing part of ourselves. The pattern of development, though subject to much circumstantial variation, is still essentially the same in every one of us.

This I conclude, after much study and ministry, that my life has been rather typical for a female under rejection: bouncing from one lover to another, hooked on one or more assorted substances, up and down in weight, up and down in mood, unable to find peace, unable to deal with the pain, every self-propelled or protectionist effort making failure more inevitable. Like so many others, I was trapped inside myself, never realizing what was happening, waking up one day to find everything that made life worth living was gone.

Like most women under rejection, beneath the surface of my addictions lurked codependency and the need to control, pervasive behavior patterns developed to cope with childhood pain, that remained when other addictions had been outgrown. I always expected the men I loved would hurt me; I at least got the satisfaction of always being right about that. Though none had hurt me physically before, I spent my life with my other husbands waiting to be left, which I always was.

"Do you mean," I once asked a therapist, "that if I got out of this one, I would end up in another relationship just like it?"

"Probably," he said. What a horrifying thought!

I finally learned the lesson that completes identity: that happiness without God is impossible. Through Him I found peace. Through Him, my mind, a sewer of bitterness, self-pity, and self-destruction, was renewed. The work He did in me was against all odds. And then the changes in the heart of my husband came suddenly, miraculously. Many times I had written him off as doomed! But when I came to know what it was to be crazy enough to depend on God alone, that was when He went to work.

Sometimes I think that it was for this one reason alone that God spared me, when so many of my friends became casualties of the age: that I saw among the rejected so much to love. Before I knew what love was, I did it all wrong. Love God's way is different. When His love flows through you to those who need it so, beginning with the ones closest to you, you begin to live. Across the expanses of time and eternity, cutting through whatever darkness has bound you, this love is destined to stream, a living water that washes loose what has held you back, setting you free.

Do not be afraid; at last you can rest in His arms. This is what you have been waiting for, to be held and warmed by a True Father's love, the missing piece of you, in the bliss of which your heart can cry: Abba, Father! (Romans 8:15 Amp).

ABBA, FATHER

There are many in the world today who would deny that God is a Father. Instead, they maintain, He is androgynous, masculine and feminine, or perhaps a Big Mama. It was the Judeo-Christian "myth" that has made God masculine, they maintain, another facet of man's need to dominate. Thus the Father God represents an insurgence against the natural cycles of life. Man's desire has always been to exploit rather than live in harmony with nature, at the center of which is Mother Earth. Those who hold to these philosophies have never known a father's love.

These female based religions point to the great spiritual need a child has for a father. When you are young, the picture you come to have of the Father-God is determined by how you are treated by and how you view your earthly father--you have no other basis of comparison. Think about it. Your early relationship with God was almost completely conditioned by the relationship you had with your natural father.

If you believed that your father didn't care anything about you, was distant, cold, or too busy for you, chances are you assumed that God was also. If you had to do negative things to attract your father's attention, you probably flew in the face of God the Father in the same way. If your father was weak and a pushover, you played the same games with God. If, like me, your father was repressive/permissive, angry and dictatorial while always drawing and redrawing boundaries, you no doubt adopted the same sullen and rebellious attitude toward God that I did. If you hated your natural father and blamed him for all the misery you had to endure, the way my husband did, you maybe had little use for God either, to whom you attributed all the suffering in the world.

But, on the other hand, if you had a loving father, who protected, nourished, and guided you, while still holding you accountable for your behavior, you have had little difficulty transferring your love for him - and your desire to please him - to the loving, caring Heavenly Father who has always wanted you to prosper and be in health. [12]

However, this loving relationship was not the one that most of us grew up with.

If we look at society as a whole, we see, in the trend toward fatherless families, the insidious influence of the thief. Because it sets the tone for all spiritual relationships, there is a direct relationship between the increasing absence of loving fathers from today's family setting and the increasing humanism and godlessness of our nation. At best, most Americans relate to God distantly - He's up there somewhere. Maybe He loves all His children, but He is impossible to fathom; He plays no active role in their lives. And as for the moral standards He dictates - well, obviously those were intended for a different time. It is generally accepted that, had the Bible been written today, it would have reflected a greater and more politically correct acceptance of life-style diversity. God may as well not exist for the average American, except when he is in a tight spot - then he gets real religious. God is like the father he goes to only when he needs to be bailed out - oh yes, and on holidays. At best, the average American worships his life, liberty, and the pursuit of "property," which, revealingly, was translated as "happiness" in the Declaration of Independence - his rights and his possessions.

At worst, the average American can be found worshipping much more malevolent forces: his own evolving human potential, the earth mother or rejuvenated pagan deities, "channelled" demon powers, or Satan himself. God created man with a spiritual longing. We will fill up the void with something. The presence of a responsible, moral, loving father on earth makes it likely that we will fill it up with the Father God.

FAMILY VALUES: RETHINKING COMMITMENT

A Father to the fatherless, and a Judge of the widowed, is God in His holy habitation. God sets the solitary in families; He brings out those that are bound: but those who turn away dwell in a parched land.
(Psalm 68:5-6)

If God didn't want marriages to endure throughout a lifetime, the consequences of divorce would surely not be so traumatic and enduring. If we look at the original language of this passage, we see that widowed plainly means "divorced." While God is Father to the fatherless, He will also fairly judge those who are responsible for the great upheaval in their children's lives.

In His judgment, God looks on the heart. He knows that no divorce is entirely one person's fault, just as He knows the stress that a family is under when everything is falling apart. Those who call upon His Name will be delivered and restored. But the rebellious (RSV) will spend their lives in the glaring white light (Amp) of rejection.

God considers any marriage to be worth saving. And He's not a God of miracles for nothing. Where even one partner is faithful to believe His promises and is willing to pay the cost of surrender, He goes to work. No marriage looked more hopeless than mine. Now, as I feel the slow but steady growth of a new togetherness with my husband, I'm able to realize why God wanted me to stick it out.

I have learned that marriages don't just happen, especially if the patterns of behavior you carry into them did not work in your family of origin. In our society, we are so caught up in the romantic ideal of eros, "being in love," with its main emphasis on physical attraction, that we automatically assume this feeling will conquer all the difficulties we might encounter in learning to live together. Of all people, I ought to have learned that you cannot base a marriage on the ability of another person to make you feel good. What happens when you stop feeling good, when the person you married no longer meets your needs, and you start reacting out of rejection instead of "love." What I always did was start looking for someone else who could make me feel good.

My brothers and sisters, you need to work on your marriages before they fall apart. It is estimated that marriages go downhill for approximately 18 months before one partner or the other actively seeks divorce. Surely in that time something can be done to save many of these unions between people who, after all, loved each other once. Get help, from as many sources as possible. You need knowledge. And you need someone who is trained and discerning to break through the patterns of your family's dysfunction. You need to learn new behaviors: how to communicate, to make your needs known, and to meet your partner's needs as well. You also need to work on yourself. You need to recognize when you are reacting out of ingrained rejection. You need to overcome the past. Maintaining our marriages is God's will for our lives.

Marriages take work; however, some marriages are over. There is no condemnation now for what happened in the past. Nor should you stay with someone who is abusive, if you or your children are in danger. Work can and should begin where you are today, even if the only thing you can do today is pray. Prayer can crack the darkness born of rejection, to bring the rebellious to their senses.

In conclusion, as married couples, we need not only to reassess why we are together and what the consequences will likely be to our children if we separate, but we also need to decide to do things God's way. Christ's love for us, agape, is "the love-feast of commitment." We came together as one, perhaps hurriedly, unduly influenced by flowing juices, codependency, or other hidden agendas, and out of our union came precious, innocent children. Our obligation is to give them what is best for their future. We cannot fall back "in love," perhaps, but being "in for the long haul" has its own satisfactions. The consequences of obedience are always blessings.

Growth is a slow process, in which things usually get worse before they get better. As the buried stuff works its way out, commitment alone may be what saves you. Nevertheless, the God who disengages you from the land of parched emotions has promised to complete the work He began in you, to bring you to a land flowing with peace and mutual enjoyment.

RECONCILIATION

This is very hard; you might not want to hear it. But even as the key to the kingdom of Heaven is the reconciliation of each person to the Father who created him--that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself (2 Corinthians 5:19)--so too the key to kingdom realities in this life must be the reconciliation of the adult child to his or her own natural father. Once again, a part of your reconciliation to God must be your decision now to reconcile with your natural father, whether living or dead. This need to understand the relationship to - and to be at peace with - your father is a pang in the heart of every human being who ever came out of a dysfunctional family. And it turns out that the degree to which both husband and wife cannot make peace in their heart, with the families they came out of, exactly matches the degree to which their souls will pass on the unfinished business of rejection. Or so says God:

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the heart of fathers to their children and the heart of children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse. (Malachi 4:5-6 RSV)

The meaning of this passage is very precise. In the Hebrew, father means "father," children means "children," and heart means "heart." All fathers, all children, all hearts.

Look around you: this scripture was intended for today. The great and terrible day of the Lord - it is expected and longed for by those of us who exist as aliens and strangers in the midst of a land so cursed: this land of fatherless children. As surely as we have eyes to see, these appear to be the last days, of which Paul writes in his second letter to Timothy. The signs of His coming are revealed by children who have been trained up disobedient to parents, without natural affection (Timothy 3:1-5 KJ). What we see about us resembles Paul's vision, but it is not itself the curse of Malachi's prophesy. Rather, it is the result of the curse.

What then is the curse? The word used here, cherem, in the Hebrew surely does mean curse: "appointed to utter destruction, extermination." But the method stands reminiscent of quite another verse, for cherem also means ensnarement, "as shutting in a net." What is this curse? What is this snare? The fear of man brings a snare (Proverbs 29:25). Rejection.

Could it be that the cause of rejection is simply this: that the hearts of the fathers are not turned to their children, nor the hearts of the children to their fathers? Revealed by God to His servant so many generations past is a curse of rejection for today, worn as stripes upon the land: in each broken relationship between a father and the children that are his seed, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, image of his image, from the first Adam down to today.

In my family, rejection most certainly came through the hardness of my father's heart; not a one of us was unaffected. In my husband's life, it was the same: a hard, intolerant father unable to cope, five survivors, lives scrambled by depression, violence, chaos, compulsion, addiction, guilt.

Consider your own life, you, who sit in your various prisons that were as surely the consequences of sins you inherited as they were of sins you committed. Was there anything that you have ever done in your life, any hurt that you have suffered or inflicted, that couldn't have been avoided if you only had known - and known how to return--a father's affirming love?

And even now, with your own children, are you handicapped by what you never knew? You try to love, but the love cannot break through. What breaks through instead is the insecurity of a drivenness that never lets you rest or accept the work of your children without criticism. What breaks through instead is the inability to reach out, the anger, the frustration that, as hard as you try, you can't seem to change--and, at the bottom of it all, that persistent, relentless need to control.

While I was writing this chapter the first time, my own father died. At his funeral, I had, naturally, mixed emotions. I cried, we cried, not so much for the mortal whose time was up, but for what should have been between a father and his children that never was. Though Jesus healed this relationship for me, enabling me during these last few years to know the love that my father was never able to ever give, to show him the honor and respect that he was due, I had suffered greatly from that curse.

My Papa was a man who, to outer appearances, was a good father: he worked hard, provided security, didn't beat us, sent us to college, and gave us many good things. But ultimately, he was selfish. Maybe he loved us, but he never gave us his heart. He only did for us that which fit into his desires for himself. When you didn't fit, about three-quarters of the time in my case, he would throw down on you in a rage targeted right at where the child in you was the most vulnerable. Life and death were in the power of his tongue; he held nothing back. And nobody learned how to get back at or extort or manipulate those controlling sensibilities better than I. Now, how do I not pass this on?

A powerful demon resides in the parent/child conflict. In Ephesians Paul says: Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath (6:4). If we examine provoke (parorgizo) in the Greek, we find it means "to anger alongside." Para means "beside or on account of." The word for anger is orge, a violent passion, "as a reaching forth or excitement of the mind, a justifiable abhorrence." What one of us, locked in combat with our children, has not felt this unnatural anger, this loathing, flooding our senses, destroying all sense? And there before us, in a child's angry face, is mirrored the rage with which we once confronted the generation that came before. Parent/child anger, vehicle of transference for the demonic spirit of orge, is indeed an addiction, a passionate blackness that reaches out from the parent and grabs the child. It stays with the child until the child becomes a parent, till it springs up out of nowhere, forgotten memories of your father staring you in the face, to destroy the generation to come. Not all families have orge; but all families that have it will have children in rebellion. How can we break the curse?

The curse is a complicated one. Certainly, anger would never manifest if children would simply do what you tell them to do when you tell them to do it. But children, like all humans, resist control. You see!

Your wrath springs from that controlling spirit which dominates all lives rooted in rejection. Having its genesis in a family characterized by insecurity, the need to control is a predictable world view for someone from a family that lacked balance. It's as if you grew up on a teeter toter that never went up and down the way it should have, that someone else was always jarring your teeth on to suit their own drivenness. Now that you are older, you are the one who runs the teeter totter. So that controlling spirit stays when all others have been cast away, a selfishness, born of fear, that denies by its very ugliness the kingdom of God within us. The controlling spirit says: "I will care for myself because no one else cares for me. I must be in control. To protect myself, I'll have to control you also, if not by my love, then by my addictions. I cannot face a world that is beyond my control."

Given this selfishness, how can the hearts of the fathers and the children turn to one another? Jesus continues Malachi's prophesy:

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John; and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.(Matthew 11:12-15 RSV)

We must take a moment to examine this scripture. If John is Elijah, who came and who is to come, the kingdom of God, which had not yet come, was even then coming soon. The prophecies were to meet and be fulfilled in the Lord's Visitation, in a triumphal procession on Palm Sunday that led first to the Cross, then to the sky, to forever change the relationship between God and man. And even now, we too await Elijah; the kingdom will soon come again.

The kingdom of heaven has its existence in two worlds: first, in the world of the spirit, that was and is and is to be, a world eternal; also, in a world that is encased temporarily in humankind, alive in time. Spirit and flesh: we are both. And God, through love, gave His only Son to save us - not merely from the human tragedy that accompanies the end of each body's mortal time, but, in the timeless world, from an eternity apart from Him, the curse of disobedience. These coexistent worlds, bisected by beings of both light and darkness, do suffer great violence in the lives of men, as Satan relentlessly tightens his grip on what is his. Of all ages, this is the most violent. Satan too feels the tugging--and the shortening of his time.

The kingdom suffers violence. From the beginning of time, rejection has shown itself a violent curse: it gives birth to violent gods. We read in the prophets how the heart of God ached for the sufferings of His children, brought upon themselves through weakness, idolatry. But the prophets foretold also the violent breaking of the curse. When the set time had come, the only hope of glory, the Messiah, appeared for a brief span of time to take back the kingdom for the children of God. To take it back required force, the violent death of a perfectly submitted Son at the hands of violent men. In the glory of His Resurrection, God opened His arms to His children once again.

How do we break the curse of rejection? How are we to overcome the compulsions we inherited that keep us in darkness, the compulsions that wound the hearts of our children? What can we do to break the curse, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers? Jesus told us: we take the kingdom as He did, violently, by force. He showed us the way: the death that is required. And just as surely He calls upon us to die, as He died, to self.

The death to self is indeed a violent death. Think about it. It is not a death to the flesh, not even to its pleasures, but to lusting after those pleasures - the everpresent craving for what we want. We alone. This unfulfilled lust is what makes the flesh cry out. That's why we were addicts; that's why our children suffer rejection at our hands. How can we die to self? How can we let it go?

The answer can only be born within each person in surrender. Therein lies the victory. Paul said:

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.(Galatians 2:20 KJ)

Christ could allow Himself to be crucified because He had surrendered His will to the will of the Father; thus He was empowered to do what His flesh resisted. As our hearts come to accept the necessity to giving up the fight to control, we too are empowered to surrender. As Freddy told me:

"You die to self by choosing to die to self. And don't think you've done it - because you must choose continually to do it. The flesh never dies, not while you're alive. You don't want it to die especially; you want to hang in here for a little while - at least till you make things right. But the choice you have to make is not to let the flesh rule. You can't let it rule you, whether it's anger or drugs or some other habit that's trying to make you its slave. You must choose not to let it. And then, when that choice becomes the choice of the spirit in your inner man, not just a choice in the mind over the outer man, the self dies. When the Holy Spirit moves in to seal your deliverance, you find yourself delivered. But you're never going to be delivered of everything. It's continual battle, continual choice." The process is never complete; the deed is never done. Paul said: I die daily (1 Corinthians 15:31). You have to keep on doing it.

It is the same for all kingdom promises--a continual battle, to die to self, to live for Christ. But the ardent, violent multitudes (Amp) will take the kingdom of God by force. What choice do we have? We must die to self if we want His kingdom to come in our lives. Are we ready to pay the price? Only if we die to self can we pass on the kingdom of God. Only then can our hearts turn to our children without selfishness, without competition, without the conflict born of rejection.

To live out agape, we must die: to all addictions of bone and marrow. By dying to the lust of the flesh - for all substances, all things, all actions, all people - we can be free to raise our children, to fatten them and bring them up straight and tall, in the admonition of the Lord. Only then can we break the curse of rejection, and with it that controlling spirit that takes care of its own only. When we die to self, we surrender control to God. And in every progressive surrender, in every progressive death, we see His miracle. He loves us and takes care of us far better than we could ever love or care for ourselves.

But what about the heart of the father who rejected us, whose control we fought? Unfortunately, for most of us, too often the yearning for reconciliation with this earthly father goes unrealized: it's less painful to put the puzzle of the past to bed without the missing piece than it is to imagine the picture whole.

Therefore, an ache remains in God's heart, too, that prevents His complete reconciliation with His children. His forgiveness cannot flow to us until it can flow through us (Mark 11:25). Furthermore, no one's sins can truly be forgiven if another retains them (John 20:23). There is more to this reconciliation than is obvious.

All family dysfunction begins with the father, who is held accountable for the sins of his household (Genesis 3:17; Deuteronomy 21:18). One day, in fasting and prayer, the Lord showed me the urgent priority we must give to the restoration of the father-child bond within our families. I saw Jerusalem, the city set on the hill. Before the city, Jesus was preaching; it was as though I was among those listening. Our hearts anguished, for the Lord Himself was in great distress. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, He cried,

killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken.
(Luke 13:34-35)

I heard Him describe the wretchedness of a people cut off from their Father: their emptiness, their alienation, their reliance upon the mere form of worship to compensate for the absence of the Living God. At this point, Jesus seemed to be looking at me, and He said: "Many of my people are cut off from their fathers also. A person who has rejected his natural father has rejected a part of himself; therefore, how can he ever know the fullness of the love of God, the Father of Life."

As Christians coming out of bondage, we carry with us the scars of dysfunction, not only the ravishment of our addictions, but also the feelings of failure, of never being able to do enough, of needing to control, of self-righteous anger. All are a function of that rejection we suffered from our natural fathers.

Rejection of your natural father, of whose flesh you are flesh to the nucleus of every cell, is rejection of yourself. It is also a tremendous spiritual force. As you in retaliation reject the one who rejected you, you make that self-love of the Great Commandment virtually impossible. Your father, for better or worse, made you what you are. If you experienced his love and acceptance, you grew straight and healthy. If you experienced his rejection, your development was extremely difficult. Weak or bent, craving self-esteem, you were prone to the shifting winds of fortune.

Jesus then gave me a prayer of reconciliation. Though given for a special group at a special time, the urgency embraces us all. Jesus is preaching reconciliation and renewal, a return, a new beginning, in a different key, as the apple of your Father's eye. Didn't He Himself upon the cross know this same rejection, the sins of the world upon His back, of a Father Who turned away. His reconciliation and return to His Father, the purpose of His resurrection, is the prototype for ours.

Therefore, if you have not made peace with your natural father, living or dead, this prayer is most assuredly also for you. I invite you to pray now, that your restoration into the family of God might be total and complete, that the curse of rejection for your children might be broken:

        Father God, in Jesus' Name, I lift up my natural father to you. I confess that I have been cut off from my father, I confess that I have failed to honor my father. Lord, forgive me. For you say that in you every family on earth and in heaven is named. Therefore, to be in your family, I must be at one with my family.
        Lord, I lift up my father to you now. I see him before me now. I see my eyes in his eyes, and in his being, I acknowledge my being. Jesus, I ask you to enter into this relationship now and heal it.
        Come quickly, Lord, in whom all relationships are renewed. Touch us, Lord, and make our relationship new in you. Touch my father, Lord. Let your love flow through him into me. You say that no man hates his own flesh; therefore, I know that my father loves me. I renounce his rejection of me as the scheme of the enemy.
Lord Jesus, I confess that I want my father's love. I earnestly desire it. I renounce any blockage to this love. I forgive my father for his rejection of me; by the strength you have given me, Father God, I ask his forgiveness for my rejection of him. Now, in this moment, I pledge to enter into a new relationship with my father. Cleanse our hearts toward one another, Lord, that we might be strengthened in our inner man.
I confess that it is only through reconciliation with my father that I might begin to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge. I confess that it is now my great joy that I am filled with all the fullness of God. Thank you, Lord Jesus. We pray in your Name. Amen.

FOR HIS GLORY

The reason He has spared us, my brother, my sister, is for His glory, that His glory might be manifested in our lives. You see, it was for a purpose. I knew, says the Lord,

that you would deal very treacherously, that from birth you were called a rebel. For my Name's sake I will defer my anger, for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, that I may not cut you off. Behold, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be polluted? My glory I will not give to another. Hearken to me, O Jacob, and Israel, whom I called. I am He, I am the first, and I am the last. (Isaiah 48:9-12 Amp)

Outcasts never have easy lives. But now you are restored by Grace, so that the world might know His glory.

Take heart, if you struggle in your flesh or in your family with a situation that does not seem to get any better. Trust the God who delivered you from yourself to deliver you from your circumstances. Pray instead of despairing; use God's Word to put Him in remembrance of His promises. Those who hold out till the end always reap the blessing. Just look at Israel, a nation again, the fig tree putting out its shoot before the end will come.

Take a lesson from God's prophecy for Israel: through tribulation comes salvation; from cursing, blessing. And for daily courage, we have assurance that we have been adopted by and are heirs of a loving Heavenly Father, who has told us:

       I will not in any way fail you nor give you up nor leave you without support. I will not, I will not, I will not, in any degree, leave you helpless, nor forsake nor let you down nor relax my hold on you! Assuredly not!
(Hebrews 13:5 Amp)

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NOTES

1.        Leanne Payne, Crisis in Masculinity (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway Books, 1985) 13.

2.        Paul Meier, Frank Minirth, and Robert Helmfelt, Kids Who Share Our Pain.(Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers)19.

3.       Erik K. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. (NY: Norton, 1963) Chapter 7.

4.       Richard Gelles, qtd in John McCormick, "Why Parents Kill," Newsweek (14 Nov. 1994) 31.

5.      "Divorce vs. Homosexuality," National & International Religion Report, Vol. 8. Rpt in Pacesetters' Path (6 Nov. 1994) 2.

6.        Payne, 13-15.

7.        Payne, 14-15.

8.        The consulting psychiatrist wrote of a 17-year old who had killed his mother that he "had become increasingly aware of his lack of identity. . . . It had come to him that his only alternatives were to either commit suicide or destroy his oppressor." Paul Mones, When a Child Kills (NY: Pocket Books, 1992) 219.

9.        Jane Mattes, qtd in Lee Smith, "The New Wave of Illegitimacy," Fortune (18 Apr.1994) 94.
10.      Payne, 13-15.

11.      Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "The Failure of Sex Education," Atlantic Monthly (Oct. 1994) 72.

12.       Phil Davis, The Father I Never Knew (Colorado Springs, CO: Navipress, 1991, 59-63.

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