Hi, my name is Pete Scuzera. I want to welcome you today, the Emotionally Healthy Leader podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm sitting here in my office on the third floor of my house here in Queens, New York, and just excited to be with you again. I must admit it's a bit lonely here in the office, and I keep getting reminded how important it is that folks like you are

listening from all over the world. So it's a blessing and glad to be here. So our topic today is

break the power of the past. Break the power of the past. Now, in these weeks on this podcast,

we've been talking about the marks of a church or ministry culture

that moves people from shallow discipleship into an environment, into a culture that deeply

changes lives.

So in these weeks, we've been talking about these marks of the ministry culture, and they come

out of the emotionally healthy discipleship book that was just released.

And the first

mark was B before you do. The second was follow the crucified, not the Americanized Jesus. The third

was embrace God's gift of limits. The fourth, discover the treasures buried in grief and loss.

The fifth make love the measure of maturity. And today is our sixth. Tomorrow will be our seventh and final one, but the sixth is break the power of the past. Now, this was one of the cutting-edge truths that launched our entire ministry of emotionally held the discipleship back in 1996 when Jerry and I were at a wall and we sat in this

little office with a couple of Christian counselors, therapists, and it was a moment of great pain

for us, but they sketched on a little blackboard in about 10 or 15 minutes, a little

simple graph of, you know, a genogram was what we call

it today. And simply, you know, how did our parents do their marriages? How did our grandparents do

their marriages on both sides of the family? And then basically how did we do ours? And it's

for adjective to describe them. And we looked at it and our grandparents, our parents, and in our marriage,

and it was very obvious that there wasn't a big difference, some of the same tensions and

difficulties that was in their marriages or in ours. And yet we were the pastor leaders who

prided ourselves in how far along we were in Jesus and we realized

we were not very far along at all, that our marriage discipleship was thin, as was all our

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