Some husbands are handfuls in character. And if the man is already distracted by the presence of another woman in his life, who is competing for his attention alongside his wife, then it's another ball game entirely. This is not a general rule, but prayerfully, it is a viable strategy in marriage — a woman (wife included) is supposed to be sought after and not the other way round.
As a wife, you are supposed to love your husband, care for
him, respect him, and revere him, but don’t be his foot mat. It is also
important to note, as a wife, that your value is not derived from your husband
or an external entity, but from you and your God. Even with your husband, the
portion of value you place on yourself is the value your husband would place on
you.
It is true that in marriage, you die to self, and as wives,
we often sacrifice a lot of ourselves for the good of the home (and that is
precisely what I do). But in doing so, you need to reserve a portion of
self-respect and self-esteem for yourself. You need to position yourself in a
way that your husband will be continually seeking after you, no matter how old
the marriage is, and not the other way round.
This is not to say that you should switch roles with your
husband and become the breadwinner, thinking you can earn his respect with
money. But this is a strategy that you will need to pray to God to help you
develop and implement appropriately. You will need to build your value in areas
of your life that will earn the respect and admiration of your husband the
most. That type of value add will only come from God.
I speak of God in this matter because doing this by yourself
might lead to burnout and frustration, especially if your husband is distracted
already, and there is someone somewhere that he is unintentionally comparing
you with. If your husband complains about your dressing today, and you go all
out to change your entire wardrobe, you can be most certain that it will be
your hair tomorrow, and your shoes the day after, and then your fingers a few
weeks after. Bottom line, he will always have something about you that is not
enough.
The more you strive to please him, the more he changes the
goal post to switch demands. Over time, you will get frustrated, and guess
what, it will be your fault. Some spouses are perfectionists at gaslighting. And
I use spouses because it's not just the husbands who gaslight.
With God in your marriage, you can never get it wrong. If
you are the kind who solely depends on God and not on your own understanding,
you can be very sure that even in dealing with your spouse, he will give you
the perfect strategy for every event in every second of your marriage. Even
when you quarrel with your spouse, He will show you how to iron things out
without love diminishing in your marriage. If you get Him involved.
But your intimacy with God is not a gateway to
insubordination in your marriage. That you get your strategy from God is not an
excuse to throw submission in marriage into the trash can. God is not an author
of confusion, and He won’t give you a strategy that will go against His word.
If your approach is contrary to the truth of the Bible, that strategy is not
from God.
Whatever strategy the Lord gives you as a tool in building
your marriage, while not losing your personal value or self-esteem, does not
include a lack of submission or disrespect for your husband as the God ordained
head over your life. In all things, God will not author confusion in your marriage
and will never contradict Himself.
There are wives who, by virtue of their spirituality, have
over-valued themselves and concluded that submitting to an unbelieving husband
is not what God is talking about in Ephesians 5:22, or Colossians 3:18, or
1Peter 3:1. When God gave His command to submit, He did not give us the
category of husbands to submit to and those not to submit to. As long as the
man is your husband, God's command to you is to submit to him.
Some husbands have concluded that their wives are stubborn.
This so-called stubbornness has been the root of fights and quarrels in
marriages. These husbands feel so belittled by their wives simply because she
thinks she knows more than they do, and would only do what she wants to do, not
what the husband tells her to. In her world, that command from her husband
makes no sense. She would conclude that she had prayed, and God told her to do
it some other day.
Well, it was not God that told you to disobey your husband.
You did that on your own instinct. God will not tell us in His word to submit
to our husbands and then tell you singularly in your spirit to disobey your own
husband. That is why 1John 4:1 encourages us to test all spirits. Is that
spirit speaking to you from God?
Some husbands lose love for their wives and become hostile
simply because of the wife's disobedience. If God calls for submission, then He
wants a total submission. Even when your husband’s instruction does not make
sense to you, pray and ask God for His leading. He will handle the situation so
that you won’t disobey your husband, and the issue will be resolved with you
still in submission.
Let me share a true-life story as an illustration of what I
am talking about. A couple had two children, ages 4 and 2 years old. The
economic situation at hand could not afford them having more children, but the
wife got pregnant, and all hell broke loose. The husband was distraught and
demanded that the wife terminate the pregnancy immediately.
The wife is a born-again Christian and knew that an abortion
meant murder. She was not going to do it, but guess what, she must submit to
her husband as unto God. She was dragging the matter, and a strain began to
build between them. The husband will not speak to her for days and treats her
like complete rubbish. It was as though she impregnated herself.
She took the matter to God and began to pray. She would cry
to God for strength and strategy on how to handle it. She eventually called
their family doctor, who refused to carry out the abortion. He offered to speak
to the husband and told him to allow the wife to have this one child, and
afterwards, to do proper birth control. But he refused and insisted that the
pregnancy be terminated.
Over time, the Lord spoke to the wife while she was praying.
He gave her the strategy that solved the problem. She was to agree to the
husband’s demands on condition that he would be in the theatre and oversee the
abortion as it was done. The wife said that since she would be put to sleep,
the husband needed to be there to ensure nothing was taken out of her body
wrongfully.
To this condition, the husband declined. He could not stay
there and watch the abortion being done. So, the wife also said she was not
ready to die; if the husband would not wait to watch the abortion being done,
and she would not be conscious to see what would be done, and the doctor she
felt safe with had declined doing the abortion, then she was left with no
choice but to carry the baby.
The husband had no choice but to accept. The matter was
settled, and the wife carried the pregnancy to term and delivered their third
child. But the beautiful twist to this story is that while the wife was about 7
months gone in the pregnancy, the husband saw a job advert in the newspapers. He
applied for the job and gave the application to his wife to help him post at
the post office.
She took the application, prayed over it, and posted it. A
couple of weeks later, the husband was called for an interview. After a series
of interviews and negotiations, he was called to come pick up his offer of
employment letter. At the same time, his wife was in labor, ready to deliver
their child, whom he had earlier insisted should be terminated. The child
brought good fortune for his father.
One lesson I want us to take away from this true-life story
is that the wife never insisted on disobeying her husband. She knew what he
asked her to do was wrong, but she deferred to God instead. She showed
obedience by approaching their family doctor, but all the while, she didn’t
stop praying.
Genesis 20 shares a similar story, where Abraham asked his
wife Sarah to lie that she was his sister to avoid death. It was a useless
instruction that made no sense, but guess what, Sarah obeyed. She was taken
away by Abimelech, the king, to be his wife, until God intervened.
As a wife, you will build your marriage on the bedrock of
God’s instruction for you, and you will have a beautiful marriage. Anything
short of God, obeying His word and holding unto Him, is not guaranteed in
marriage. 2 Corinthians 10:6 tells us that God is ready to punish every
disobedience in our lives when our obedience is complete. The catch there is
that your own obedience needs to be complete first before every disobedience
against you is dealt with.
In conclusion, two things we need to take away from this blog
post: first, that as a wife, you need to find your value outside of your
husband, but within yourself in God. God is and should always be your source of
strength, and the source of your value-building strategy needs to come from God
alone. And the second is that your growth is not a ticket for your insubordination
and lack of respect for your husband. With God, you can build the best home and
anchor a thriving marriage without losing yourself in achieving that.
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