Those of us who are born again, could have made the choice to rebel against God, wreaking havoc everywhere we go. Every one of us could have concocted an excuse for refusing to learn the right path to take.
We could say, "my parents abandoned me" or "my mother loved my brother more than me" or "my father wasn't around enough", or whatever other excuse we want to use to wallow in self pity rather than trust Christ, determining to do things His way.
No parent is perfect and some are pretty awful, however, did we stop to think that God gave us those parents? God knew before we were conceived that we would be in the family we were born to and He knew if we would be given another family to raise us.
A child's attitude is developed very early in life, perhaps as young as two. When a child is not nurtured, trained or protected by the time they are two, they develop an angry heart. We have adopted four children of our six. The four adopted children came at older ages.
When they entered our home, they did not see it as their new family, but as the next foster home. We didn't want to be foster parents, we wanted to adopt to give the children a sense of belonging. We were young and didn't realize that the anger at being taken from their natural parents, was festering in them all their lives to this very day. We thought if we gave them a stable family life with two parents, love and opportunity, they would come out of their anger and bitterness. As we grew in the Lord we realized that we forgot to take into account the choice of a child. The child must want the love and instruction before he can become anything other than how he was trained.
It was not a "generational curse", it was a sense of deep loss that motivated them to rebel against anyone who would be the authority, even if that authority was trying to help. Many adoptive parents have the same story. This is not a curse, it is by lack of love from natural parents and lack of proper training in their early life. It is not an excuse for their behavior though, if we want to think in humanistic terms, everyone has a "reason" for being rebellious and angry, when things don't go the way we want them to. When we reach a certain age, we have a choice to depart from the way we were raised or follow in the foot steps of rebellious parents.
Moses was raised by the Pharaoh, after his mother placed him in the river to spare him death at the hands of the Egyptians. He was nursed by his own mother for the first early years of his life, then his time was spent with his adoptive father, learning to build cities and lead people. The end result was a confident young man who had training and skills to lead his people out of captivity. He suffered persecution when the Lord opened his eyes to who he really was, and later was given the task of freeing God's people from bondage. Notice too that Moses was with his natural mother for the formative years before she went out of the picture.
Then there was Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his own brothers, thrown into a well, later to become a leader in Egypt where his brothers ended up bowing down to him. Joseph could have harbored bitterness and hate toward wicked brothers, but instead he got on with the life God had for him and even forgave when the brothers were repentant.
God was the engineer in all of this, for His purposes, and the misery was not to be compared to the glory that these men saw, the power of God was clear as time went on.
Those who are adopted and have seen miserable times before you entered your new home, I want to encourage you that you do not have to harbor bitterness and anger over your circumstances, you can choose to confess the sin of pride and anger while trusting Christ for salvation and deliverance from the hate that comforted you as young children and through your life.
The devil loves to remind us of our past misery, if he can keep us in a "one down" position he can cause great destruction in our lives. His favorite tactic is to keep us bitter and angry over the past, never allowing us to move beyond that afflicted condition.
Adopted children, this is for you, God tested you for years, in sometimes very difficult circumstances. He did not cause you to engage in the attitudes you chose, He merely did what would cause those attitudes to emerge, they were already there. When someone responds badly to provocation, that attitude did not develop instantaneously, it was already in there waiting for the time when it would be incited by people or circumstances.
Matthew 7:16-18
"16 You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? 17 So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit"
God allows us testing so that we will see our own hearts. When difficult and even miserable circumstances come, they are to drudge out the inner self, that we might confess that sin, we may not have known was in there.
When a battered child grows up and finds Christ, there is forgiveness in their heart, ready and willing to forgive those who have hurt them. They are no longer bent on self destruction because of hate, they are on the road to healing, ready to live for Christ, setting aside all of their past to go to live the present as if there never was a past.
After all, Christ forgets our past when He forgives us, what right have we to hold onto a painful and destructive past. The past is not here now, why waste any time on it. Our future is dependent on today, right now, not the past.
1 John 1:9
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
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