How to Recognize a Curse

Today, I’m going to give you guidelines that will help you to recognize if there is a curse at work in your life. And that’s extremely important for you. It’s very probable that you’ve been struggling against something which you never really were able to master. And the thing you’re struggling against is a curse. If you only look in your own lifetime, you may not find the cause of it.

Therefore, let me give you, first of all, a general picture of what a curse is like. I just use the best kind of descriptive language that I can, and I trust that the Holy Spirit will quicken to you whatever you particularly need to understand.

A curse is something like a dark shadow or an evil hand from the past, oppressing, pressing you down, holding you back, tripping you up, and propelling you in a direction you do not really wish to take. I think I’m going to say that again.

A dark shadow or an evil hand from the past, oppressing, pressing you down, holding you back, tripping you up, propelling you in a direction you really do not wish to take. Or you could compare it to a negative atmosphere that surrounds you, which seems to be stronger at some times than others, but you’re never totally free from it.

If I were to choose one keyword, it would be the word “frustration.” For example, you reach a certain level of achievement or progress in your life. You seem to have all the needed qualifications for success, yet something goes wrong. So you start again. You reach the same level, then something goes wrong again. And this seems to be the pattern of your life. And yet, there’s no obvious reason for it. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve dealt with who’ve told me a life story that has that pattern. There can be many different details, but the pattern is there.

And then often they will say something like, “The same thing used to happen in my father’s life.” Or, “I remember my grandfather telling me about this or that.” And somehow they’re vaguely aware that this thing didn’t begin in their own lifetime.

This pattern may occur in various areas: in the area of business, personal relationships, especially marriage and family, a career, finance, or health. In all probability, whatever area it may be, that dark shadow or evil hand is a curse over your life, perhaps going back many generations.

Now, let me give you some specific forms that curses may take. If you want to study blessings and curses in the Bible, there is one chapter above all others that you must turn to and study, and that is Deuteronomy chapter 28. This chapter contains 68 verses. The first 14 verses are blessings, and the remaining 54 verses are curses. And I think anybody that has a problem in this area should take time to study and meditate on and pray over that chapter.

I will give you a very brief summation, first of all, of the blessings, and then of the curses. But I’m not asking anybody to accept my summation. I would prefer that you go to the chapter for yourself and read it through carefully. But this is the summation that I have arrived at.

First of all, blessings: exaltation, being lifted up, health, reproductiveness in every area, prosperity, victory, and God’s favor. The curses essentially are the opposite: humiliation, failure to reproduce. And I want to say barrenness in almost any area is nearly always the outworking of a curse. Failure to reproduce, mental and physical sickness, family breakdown, poverty, defeat, oppression, failure, God’s disfavor.

In the connection with the blessings, Moses said to Israel,

“If God’s blessing is on your life, you’ll be the head and not the tail. You’ll be above and not beneath.”

That’s the difference. I ask people many times, “Now, are you living like a head or a tail? Are you taking the initiative? Are you making the decisions? Or are you just being dragged around like a tail by forces that you have no control over? Are you living above or are you living under?”

I heard about two Christians once who met one another, and one said to the other, “Brother, how are you doing?” The other one answered, “Well, under the circumstances, I’m not doing too badly.” And the first one said, “Well, brother, what are you doing under the circumstances? You shouldn’t be under the circumstances. If the blessing of God is in your life, you’ll be above the circumstances, not under them.”

Now, all these apply more often to a family, a community, or a nation than an individual. In other words, both blessings and curses are not limited normally to a single individual, but they are related to a family or a community, or a nation, or sometimes a whole civilization.

Now, in dealing with people in this area, and I’ve had pretty extensive experience, and I tell you what I’m teaching today is out of experience, not theory, I made my own list of curses, or indications of curses, that I had found in the lives of people. This was done purely on the basis of experience and observation. But I’ll just give you my own personal list. It’s amazing how close it is to Deuteronomy chapter 28.

So I have here seven common indications that there’s a curse over a person’s life. Number one, mental and/or emotional breakdown. Number two, repeated or chronic sicknesses, especially if they’re hereditary or without clear medical diagnosis. Number three, repeated miscarriages or related female problems. Number four, the breakdown of marriage and family alienation, where a family falls apart. Number five, continuing financial insufficiency, especially where the income appears to be sufficient. You see, a little with God’s blessing does more than a lot with a curse on it. Number six, being accident-prone. Oh, how common this is. And number seven, in a family, a history of suicides or unnatural deaths.

Now, let me just tell you, in closing, a little incident that awakened me to this. I had been teaching in a church. I’d come to the end of my preaching. I was standing behind the pulpit, just wondering what to do next. I saw a family—father, mother, and teenage daughter—on the front row on my left. God seemed to say to me, “There’s a curse over that family.” So I walked up to the father and said, “Sir, God has shown me there’s a curse over your family. Would you like me to release you from it in the name of Jesus?” He immediately said, “Yes.”

I stepped back behind the pulpit, said a short prayer, saw a visible physical reaction in each one as I released them from the curse. Then I noticed that the girl, about 18 years old, had her left leg in a cast from the thigh down to the bottom of the foot. So I stepped back and said to the father, “Would you like me to pray for your daughter’s leg?” He said, “Yes, but you need to know she’s broken the same leg three times in 18 months, and the doctors say it will not heal.” Now, if I heard that today, I’d know immediately, a curse. That’s unnatural to break the same leg three times in 18 months.

So I prayed for the leg, and to cut the story short, next time she went back to the hospital, the leg was healed. But as I meditated on it, I realized that God had shown me there was a curse in that family because if the curse had not been revoked, the leg would not have been healed. The curse was the barrier to the healing of the leg. And many, many times, a curse is a barrier to people receiving healing.