Marriage Monday - Power of a Praying Wife Week 1

The hardest part of being a praying wife, other than the sacrifice of time, is maintaining a pure heart.  It must be clean before God in order for you to see good results.  That's why praying for a husband must begin with praying for his wife.

Most, if not all, of us, go into our marriage thinking our husband is close to perfect.  And those things that are not perfect, we find cute and what makes him unique.  After that "honeymoon phase" is over and reality sets in, we see that cute is really irritating.  And perfect?  Can we say ha!?  But we think it is okay because we just have to "train" them or change them and all will be fine.  Our life will be back to the bliss we thought we once had.

Our prayers begin to sound like this:

God, make my husband be romantic.

God, make my husband help around the house...and like it.

God, do you see how moody he is?  Make him nicer.

We pray to God out of anger, bitterness and resentment.  Not from a pure heart.  Our prayers should start with three important words: Change me, Lord.

I know sister.  I know you are ready to reach through the screen and wring my neck!  I know you are thinking that you are not the problem.  I know.  But God sees things we do not.  He knows the deepest thoughts and desires we have. He sees sin in our own life that we may not be recognizing.  He sees sin in our life that we may not even realize is sin.  If we want God to work in our husband's life, we need to ask Him to first work in our own heart.

If I had cherished sin in my heart,
the Lord would not have listened.
Psalm 66:18

Is it hard?  Yes.  Is it worth it?  Yes.

For some of you, I know you are possibly at a place where your husband has hurt and betrayed you.  You are tired.  You are lonely. You are bitter.  You don't even feel as though you like him very much so how on earth can you pray for him!?  The first thing to do is be completely honest with God.  In order to break down the walls in our hearts and smash the barriers that stop communication  we need to be totally up front with the Lord about our feelings.  We don't' have to pretty up for Him.  He already knows the truth.  He just wants to see if we're willing to admit it and confess it as disobedience to His ways.  If so, He then has a heart with which He can work.

Pray to the Lord.  Confess your own sins.  Ask Him to reveal to you sins that you are not recognizing.  Ask God to help you be the wife He has called you to be.  Ask God to help you be the keeper of your home making it a sanctuary and how to be appealing to your husband.  The first step to being a praying wife, is to pray for yourself.

I want to encourage you to take this week's prayer and pray it daily.  Yes daily.  

This Week's Prayer:

Lord, help me to be a good wife.  I fully realize that I don't have what it takes to be one without Your help.  Take my selfishness  impatience, and irritability and turn them into kindness, long-suffering, and the willingness to bear all things.  Take my old emotional habits, mindsets, automatic reactions  rude assumptions, and self-protective stances  and make me patient  kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self controlled.  Take the hardness of my heart and break down the walls with Your battering ram of revelation.  Give me a new heart and work in me Your love, peace and joy {Galatians 5:22-23}.  I am not able to rise above who I am at the moment.  Only You can transform me.

Show me where there is sin in my heart, especially with regard to my husband.  I confess the times I've been unloving, critical, angry, resentful, disrespectful, or unforgiving toward him.  Help me to put aside any hurt, anger, or disappointment I feel and forgive him the way You do -totally and completely, no looking back.  Make me a tool of reconciliation, peace and healing in this marriage.  Enable us to communicate well and rescue us from the threshold of separation where the realities of divorce begin.

Make me my husband's helpmate, companion, champion, friend and support.  Help me to create a peaceful, restful, safe place for him to come home to.  Teach me how to take care of myself and stay attractive to him. Grow me into a creative and confident woman who is rich in mind, soul and spirit   Make me the kind of woman he can be proud to say is his wife.

I lay all my expectations at Your cross.  I release my husband from the burden of fulfilling me in areas where I should be looking to You.  Help me to accept him the way he is and not try to change him.  I realize that in some ways he may never change, but at the same time, I release him to change in ways I never thought he could.  I leave any changing that needs to be done in Your hands, fully accepting that neither of us is perfect and never will be.  Only You, Lord, are perfect and I look to You to perfect us.

Teach me how to pray for my husband and make my prayers a true language of love.  Where love has died, create new love between us.  Show me what unconditional love really is and how to communicate it in a way he can clearly perceive   Bring unity between us so that we can be in agreement about everything. {Amos 3:3}.  May the God of patience and comfort grant us to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus {Romans 15:5}.  Make us a team, not pursuing separate, competitive, or independent lives, but working together, overlooking each other's faults and weaknesses for the greater good of the marriage   Help us to pursue the things which make for the peace and the things by which one may edify another {Romans 14:19}.  May we be "perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement" {1 Corinthians 1:10}.  

I pray that our commitment to You and to one another will grow stronger and more passionate every day.  Enable him to be the head of the home as You made him to be, and show me how to support and respect him as he rises to that place of leadership.  Help me to understand his dreams and see things from his perspective.  Reveal to me what he wants and needs an show me potential problems before they arise.  Breathe Your life into this marriage.

Make me a new person, Lord.  Give me a fresh perspective  a positive outlook and a renewed relationship with the man You've given me.  Help me see him with new eyes, new appreciation, new love, new compassion and new acceptance.  Give my husband a new wife and let it be me.

Amen

To order Power of a Praying Wife click HERE.  Ladies I want to encourage you, if you are in a position to do so, buy two copies.  Keep one and join us for our series and give one to a wife that you know will be blessed by this series.  This book is powerful.  It will bless your husband and change your life.