Out of all the thousands of people living in Old Testament times, God chose Abraham to be the father of Israel.  He kept the purity of the family line intact so that one day, generations later, that same line would be the human ancestry of His Son, Jesus Christ.  Throughout the hundreds of years in-between He carefully chose who would contribute to the flow of generational blessings, sometimes going to great lengths to introduce new flavors as He did with Ruth and Boaz.  While we cannot possibly grasp all the layers of complexity that contributed to Jesus’ family tree, we can be sure of one thing.

It mattered to God.

As a member of the Godhead, Jesus was immortal and outside the boundaries of time.  Yet, in His humanity He walked in exquisite synchronization with Divine time, anchored in His place in history.  He fully received the cascade of blessings the Father had been building over the centuries.  He knew Who He was, what He was there for, and all the lives that had contributed to Him being there.

It still matters to God.

He watches over our ancestry too.  He knows who contributes to the flow of blessings, who walked in their God-given design and who perverted it.  He is profoundly aware of each person’s place in the timeline of history and what role they were meant to play.  He recognizes AND wishes to leverage the personal and national resources that lie within our ancestry.  If only it mattered to us as much as it matters to Him.

In the course of this article it is my hope to ignite some passion in you concerning this topic.  There are significant resources we lose when we are not connected to our past – whether it be our land of birth, our heritage or our personal lives.  Equally important is the lack of emotional grounding that occurs when we disconnect ourselves from our timeline and embrace only the parts of our past that we like.

In this day and age most people know very little about where they came from. Thousands of years of human history combined with increased mobility has made the family line more like a bush than a tree.  But even so, the real tragedy is that most people just don’t care, or worse yet, try to forget.  With this in mind, we are going to start with the topic of reconciliation.

Reconciling to Your Past
If you are someone who has done your best to forget where you came from, can you articulate why that is?  Was it something that happened in your lifetime?  Or a story passed down to you from your parents?  Or maybe it is even a vague sense of shame that echoes down to do you from the generations?  Maybe your family is known for a particular set of behaviors and you couldn’t wait to get out of town and live in a city where no-one knew what your last name meant.  There are some families that carry the stain of their ancestors for decades.  Perhaps it was when your grandfather or great-grandfather came to the land where you are now, and it wasn’t cool to be whatever nationality he was.  Perhaps there was even a name change, in order to hide the bloodlines.  Perhaps it goes back even farther in the generations.  I dealt with this regarding my French roots.  We can trace my French heritage back as far as the 1500s and the persecution of the French Huguenots.  We fled France and settled in England, until my great-grandfather brought the Caldecourt name to America.  For much of my life I had an unexplainable distaste for the French.  Once I began working on my ancestral roots, I discovered it was because of the persecution from my own people, and when I dealt with that, the inner conflict disappeared.  But it wasn’t until then that I could fully embrace the “Frenchness” in my blood.

Sadly, for many people a major cause for reconciliation is simple prejudice.  You dislike your roots because your skin is the wrong color, you came from the wrong side of the country or the poor side of town.  These kinds of things cause people to flee their roots and never look back.  In this and any of the other situations, the pain is real and justified.  However, the chasm created cannot be left unhealed.  It separates you from a significant part of who you are.

It takes a revelation from God to show us where He was in the midst of the pain, especially when it happened in our own lifetime.  Thankfully, He is quite willing to show us where His fingerprints were, why He allowed the things to happen, and even more, what benefit they bring to our lives now.  It is only your perspective that blocks you from seeing Him redeem the gnarly knots of your family tree.  Are you willing to see God in the midst of a mess?  Are you willing to accept a God who allowed (or even caused!) the mess?  Don’t be afraid to take the most colossal hurt to the Father, along with all your anger and bitterness.  It’s not too big for Him.  Let Him show you how He orchestrated events, intervened in people’s lives, broke some and healed others, in order to give you what you need to carry out the generational calling on your life.  Let Him show you your family line through HIS eyes.  And always remember, just because others may freeze-frame their definition of your family doesn’t mean YOU have to, and it certainly doesn’t mean that God does!

One thing I have learned in these last few years of my healing journey is that our lives are a continual process of healing and growth.  We must always be open to Father revealing a blind spot, a hidden issue, or a place where we can go from +3 to +40.  However, with the perspective of continual healing in mind, it is still important to invest in the positive aspects of our heritage.  Deal with whatever reconciliation is necessary for you to even see the positive things, and then begin to look for the things your heritage contributes to your life.  Not only will it ground you more deeply in time, but these are resources you can offer the King.

One of those positive aspects is the redemptive gifts of our nationalities.

Redemptive Gifts of Nations
If we think of this process as a series of concentric circles, the redemptive gift of nations is one of the outer circles.  All nationalities have a Redemptive Gift, and even though your personal gift is a stronger force than your nationality, it is still a part of you.  Do you know the redemptive gift of your people?  The mix of gifts in your ancestry may vary depending on how many nationalities are present.  For me, there are four strong European lines, and then my American heritage, which is the land where I was born and raised.  I have English (Ruler), French (Exhorter), German (Prophet), and Swiss (Giver), and America is Prophet.  Depending on how close you are to the roots of your family, you may or may not see clearly the imprint of the gift.  Since I am American by birth, I see most clearly the imprint of this Prophet nation.  However, the Ruler influence of England is also visible in my love for the monarchy.  There is something about the governmental structure of England that resonates with my spirit, and plays into the part of my calling that deals with government.

As you look at these dynamics, I suggest you ask God why He brought these particular gifts together to be represented in you, and what aspects of them He wants to release in your life.  What is it that He wants to do with you because you have the Ruler gift of England as a part of your heritage?  Or the Prophet gift of Germany?  Or whatever may be the case for you?  Once you have a picture of what resonates with your spirit begin to explore what you need to do to develop it.  Do you need to study history or learn a skill or immerse yourself in that part of the culture or structure of the country in order to fully unpack what is in your spirit?

Now we will move a circle or two inward and look at some elements that are specific to your family line.  The first of these is generational blessings.

Generational Blessings
Many of you are already familiar with this concept through the teachings of Arthur Burk.  If any of you have not read the book “Relentless Generational Blessings”, I suggest you stop reading right now and go buy it.  It is a critical piece that is missing from contemporary Christian teaching.  This concept resonates with the picture of your timeline being like a stream, and you are standing in the middle of it.  What was done upstream from you (your ancestors) has an effect on you, just like your life has an effect on those downstream from you (your physical and spiritual seed).  It is important that I bring this up for two reasons.  One is to restate the necessity of appropriating the generational blessings.  This may be done at a particular season of life or through a ceremony or even just as you feel God directing you to pray.  Remember to ask for the blessings to flow according to His time and sequence.  It is not up to us to decide when and how, just that we are positioned to receive and use them.

The second is to state the importance of living in a way that sends more blessings downstream.  It’s not just about receiving all the good stuff that other people lived and died for.  It’s about YOU investing in healing, growth, and righteousness so that those who come behind you will have a richer flavor of resources released to them.  Do you want your son or daughter or grandchild or great-great-grandchild to be a giant in the Kingdom of God?  Then do what you can NOW to make that happen.  Have you bought the book yet?  If not, go do it.  You will not regret it for a moment.

Historical Contributions
Next, let’s look at some specific people in your generations.  What do you know or what can you learn about the things accomplished by people in your family line?  Have there been any stories of great exploits passed down through the generations?  Or if nothing grand and glorious, people who portrayed great strength of spirit, tenacity, courage, wisdom or such in their daily lives?  For many of those who left a homeland and immigrated somewhere else (as is the case with most Americans!) their life was hard.  They had to build a home from scratch in a foreign country and it required great patience, sacrifice, and tenacity.  While history may not remember them, they still portrayed a noble set of character traits that do honor to the family.  Whether it was this kind of scenario or any other, it is worth learning about the heroes in the family and emotionally connecting with their contribution to your heritage.

Celebrate them!

Ok, now for the specific people who none of us wants to admit exist …

The Black Sheep
As every family has their heroes, so does every family have their black sheep.  Do you wonder why I have this under the positive things to explore?  I have a very good and very simple reason.  God was there first.  Some of the baddest of our black sheep are merely living out the perversion of a huge spiritual deposit within the family line.  The deposit was originally placed there by God, and someone just came along and used the force for darkness.  The truth is, the deposit is still there and can be just as effectively used for light.  So, look at your villains, your witches, your crooked businessmen, your perverts, and see what might be hiding under the toxic waste dump.  Obviously you have people with seared consciences, bad character, and just plain old woundedness.  But there is often something that fuels how bad they become.  That is the thing we are looking for.

Take, for example, the Druids.  They were BAD boys.  However, the intensity of their spiritual wickedness was in part determined by the bigness of the individual spirit.  You didn’t see many Mr. Jones the Normal with his white picket fence and daily routines becoming a Druid.  People with Druidic ancestors often have a significant spiritual bigness and connection that was designed by God for His purposes.  So, instead of cursing the spiritual darkness in your past, look for the light underneath.  What could God release in your life when the toxicity is removed? Obviously, it is important to clean up the mess.  You need to repent, to break defiled covenants, disconnect from their wickedness, and cleanse the family line.  It may also require cleansing of land and time.  But you can’t stop there.  Too many times people will do the repentance and cleansing and then try to forget it ever happened.  Sadly, this means they leave the original treasure of God’s design untouched and unused.

I also want to stress that it is important that you not deny the presence of the villains.  While you disconnect from their wickedness, you cannot disconnect from their existence.  Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of editing the kind of people who came before us.  And denial of parts of our history and acceptance of others only creates an imbalance of connection, which warps our reality.  We need to wrap our arms around the whole of our heritage, and leave in God’s care the things we don’t understand.  But in the end, you can always celebrate how far you have come.  Just by nature of your reading this article, you are not likely to be another of the villains.  That means that through the course of time, God brought about righteous people in the family and now you have the opportunity to increase that level of righteousness even more.  That is something huge to celebrate.  You can also celebrate the inability of the enemy to destroy the bigness God creates, even though he often succeeds in defiling it.  At the end of the day, he cannot eradicate it, and must always live with the fear that somewhere in the family line will pop up a righteous, big spirited, defiantly dangerous God-seeker who will wreak all kinds of havoc in the kingdom of darkness.

Like you!

Connected to Time
Throughout this article I have illustrated how exploring your ancestry can give you access to available resources.  This is an important part of the process because it makes you all the more useful to the King.  I am convinced there are things about my individual design that cannot be expressed if I do not embrace the whole of my history.  However, there is an equally important point I want to stress.  This is the overall theme of the series of articles, which is being rooted in time.  This is largely an emotional exercise, and has considerable effect on our emotional stability.  Every time we emotionally engage with some aspect of our roots, accept the reality, and find God’s fingerprints, we add another anchor to our connection to time.  In our day-to-day lives we will find our relationship to reality changing, our sense of confidence growing, our emotional stability increasing, and our sense of purpose becoming more richly defined.  In essence, these exercises are reconciling you to yourself.  Whether it is on a macro or micro scale, you are coming into agreement with God’s presence in the process, and accepting the things you may have once pushed away.  Instead of going around with pieces of you missing, you are becoming whole.

And that, my friend, poses a serious threat to the enemy!  He can do a lot more to knock us around when we are disconnected and disjointed.  But it is an intimidating thing when we feel the force of history, see God’s fingerprints in the good, the bad, and the ugly, and can march forward into the future with all the resources of the past.

So ONWARD we go!