How to Overcome Spiritual Consequences of Sexual Immorality

Healing Ancestral Wounds

By Gena Barnhill @BarnhillGena

You can overcome the negative spiritual consequences of sexual immorality and walk in freedom.

Our enemy, the devil, comes to steal, kill, and destroy. His goal is to separate us from God so we won’t enjoy a healthy spiritual connection with our Creator. He attacks us through temptation, accusation, or deception. Sexual intimacy outside of marriage is one area he uses to tempt us. When we fall prey to his temptation, he hurls accusations against us, causing us to feel shame, fear, and unworthiness and believe the lie that we can’t be forgiven. From our experience in prayer ministry, all families have had a form of ungodly sexual activity in their bloodlines.

The Enemy Brings Negative Spiritual Consequences

God created us to be in a relationship with Him and each other. He ordained marriage as a covenant relationship between a man and a woman. We read in Genesis 2:24 that a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Jesus repeats this in Matthew 19:5-6 and adds that what God has joined together, let not man separate. Sexual intimacy is more than a physical union. The couple joins physically, spiritually, and emotionally in holy matrimony. God created sexual intimacy as a bonding encounter, which creates a soul tie or spiritual connection.

If the enemy has deceived us, we may mistakenly believe we were only physically involved with another person, and not spiritually connected. But when we intimately join with another person, we are also joined spiritually and emotionally. This forms a bond, also referred to as a soul tie. If we are connected to a person who does not have the same deep level of commitment and intimacy, we can become deeply wounded and find ourselves in an unhealthy or ungodly soul tie.

Other forms of ungodly sexual activity that can create unhealthy soul ties include pornography, sexual perversions, sexual abuse, rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and any sexual union outside the covenant of marriage.

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Break Negative Spiritual Consequences and Connections

We prayed with hundreds of people who had experienced deep wounds from ungodly sexual activity. Some found themselves longing for the person they were intimate with even though they no longer liked the person. Several individuals told us that they were drawn to unhealthy, manipulative relationships, and they did not understand why. The Lord revealed this was a pattern in their family lineage that needed to be broken and healed.

They received freedom after:

  • forgiving their ancestors who partnered with ungodly sexual activity,
  • asking God for forgiveness for their involvement in ungodly sexual activity,
  • repenting, and renouncing the spirits associated with sexual immorality, and
  • declaring in Jesus’s name that spirits of ungodly sexual activity could no longer operate in their family.

Then they asked the Holy Spirit to fill them with His blessings. They no longer felt shame and instead often received purity and forgiveness from the Lord. The were new creations in Jesus.

The Danger of Ungodly Soul Ties

The Bible presents many cautions against sexual immorality. God’s laws, including the Ten Commandments, were meant to protect us from harm. Banks and Banks suggest the following consequences of ungodly soul ties:

  • Loss of independence and self-confidence
  • Loss of clear thinking when making decisions
  • Loss of peace
  • Loss of the capability to rightly love others
  • Loss of spiritual liberation and personal freedom
  • Loss of good health accompanied by illness
  • Loss of closeness to Father God1

First Thessalonians 4:3–5 says: For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God.

First Corinthians 6:18–19 says: Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own.

There is Hope

The good news is unhealthy soul ties can be broken and ungodly sexual activity can be forgiven. If we have sinned, Jesus promises to forgive us of our sins when we repent. If we were violated or sinned against, we can ask the Lord to help us forgive our offender and ask Jesus to cleanse us. He can restore the purity and innocence stolen from us.

Once we recognize an unhealthy soul tie exists, we can pray the following prayer to break this negative spiritual connection and resulting consequences:

Unhealthy Soul Tie Prayer

  1. By the power of Jesus’s holy name and His shed blood on the cross, I confess all unhealthy soul ties with _____________.
  2. I forgive ______________ for their part in this unhealthy soul tie and all the ways it has affected my family and me.
  3. I ask Your forgiveness Lord for any part I played in this unhealthy soul tie.
  4. I give back to ______________ everything I may have taken from ______________, and I take back everything ______________ took from me, including from my heart.
  5. I renounce and break this unhealthy soul tie with ______________, and I release myself from______________. I am free. I renounce and cancel any darkness associated with this soul tie. I am completely restored, and I pray ______________ is completely restored.
  6. I pray blessings on ______________.2

*Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV).

**Editor’s Note: This post, originally published on July, 17, 2023, was revamped for comprehensiveness.

1Side effects of unhealthy soul ties are paraphrased from Bill Banks and Sue Banks, Breaking Unhealthy Soul-Ties (Kirkwood, MO: Impact Christian Books, 2011), 113-115.

2Gena Barnhill and Press Barnhill, Simple Effective Prayer: A Model for Inner Healing (Birmingham, AL: Brookstone Publishing Group, 2022), 30-31.

Your Turn

What negative consequences have you observed from ungodly sexual activity?

Be sure to share your observations in our Facebook Group Healing Prayer Discussion.

We are all stronger when we learn from each other. Looking forward to your input.

Blessings,
Gena

In case you missed the rest of the Ancestral Influences Series, here is the link to the Archives:

https://simpleeffectiveprayer.com/category/healing-ancestral-wounds/