In this sermon, the speaker discusses the importance of understanding the spiritual world alongside the physical world. He emphasizes that humans are not just physical beings, but also spiritual beings. The speaker explains that communication between individuals occurs on a spiritual level, rather than just through physical senses. He also mentions the consequences of engaging in occult activities and the impact it can have on individuals and their descendants. The sermon concludes with a reading assignment from Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and the book of Daniel to further explore the topic of generational consequences.

Hello, this is Brother Denny. Welcome to Charity Ministries. Our desire is that your life would be blessed and changed by this message. This message is not copyrighted and is not to be bought or sold. You are welcome to make copies for your friends and neighbors. If you would like additional messages, please go to our website for a complete listing at www.charityministries.org. If you would like a catalog of other sermons, please call 1-800-227-7902 or write to Charity Ministries, 400 West Main Street, Suite 1, EFRA PA 17522. These messages are offered to all without charge by the free will offerings of God's people. A special thank you to all who support this ministry. In preparation for tomorrow evening's message, which will be based on the subject of generational sin and its consequences, I would like to assign to your reading Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 27 and 28, and the 9th chapter of the book of Daniel, verse 3 through 19. That will prepare you to better understand what I want to say tomorrow evening. This evening I wish to focus on the consequences of occult activity, of sorcery, witchcraft, in people's lives and in their descendants. That will also be partially the focus tomorrow evening. Now, this evening I will use some illustrations from real-life situations, and I will be using some names of people involved in those situations, and I wish to inform you that I have expressed permission to use those illustrations. One does not violate the seal of confession of what goes on in private unless you have that permission. Therefore, when I use names and places, you have the opportunity to go check with those people to whom I refer to see whether or not I am telling the truth. Turn with me in your Bibles to two passages of Scripture. The first found in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 5, verse 8 and 9. These are the first two commandments. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above, or on earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a zealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me. Let's go on to verse 10 as well. But showing lovingkindness to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. The second portion in the book of Lamentations, chapter 5. Lamentations follows Jeremiah. Verse 7. Our fathers sinned and are no more, and it is we who have borne their iniquities. But the prophet is saying, our forefathers have sinned. There are consequences of that sin that have come down to us. And nowhere is that more clearly seen than when family systems have been involved with occult practices. It becomes very apparent at that point. Now I am aware that communicating this kind of information is difficult. First of all, as we have already looked briefly at a world view. Most of us have entertained for most of our lives a North American world view, not a biblical one. Therefore we have difficulty in seeing the reality of the spirit world around us. However, the truth of the matter is, the Bible is very balanced. It recognizes a scientific world view as we have already looked at. And it also recognizes a spirit world. And the balance is in the middle. And we must keep that in perspective if we expect to understand the workings of both the Holy Spirit and the spirits of darkness. I am reminded to a marked degree of the story I heard of this particular church board that met. And in the course of deliberations they made a decision that they should have a new chandelier for the auditorium. So they gave orders to one of the trustees to see to it that it got purchased and got put up. And time went on and no chandelier appeared. They had another board meeting and they got asked of the trustee, didn't you buy that chandelier that we told you to? No, he says, I didn't. Well, why not? Well, he said, I have three reasons. In the first place, I cannot spell that big word. In the second place, if we did buy the thing, who would play it? And if we have extra money around here to spend, what we really need is a new light in the auditorium. I hope we don't have quite that problem this evening. We are not limited to only a physical world. We are also involved in a world of spirit. You see, you and I are spirit too. There is not communication going on between meat and bones here this evening. The communication is between spirit. All of us have been to funeral homes. The remains in the casket has no material difference in size than what it had a few days before. But there is no communication because the spirit has departed that body. The diagram is a person. This is our conscious side. And this is the subconscious. In this world, we have to deal with mass and space and time and energy. And we could add another dimension, the dimension of spirit. You and I have five senses. We can hear, we can see, smell, taste, and feel. Those five senses interact with what is going on in the world about us. And the conscious side of us programs that, makes sense of it, works it through. Let us say, in particular in a child, come very painful, difficult experiences. A child does not have the capacity to program hurt and pain. It hasn't developed that. Thus all that the child can do with the hurt and pain is shove it over here into the subconscious side. And it gets buried. When we become adults, and our circuits get overloaded and we have more to carry than what we can cope with, we consciously put the remainder over here and we bury it thinking we have gotten rid of it. No, we have not. Whatever you bury in the subconscious that is hurtful and painful will chew and gnaw at you until the day that you go get it, bring it over here, and program it. It is also the storehouse of dreams, visions, extrasensory perception, inherited abilities, and stored information. And whatever is over here will affect the other side. In fact, the subconscious is the prime motivator of what we do. The conscious side is only the programmer. Now, in families where occult practices are, the effects of those practices are going to be stored over here in the subconscious, even in succeeding generations. You find that working itself out in the realm of practical experience when you go to deal with the people that have problems in their lives. Now, I also invite you to notice that the conscious side consists of two things, the level of individual consciousness and the level of intuition. That will become apparent in another overhead that I will use after a while. Not all of the effects of occult activity, the sins of sorcery, will be found in the same person. And it does not afflict every member of a family the same. And sometimes it even skips a generation. I have learned from the years of experience that when practices of an occult nature cease in the family line but are never repented of, the worst problems appear two generations away. That's an awful price that our children and grandchildren pay for our own sins. One of the first things that you see in families where occult practices are is spiritual blindness. Such people are frequently offended at the very mention that the use of a divining rod to find a place to put the well or pow-wowing or plighting with the horoscope would be sin. They can't see it. I recall so vividly a particular Amish bishop that I confronted with his pow-wow practices. And he looked at me and said, what ails you? You know that those things work. I wasn't disputing that. I was raising questions of where the power came from. He couldn't see that. And he died with that kind of bondage in his life. Second, another thing that you notice in people's lives is lack of assurance of salvation. Now, our Bible is very clear. Passages like 1 John 5, 12, and 13. These things are written that you may know that you have salvation. What of God if he demands salvation and holy living and doesn't tell us when we have complied? You remember the overhead this morning? Authority, responsibility, accountability, affirmation, acceptance. People that are afflicted by these sins of sorcery invariably see that thing from the top down. They see God as carrying a big stick. They cannot see God as loving and accepting us where we are. And then affirming us so that we can become accountable to his authority. Another issue that one sees frequently, people do one of three things that are in such families. The one is wild Pentecostalism. They have a religious bent. A second thing that happens is atheism. And the most common one is legalism. A life that is ordered by rules and regulations. Not freedom and liberty in Christ, but some kind of man-made rules. Another issue, the inability to appropriate the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In a congregation where occult practices are being used, it is an impossibility to bring teaching about the person and work of the Holy Spirit. You won't get to first base. You've got to deal with this dark stuff first. Otherwise you never get there. Ancestral burdens. In families where occult practices are, you will find about four times the rate of the normal population. Of crippled, deformed, mentally retarded children born. Ancestral burdens flourish in those kind of places. Fifty-five percent of the mentally ill and the emotionally disturbed have occult involvements in their own life or the near ancestry. That factor was first researched in Germany by Dr. Alfred Leffler, a German psychiatrist, and Dr. Kurt Koch, the German medical psychologist who was a personal friend of ours. It was Dr. Koch who once said to Dr. Leffler, have you ever noticed the connection between mental illness and occult activity? And Leffler said, no, I never thought of it. He said, take a look. For the next fifteen years, those two men, independent of each other, researched that factor. They raised questions about occult activity and disturbed people's lives. At the end of the fifteen year period, they had twenty thousand case histories. And they came to the conclusion that it was about fifty-five percent. I'm not a good record keeper. I file far too much in my head, which is a poor place. My own judgment is that they are approximately correct, which is why the psychiatry and psychology cannot handle this kind of thing unless they're thoroughly Christian and approach it from that point of view. I could tell you, I think, enough stories to last till midnight about that very factor alone from the realm of experience. Tendencies to immorality. Lust. Those two things are close companions of occult activity and immorality in a family. Some types of epilepsy. Now notice I didn't say all epilepsy. I said some. I was speaking at a church near LaGrange, Indiana, perhaps fifteen years ago, on this very issue. After I finished the Sunday morning address, a woman by the name of Emma Miller came to me. And she said to me, Mention to me of a soul as brow-hazing-scent. You mean to tell me that pow-wowing is sin? I said, that is what I said this morning. And she cried. After she had gotten her composure together, she told me what she had done. The youngest son named Delbert, when he was a baby, cried day and night for three solid weeks. You can imagine what that did to parents. Medical science availed nothing. And finally, in desperation, they took the baby over to Moses Mast, who practiced the pow-wow business a lot. He performed his magic rituals and formulas. She explained to me very carefully what he did and what he said. And the child cried on. Half an hour later, he repeated the whole performance. And the child slept. It was the end of it. I learned a valuable lesson off of that one. If Satan needed two operations to perform his work, how much more ought Christians to pray? And now all was well with the child until it was six years of age, at which point he began to develop epileptic fits. Then she said to me, you mean to tell me that that was healed by the devil? I said, it was. And that's not all. I suspect that that epilepsy is not medical. She said, what do I do? I said, repent. Confess your sin. I said, I'm going to be at Phil Helfman's for dinner today. I'm speaking here again tonight. If you need help, come along. And I think you should inform the son. Where does he live? Well, he's married now. He's been under doctor's care for this epilepsy for 24 years. He lives in Fort Wayne. With that, we parted company. That afternoon, about three o'clock, there was a knock on the door. There stood Emma, her son, and his wife. Her husband had died in the interim period. We invited them in, talked with them quite a while. Finally, I said to them, The ball is in your court. It is your turn to play. Emma began to approach the matter from the standpoint of personal sin. And laid before the Lord the whole business of involvement with the sins of sorcery. When she finished, Delbert began to do the same from a generational point of view. You see, he had the problem, but it was not his fault. How could he help what was done to him as a baby? It was the fault of the parents and the family system. Thus he began to confess the ancestors' sins. When he finished, I began to pray with him. And at the end of the prayer, gave orders in Jesus' name to the powers of darkness that were behind the epilepsy, and command them to release the man. Because they had heard the confessions of the mother and the son. Informing the wicked spirits that that broke their stronghold. There was nothing dramatic about it. When I finished, Delbert looks at me. When you began to pray, I got that bitter taste in my mouth that always proceeds in attack. Before you finished, it was gone. I prayed the Lord, and I thought no more about it. The following Friday, I got a letter from a friend in Lawrence, Kansas. The letter began like this. What were you doing last Sunday afternoon, shortly after three o'clock? He said, I awoke from an afternoon nap with overwhelming compulsion to pray. You can imagine what I wrote to him. That was the end of the epilepsy. No more medication. Several years ago, I got a phone call one evening. Delbert Miller was on the other end of the line. He said, I have changed jobs, and I have moved back into the area. And I had to get it complete physical. And among other things, they ran an encephalogram on me. That's a test by which they look at the brain waves. A medical doctor does. If you have had medical epilepsy, it will always pick up the scars from it. He said there were no scars. Clear indication that the problem was demonic. Delbert has been doing fine. The problem has never returned. We had the same kind of problems with a group of people that came from Paris, Tennessee. The lamentable part of that situation was they couldn't stay in our area indefinitely. And the local church positively refused to plug in and lend them a helping hand. I was saddened by that. Because Christ has commissioned us to do this stuff. Thoughts and acts of suicide. I already made mention in an earlier address that in the past 25 years, I have investigated all the suicides that I came across in the Mennonite and Amish house. And I have yet to find one that isn't connected with either pow-wowing or the use of the divining rod, either in the person's own life or the near ancestry. That speaks volumes. Marital problems. Problems of the female reproductive system, in particular. Constant sickness and incurable disease. Some years back, a young couple by the name of Ezra and Leanna Smucker came to our congregation. Began attending there. They were about as dead spiritually as the doorknob out there on the door. About a year after they began attending, twins were born to them. And within the next year or so, one of the twins became ill one day. She called Dr. Engelmeyer and Napanee. Do this, and she did it. It got worse. She called again. Well, try this, and she did that, and it got worse yet. Finally, on a Thursday, she bundled up the baby and took it down to Dr. Engelmeyer's office. He took one look at the child and reached for his telephone and called the ambulance and sent the child to Osteopathic Hospital in South Bend. Sunday morning, I got a phone call from our pastor. Go round up the grandparents and bring them over. The child is not expected to live. So I complied. Got there about 10 o'clock. And I walked into the room to take a look at the child. And I'm no doctor by any means. I spent most of my working years in the metal trades. But I could see that the end was close. Breathing was very labored. His face was the color of ashes. Oxygen tent, nurse in attendance. As I walked out the door, who did I see in the hall but Dr. Engelmeyer? And I said to him, Doc, what's the matter with the child? He said, I don't know. I said, what? I tell you, I don't know the problem the child has. It's some respiratory ailment. I've consulted with four other physicians. We do not know what it is. But the end is here. With that, he walked down the hall. I knew the background of the family. So I got after the parents. Was that child powwowed over? Father said no. And Leanna packed up, yeah, Grandma did about three weeks ago when Rodney had the croup. So that's what I thought. I took the father. Went back into the bedside of the child. And I asked the nurse in attendance, may I pray over this child? Certainly. She stepped out of the way. Now I suspect that by now most of you have come to the conclusion that I'm not particularly weak in character. I found it impossible that morning to pray audibly. I couldn't do it. My mouth was glued shut. I silently, in Jesus' name, began to command the powers of darkness that were behind the illness and gave them orders to free the child from the grip. And we left the room. About 15 minutes later, there was consternation in that room. The nurses stood it in and out. The doctors came back and forth. The child's breathing returned to normal. The color came back in its face. A week later, the child was home, sound and well. And they finally had a great big 12-cylinder word for the ailment. The full impact of that particular happening didn't sink home to the parents for another year and a half. And one day it hit them like a ton of bricks. They began dealing with their own sins and with the sins of the generations behind them. Those two people turned from the deadest wood in the church to the livest people in the congregation. In fact, Leanna began making it her business to go to the garage sales, buy the Ouija boards, and hand out a sermon on it. What a switch. Rodney just got married a while ago. The reason for that kind of problem is here. The top level of man is the level of intuition. That's where you communicate with God. That's where you pray. That is the level where conviction of sin comes to you. The next level is the level of individual consciousness, where you reason, think, make decisions. It's that conscious side of the arrow that I had up earlier. Next is the individual subconsciousness, the open side of the arrow. Therein is the family subconscious, where the traits of your immediate family are stored. Then the collective subconsciousness, where all the traits of the human race lie. Next comes the organic subconscious, the heartbeat, breathing, the involuntary functions of the body, which we do not control. Then comes the organic, the meat and bones. Now if you have been treated for some organic illness by the powwow business, you see Satan being behind those practices is not on the level of God. He cannot produce genuine stuff. All he can do is produce a deception or a counterfeit. Therefore, you may get organic healing, but it's a trade-off. The problems are now shifted upstairs into the psychic. And the first two levels that are damaged are the level of intuition and the level of individual consciousness. That's where you make decisions of saving faith. That's why you find people preaching and teaching against assurance of salvation. That's why people who come from places where healing magic has been used, in many cases never come to salvation or they go into legalism or some wild stuff over here. And many rest in atheism because this level is damaged. Now, if you're healed of a mental illness by the same methods, organic stuff may appear. It's a shift. The only way that that can be handled is by genuine Christian faith. Repentance, confession, and in many cases direct address to the powers of darkness in Jesus' name. In our particular congregation, the family Earl and Gordon Walters, Earl's parents practiced taking their children to the powwow healers. There were six children. The oldest two, son and a daughter, were taken to the powwow healers. The rest of the family was never taken. The oldest son died an atheist. The daughter, a Unitarian and a serious cripple. And the daughter, as part of our congregation, had serious problems with her heart. She'd had rheumatic fever six times in life as a child. And she came to the age of around 40, and the heart valves began to fail. She was in bed 12, 15 hours a day. She could no longer function as a wife and mother. And one day she had some spiritual problem. I don't know what it was. It's none of my business. She went to the pastor with a problem. In the process of looking at the issue, all of a sudden he saw that she had fallen into trance. She wasn't there anymore. Now, he had enough understanding of such things that he began to put some pressure on it to find out what's going on here. And 22 wicked spirits surfaced in her who declared under pressure and the authority of Jesus' name that they had come in on the generational line of power. After a spirit named sickness was cast out in Jesus' name, the heart function returned to near normal. The surgeon had said, You must have surgery on your valves very soon if you expect to live. And they were thinking in that direction. Three weeks later she went back to the surgeon for checkup. And he listened and listened and listened and listened and listened and listened and listened to her heart function and finally declared, That medicine that I have been giving you has worked miracles. To this day she has a slight heart murmur. But she's living a normal, robust life. We found nearly identical problems in the oldest married daughter except for the heart problems. One night in a Bible study, we were studying the book of Ephesians and the passage in Ephesians 6 was being read and the next thing we knew she was sliding across the floor. It was way over there off her chair. It was more than the powers of darkness of a resident with her could take and she too was set free. From that problem by dealing with generational sin. I was speaking in the Mennonite Church in Topeka, Indiana perhaps about four years ago on a Sunday morning. Two Sundays in succession, two sessions each morning. One of the things that I did not know was that Moland's mass granddaughter was sitting right in front of me. She had been treated for a high fever by her grandfather at six years of age and the fever disappeared in the space of three hours. Now it's thirty years later and her life has been one damnable thing after another. She came under conviction that she needs to deal with that treatment that she got from her grandfather for the fever. So she confided in a friend. Together they laid the whole issue before the Lord. Before the day was over, that fever that had disappeared thirty years ago was back. It was so high it was dangerous. She went to the medical doctor. He examined her from stem to stern and said, I can find no reason for the fever. He sent her to the LaGrange Hospital. They ran a whole bunch of tests on her and said the same thing. She came home with a high fever. Next she called Gene Troyer, the pastor of the congregation. He summoned the elders of the church. They prayed over her, anointed her, gave orders to Satan in Jesus' name, take that fever and be gone, and she was freed like that. Praise the Lord. Our God is able to deliver. Extreme bed-wetting up into teenage years. That thing sticks out like a sore thumb. Sleepwalking, freak accidents, compulsive behavior and actions, severe behavioral and emotional problems. In a congregation where occult practices are, I can guarantee you gossip, strife, and dissension. It's there every time. People can't get along with each other. An inability to hear others. I remember a particular pastor whose mother was a powwow person. That man couldn't hear straight. If I would have told him that that ceiling was white, he'd likely have gone home and told his wife I said it was black. I wasn't the only person who had that problem. He couldn't hear anybody straight. An inability to forgive others is another point that one frequently sees. Haunted places. I could give you I don't know how many examples of that one. I was involved in one like that in the town of Granger, north of South Bend, about three weeks ago, where people had a haunted house. There are reasons for that. One, the curse put on the place by some sorcerer. Second, sorcery performed on the premises. A sorcerer that dies there, and a resident spirit remains because of it. A demonized person that lives there, in about half the cases you will have ghost phenomena around that person. In the other half you don't, and I don't know why that is. I do not know about this realm. Murder on the premises will bring it about. An ancestrally burdened person that lives there. Sometimes the spirits follow that family line to the place where they're living. There is another factor that fits nobody's theology. Sometimes the place is haunted by the spirits of the departed dead. I don't have the time to elaborate that this evening, but I have met that kind of thing on several different occasions just in the last couple years alone. Once in a while you find a place that is haunted because some aggressive Christian lives there who is actively engaged in the salvation of his neighborhood, but does not realize his position in Christ, that he has authority over the powers of darkness. Now, there are a few communities that don't have a haunted house. If there's one in your community, I recommend to you that you go buy it. You can get it cheap because nobody will live in the place. Then exercise your authority in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and deal with those resident spirits in the place. Live in it and demonstrate that this place is okay. Then sell it at a profit. Now let me illustrate. Two houses south of where we live, on the opposite side of the road, lives Dana and Diana Stickle. They began coming to our church some years ago. They were 15 years younger than my wife and I. We knew them casually. One evening they came out to the house. We invited them in. We talked about the wind and the weather and a few other things, and they went home. I said to Ed, I wonder what in the world they want. Oh, you think they want something? Yeah, I'm sure of it, but they didn't tell us. A couple evenings later they were back again. We talked about the wind and the weather some more, and they went home again. I said to Ed, they're checking us out to see whether they think we are reliable or not. It wasn't but a couple evenings later here they came again. She's the spokesman of the house, and she spit and sputtered and stammered. We've got something we'd like to tell you, but we're afraid you're going to laugh at us. So I assured them that I wasn't going to laugh at anything they had to say. Philip. Well, she began, we've got problems with our house. We go away at night and we lock all the doors, we turn out all the lights. We come home and the lights are on all over the house. And the doors are still locked. The dog barks at stuff we can't see. The doors open and shut by themselves. Here of late the curtains blow back and forth. We don't even have a forced air furnace. Then she said, you know we've been here a couple times before, and I said, yeah, I know. The night before we came the first time, it was moonlight. I got up to go to the bathroom. I didn't turn on any lights. And as I entered the bathroom, here are two black hands going to get me. She said, I screamed bloody murder. You have to know Diana to get full force with that one. I began to raise some questions about their own lives and what they were into. I found nothing amiss. So I began to raise questions about their ancestry. I knew that her father had been a tavern keeper, but again I ran into a blank wall. I didn't find anything wrong that would warrant this kind of stuff. So I began to raise questions about the former occupants of the house. Two owners prior to theirs I hated. The old lady that lived there, she was the neighborhood water diviner and the healing magician and painted the Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs on her stuff. She died there. Resident spirit. Next I asked them, do you people have absolute assurance of salvation? Yes, they said we do. So I prayed with them, gave them instructions what to do. You go home and exercise your God-given authority in Jesus Christ and give orders to those resident spirits to get off of the premises and go to the abyss where they belong. And they did. That was the end of the problem. Their faith blossomed like a rose. Wherever you have occult practices, you always have the possibility of demonic invasion in people's lives, either in the person's life that is practicing it, in the person's life upon whom it is practiced, or in the descendants. There is much more that could be said about this issue. Well, let me conclude with this one. Times there are violent deathbed scenes. And particularly is that connected with the powwow business. Those abilities are generally transferred from man to woman, woman to man. That isn't necessarily true. It can be transferred to any willing recipient. And often it comes through the generational lines. Or people have read and experimented. Those are the three ways by which it's perpetuated. The particular man that I'm referring to, I knew him very well. He was older than I. Fine, honest, upright man in the community. I suspect that some of you would know who he was if I mentioned the name. He was a member of one of the more conservative churches. The church house doors were open, he was there. In regard to his honesty and integrity, you could have trusted him with a half a million dollars of yours in his pocket. It would have been safe. He was the neighborhood water diviner and the healing magician, the powwow fella. Finally he contracted cancer and came the day to die. The pastor that was in attendance when he died told me what I'm going to tell you. And I had him retell the whole thing to me about two years ago to make sure I had all the facts. As the hour of death approached, he said to this man, Shall I read a chapter of the Bible to you, perhaps one of the Psalms? And all of a sudden in a voice not the man's own, No, get that book out of here, I can't stand it. The pastor nearly collapsed. And after he had regained his composure, he said to him, Shall I pray with you? Don't you dare. Tear out that wall over there, I've got to have room. Things are closing in on me. And with those words, he died. You see the true ownership of that man's spirit did not show up in life, but it did at death. He had served false gods all his life. Don't be deceived. God's not mocked. What you sow is what you reap. This evening, I suspect that the Spirit of God is speaking to many of you. I invite you to confession and repentance of personal involvements in these particular sins that I have been speaking about. There are those of you who have ancestors that have been involved in them. And you have burdened lives because of it. There are innocent children sitting here whose lives are burdened because of this stuff. And they need to be released too. The prophet Daniel brought the sins of his people to the Lord. Tomorrow evening, we want to look at this generational thing again in far more detail. And I suggest that when we finish tomorrow evening, that we begin to deal with the corporate sins of a people as well as the personal sins. That we may be set free to serve the living God. Think it over. Let us stand together. Maybe some of you that wish a personal work, I'm available for that if you wish.