"Curse-Full" Relationships

In the first section of Families Where Grace is in Place, Jeff Van Vonderen discusses the fall and the curse that take place in Genesis, and how this has affected our relationships. This has been on my mind for a couple of days now.

So many of us are trying to perform and trying to get others to perform, trying to earn love and get others to earn our love, trying to avoid punishment and punishing others if they don't measure up. If our spouse, our children, our family members, our friends, will just behave the way we want them to on the outside, we give them more of our love and acceptance. And if they don't perform, we punish them with our words or actions.

Our relationship with God suffers, too. We wear ourselves out trying to live up to a self-imposed laundry list of expectations, believing that if we can just pull it together and perform well enough, God will love us more... and fearful that if our performance isn't good enough, he will love us less or punish us.

But this is not how our relationships with each other and with God were meant to be. When we are trying to control other people's actions and rewarding or punishing them for their ability to perform the way we want them to, and when we are trying to change our own behavior in order to win approval or avoid punishment, we are operating under the curse. Jeff Van Vonderen calls these kinds of relationships "curse-full," as opposed to "grace-full."

More on having grace-based relationships with spouses, children, and God later...