Stop The Flow: Breaking Negative Relationship Patterns by Rev. Sam Oye: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

God Is a God of Patterns

Exodus 25:8-9 says: "Have the people of Israel build me a holy sanctuary so I can live among them. You must build this Tabernacle and its furnishings exactly according to the pattern I will show you."

Notice: building begins after the showing. You are not going to build what you have not seen. In practice, we end up building what we have, not what we were shown.

God is a God of order, structure, and patterns. He does not do anything randomly. Everything God does, he does orderly, structurally, intentionally. In the same way, he does not want his children to build randomly or accidentally. You will ruin your marriage if you build it based on how you feel. Feelings change. Duty does not.

Patterns Drive Relationships

You do not fix relationships by focusing on fixing your partners. You do not fix marriage by managing emotions or avoiding conflict. You fix it by fixing the patterns driving the problem.

The problems in relationships are pattern-centric. Whatever repeats itself as a problem in a marriage is traceable to a pattern. Marital crises are not random. They are not accidental. They are patterned.

You do not get what you desire. You get what your patterns produce.

Think of a mold. Whatever shape the mold has, everything you pour into it will come out in that shape. Your relationships come out in the shape of your patterns. If the pattern is negative, the output will be negative, no matter who you are in relationship with.

Where Patterns Come From

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Rev. Sam Oye
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• Patterns come through exposure. What you expose yourself to consistently will shape you. Abraham lied about his wife. Isaac lied about his wife under the same circumstances. By the time Jacob arrived, the pattern had multiplied. Jacob did not merely lie. He became a liar. He lied to his own father, Isaac, the same man Isaac had lied to a generation before. What left the family returned to the family with greater force.
• Patterns come through encounters. Be mindful of who you surround yourself with. Consistent exposure to certain voices, certain behaviors, certain environments will weaken you over time. This is the principle of sight and sound in the home. Put on the light. Be children of light in the most practical sense.
• Patterns come through experiences. Pain has memory. Many people are reacting to experiences from their past rather than responding to the people in front of them. An experience from a previous relationship is coloring every interaction in the current one.

The Generational Multiplication of Patterns

Negative patterns have three stages in family lines:

1. Originators — those who start the pattern.
2. Continuators — those who continue it.
3. Multiplicators — those in whom the pattern multiplies and turns back on the family itself.

In Abraham's family, Abraham lied to an outsider. Isaac lied to an outsider under identical circumstances. But by the time Jacob arrived, the pattern came home. Jacob lied to Isaac, his own father. The 10 sons of Jacob then lied to Jacob, their own father. What had gone out came back, amplified.

The only reset in that family was Joseph. Joseph was the first one who refused to yield to the dominant pattern. He refused Potiphar's wife, refused to lie, refused to operate from the family script. Joseph stopped the flow.

Breaking the Pattern

The good news is that patterns can be broken. They were established through repetition and they can be disrupted through intentional counter-patterns.

First, you must identify the pattern. You cannot fight what you cannot see.

Second, you must trace its origin. When did this first begin in my family? When did I first begin operating this way in relationships?

Third, you must make a quality decision to respond differently. Not react from the old pattern, but deliberately choose a new response.

You do not get rid of a pattern by fighting it. You replace it. Fill the space with a new behavior, a new thought, a new response.

Father, we ask for the grace to see the patterns that have been driving our relationships. We ask for the courage to break what has been flowing. Let the patterns of pain, of mistrust, of deception, of avoidance end with us. We choose to build our homes and our relationships on what you have shown us, not on what we have inherited. In Jesus' name.