Now if you go through there in Deuteronomy 28, and the verses in Deuteronomy 28 from Verse 15 through almost to Verse 45, it lists in detail what curses look like when they're operating, and so I've broken them down into a number of headings so you could identify them, and I've put the scripture reference there. They're pretty well all found in Deuteronomy 28. So firstly there's mental and emotional breakdown, so if there's a pattern in your family of mental or emotional breakdowns, there's almost certainly some spiritual power at work. If there's just one person, well there'd be something in that one person, but if there's several in the same family line, then there's obviously something has got an inroad in, so repeated patterns of mental or emotional breakdown. A second one is chronic disease or sickness. By chronic I mean it keeps repeating, it keeps repeating. The Lord will make pestilence cling to you until He's consumed you. He'll bring back to you all the sicknesses of Egypt, which you're afraid of, and they shall cling to you - so repeated cycles of sickness or disease, family sickness that can't be healed.
So we found in our family that, for example, one of my daughters had a particular skin condition that wouldn't go away, and it just persisted. We prayed and prayed and prayed, couldn't get rid of it, then she was just listening to the Lord, and He showed her how that one, it was rooted in anxiety, which is a family generational spirit, and also how she'd taken on responsibility for the rest of the family, when they were quite young. When she let all of that go, overnight the eczema all vanished. It was quite sudden, so there was clearly a spirit that was behind the sickness and infirmity.
Another one is history of women with problems with their womb, barrenness, they can't conceive at all; or miscarriages, they continually miscarry, have several miscarriages; or fertility problems or bleeding problems. These are often indication that there's some form of cursing is operating, and so it says cursed is the fruit of your body. Hosea talks in Hosea 9:14, that idolatry results in miscarriages, you've just cast off the fruit of your womb, so if you have a family, and you know that there's some form of regular and repeated problems that women have, there's almost certainly some form of cursing operating, and there can be many causes of the curse. We've got to find the root cause.
A fourth one is marriage and family breakdowns. If there's repeated patterns of marriage or family breakdowns, so they can never build marriage, it's like something is destroying marriage, something is destroying families, that often indicates that there's a curse operating - constant quarrelling and fighting, breakdowns - but it's the pattern of it. It's not just confined to one, it's actually in a family line. That's how we can see that it's generational, and it's a cursing of some kind. Another one is financial setbacks, where constantly there are setbacks, so the person's managing money the best they can, but no matter what they do, they keep getting these setbacks just when they should prosper. It could be constant lay-offs at work, harassment in the workplace, constant problems with housing, foreclosure on housing, problems with landlords. It's almost like everything around the provisional area of their life just keeps going wrong and toxic. Often there's a cursing around there.
Accident proneness - have you ever noticed some people are accident prone? If there's a history of it in your family then it's generational, and also there's an element or an area of it which is related to some curse, some demonic power. Freak accidents, regular car accidents, lots of broken limbs; these can indicate there's some hidden kind of curse operating, some spirit is operating. Remember the power of a curse is a spirit, the power of blessing is the Holy Spirit. A history of suicides or premature violent death, so if you look into your family background ,and you start to notice then that there are premature deaths or suicides, if there's more than one there's some kind of curses operating in the family, there's some kind of demonic power. Patterns of mistreatment and abuse, they also indicate that physical abuse, abusive relationships, those patterns are in the family, it would indicate: one, there's a cursing operating that needs to be broken; two, there are family patterns and habits that need to be changed.
Another one which I noticed in Genesis 4:11 was the inability to settle down, like being a gypsy. The person can never form roots, they're there for just a little while and then they just up, and for some reason when they've just been there long enough to start to prosper, suddenly they're up and we're shifting. There's no apparent reason, there's no work reason, it's just the person has got restless and feel like I need to move on, I need to move on.