Deliver me from all of it. When Michael became angry, instead of reacting negatively, I prayed for him. I asked God to give me insight into what was causing his rage.
He did. I asked Him what I could do to make things better. He showed me. Every day, prayer built something positive. Sorry, Mom. But when a man marries, he leaves his father and mother and becomes one with his wife Matthew They are a team, one unit, unified in spirit.
Can you imagine praying for the right side of your body and not the left? The same is true of you and your husband. If you pray for yourself and not him, you will never find the blessings and fulfillment you want.
He gives us whatever we will fall for, whether it be low self-esteem, pride, the need to be right, miscommunication, or the bowing to our own selfish desires.
In every broken marriage, there is at least one person whose heart is hard against God. We only see the way it is, not the way God wants it to become. When we pray, however, our hearts become soft toward God and we get a vision. We see there is hope. We have faith that He will restore all that has been devoured, destroyed, and eaten away from the marriage. We can trust Him to take away the pain, hopelessness, hardness, and unforgiveness.
We are able to envision His ability to resurrect love and life from the deadest of places. The joy of seeing something hopelessly dead brought to life is the greatest joy we can know.
The power that resurrected Jesus is the very same power that will resurrect the dead places of your marriage and put life back into it. We have to go through the pain to get to the joy. You have to decide if you want your marriage to work, and if you want it badly enough to do whatever is necessary, within healthy parameters, to see it happen.
You have to believe the part of your relationship that has been eaten away by pain, indifference, and selfishness can be restored. You have to trust that what has swarmed over you, such as abuse, death of a child, infidelity, poverty, loss, catastrophic illness, or accident, can be relieved of its death grip.
You have to know that whatever has crept into your relationship so silently and stealthily as to not even be perceived as a threat until it is clearly present—such as making idols of your career, your dreams, your kids, or your selfish desires—can be removed.
You have to trust that God is big enough to accomplish all this and more. He can heal the wounds and put love back in your heart. Nothing and no one else can. Lift us out of the pit of unforgiveness. Speak through us so that our words reflect Your love, peace, and reconciliation.
Tear down this wall between us and teach us how to walk through it. Enable us to rise up from this paralysis and move into the healing and wholeness You have for us. Ask God to give you a new husband. He is able to take the one you have and make him a new creation in Christ. We can fight for them in prayer and not give up, because as long as we are praying, there is hope.
With God, nothing is ever as dead as it seems. Not even your own feelings. What About Me? I Need Prayer, Too. Praying for your husband will be an act of unselfish, unconditional love and sacrifice on your part. You must be willing to make this commitment knowing it is quite possible—even highly probable—that he will never pray for you in the same way.
In some cases, he may not pray for you at all. So release him from that obligation. Your happiness and fulfillment will not ride on whether he prays, it will depend on your own relationship with the Lord. Yes, wives need prayer, too. In fact, looking to your husband to be your dedicated prayer partner could be a setup for failure and disappointment for both of you. I learned that the best thing for our marriage was for me to have women prayer partners with whom I prayed every week.
I now believe this is vital for any marriage. It will change your life. Of course, if there is an issue with serious consequences, and you can trust your prayer partners with the confidential nature of your request, by all means share it. They go along putting up a good front and suddenly one day the marriage is over.
Before your prayers are answered there will be blessings from God that will come to you simply because you are praying. Let the suggestions in this book be a guide and then pray as the Holy Spirit leads you. Also, praying Scripture over your husband is powerful. Seeing answers to your prayers can take time, especially if your marriage is deeply wounded or strained.
Be patient to persevere and wait for God to heal. Keep in mind that you are both imperfect people. Only the Lord is perfect. Leave it in His hands. It must be clean before God in order for you to see good results.
But if you can release those feelings to God in total honesty and then move into prayer, there is nothing that can change a marriage more dramatically. It took me awhile to figure that out. Oh, I prayed. As time went on, cute became irritating and perfect became driving perfectionism. I decided that what irritated me most about him had to be changed and then everything would be fine. It took a number of years for me to realize my husband was never going to conform to my image.
I was the one God worked on first. I was the one who began to change. My heart had to be softened, humbled, pummeled, molded, and reconstructed before He even started working on my husband. I had to learn to see things according to the way God saw them —not how I thought they should be. When you pray for your husband, especially in the hopes of changing him, you can surely expect some changes. He knows where we have room for improvement.
God wants our hearts to be right so the answers to our prayers are not compromised. This whole requirement is especially hard when you feel your husband has sinned against you with unkindness, lack of respect, indifference, irresponsibility, infidelity, abandonment, cruelty, or abuse.
But God considers the sins of unforgiveness, anger, hatred, self-pity, lovelessness, and revenge to be just as bad as any others. Confess them and ask God to set you free from anything that is not of Him. One of the greatest gifts you can give your husband is your own wholeness. The most effective tool in transforming him may be your own transformation. Are you ready to hear them? The point is who is willing to change. I said I am fair. The other options are unacceptable. Go ahead. Oh, this is going to be painful!
Dying to yourself is always painful. Especially when you are convinced that the other person needs more changing than you. But this kind of pain leads to life. The other alternative is just as painful and its ultimate end is the death of a dream, a relationship, a marriage, and a family. It means letting go of the past and all hurt associated with it and being willing to lose the argument in order to win the battle.
In fact, if you are in any kind of physical or emotional danger, remove yourself immediately from the situation to a place of safety and get help. You can pray from there while your husband receives the counseling he needs. Submission is something you give from your heart, not something demanded of you.
But laying down your life is something you willingly do, not something that is forcefully taken from you. The hardness melts.
We become able to get beyond the hurts, and forgive. We even end up loving the person we are praying for. It happens because when we pray we enter into the presence of God and He fills us with His Spirit of love. When you pray for your husband, the love of God will grow in your heart for him. Talking to God about your husband is an act of love. Prayer gives rise to love, love begets more prayer, which in turn gives rise to more love.
Even if your praying is not born out of completely selfless motives, your motives will become more unselfish as prayer continues. This unity is vital. When we are not united, everything falls apart. My husband will usually stop and answer that question in great detail when he might otherwise not say anything. I know of even nonbelieving husbands who respond positively to that question from their wives. We want to be on the same path together. We want to be deeply compatible, lifelong companions, and have the love that lasts a lifetime.
Prayer, as the ultimate love language, can make that happen. Have you ever been so mad at your husband that the last thing you wanted to do was pray for him?
So have I. If He asks us to pray for our enemies, how much more should we be praying for the person with whom we have become one and are supposed to love?
But how do we get past the unforgiveness and critical attitude? 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 have to be totally up- front with the Lord about our feelings. He already knows the truth. If so, He then has a heart with which He can work. If you are angry at your husband, tell God. I confess my anger, hurt, unforgiveness, disappointment, resentment, and hardness of heart toward him.
Forgive me and create in me a clean heart and right spirit before You. Give me a new, positive, joyful, loving, forgiving attitude toward him. Where he has erred, reveal it to him and convict his heart about it. Lead him through the paths of repentance and deliverance. Help me not to hold myself apart from him emotionally, mentally, or physically because of unforgiveness.
Where either of us needs to ask forgiveness of the other, help us to do so. Where there is behavior that needs to change in either of us, I pray You would enable that change to happen.
As much as I want to hang on to my anger toward him because I feel it is justified, I want to do what You want. I release all those feelings to You. Give me a renewed sense of love for him and words to heal this situation. Pray for your husband every day for a month using each one of the thirty-one areas of prayer focus I have included in this book.
Pray a chapter a day. Ask God to pour out His blessings on him and fill you both with His love. Well, God is asking.
And it is never more true than in a marriage, especially when it comes to the words we say. There is a time to speak and a time not to speak, and happy is the man whose wife can discern between the two.
Anyone who has been married for any length of time realizes that there are things that are better left unsaid. A wife has the ability to hurt her husband more deeply than anyone else can, and he can do the same to her. They can only be forgiven and that is not always easy. I stuffed my feelings inside. After our first child was born, I became increasingly vocal. But the more I voiced my objections and opinions, the more he resisted and the more we would argue.
Whatever I said not only accomplished nothing in the area I wanted it to, it had the opposite effect. It took me a number of years to learn what millions of women have learned over the centuries. The safeguard you have with prayer is that you have to go through God to do it. When you pray, God reveals anything in your personality that is resistant to His order of things. If I do need to say something, I try not to just blurt it out. It took me a long time to figure this out, however.
For some reason it struck a nerve. The more I talked about it, the more irritated Michael became. I stopped talking about it and started praying. I also asked my prayer group to pray along with me. Even though it took longer than I would have liked, it did happen. There was a lot at stake and she knew it.
The Lord will always give us words to say, and show us when to say them if we ask Him. Timing is everything. That hurts people. Our goal must not be to get our husbands to do what we want, but rather to release them to God so He can get them to do what He wants.
Distinguish carefully between what is truly right and wrong. Or pray about them and then, as the Lord leads, reveal them for calm discussion. There are times when we are just to listen and not offer advice, to support and not offer constructive criticism. By all means you must clearly communicate your thoughts and feelings. If you do have to say words that are hard to hear, ask God to help you discern when your husband would be most open to hearing them.
Pray for the right words and for his heart to be totally receptive. This is especially true when talking has ceased altogether and every word only brings more pain. I wish I had learned earlier to pray before I spoke.
My words too often set up a defensive reaction in my husband that produced harsh words we both regret. He received my suggestions as pressure to do or be something, even though I always had his best interests at heart. It had to come to him from God. The Bible says a wife can win over her husband without saying anything, because what he observes in his wife speaks more loudly than what she tells him.
God says He speaks of things that are not as though they were. You can do that, too. No matter how long you have to pray for your husband to come to know the Lord, even if it takes his whole life, the time will not be wasted.
In the meantime, whether your husband is a believer or not, you can still pray all the prayers in this book for him and expect to see significant answers to them. Even if you are the only one working and your husband stays home to keep the house and tend the kids, you will still be expected to see that the heart of your home is a peaceful sanctuary—a source of contentment, acceptance, rejuvenation, nurturing, rest, and love for your family.
On top of this, you will also be expected to be sexually appealing, a good cook, a great mother, and physically, emotionally, and spiritually fit. Ask the Lord to show you how to make your home a safe haven that builds up your family—a place where creativity flows and communication is ongoing. Ask God to help you keep the house clean, the laundry done, the kitchen in order, the pantry and the refrigerator full, and the beds made.
These are basic things a man may not compliment his wife on every day or ever , but he will notice if they are not done. My husband may not look in the cupboard for a lightbulb or a battery for months. But when he does, he wants it to be there. Nor does he want to come home late from work one night and find that there is no bread for a sandwich. I do my best to make sure it is there.
I ask God to help me maintain a house that my husband is pleased to come home to and bring his friends. My first home was small and had secondhand furniture I bought from yard sales. I painted the entire place myself with the help of a girlfriend and made it look attractive. It just takes some thought and a little care.
Part of making a house a home is allowing your husband to be the head so you can be the heart. Trying to be both is too much. God placed the husband as the head over the family, whether he deserves it or not and whether he rises up to take his position or not. They work together. If your husband is to be the head of the house, you must allow him that headship. If you are to be the heart of the home, you still must take the steps necessary to do so, even if you are a major contributor to the financial support.
Trying to reverse that keeps a constant struggle going. It never minimized his headship or caused me to usurp his position. It was something he did for me. There were times he needed me to work so he could rest. If you are working as hard as he is to bring home a paycheck, the responsibilities should be shared in the home.
Ask God to show you about that. Some effort must be put into maintaining them. I once heard a radio talk show where a woman called in to complain to a popular psychologist that her husband told her he no longer found her attractive. Even the most gorgeous women in the world do much to maintain their attractiveness.
Queen Esther was one of the most beautiful women in her country and she still spent a year beautifying herself before she met the king. We have to ask ourselves the same question. Do I see that my internal self is cleansed and rejuvenated with regular exercise? Do I preserve my strength and vitality with a healthful diet? Do I dress attractively?
And most important: Do I spend time alone with God every day? I guarantee that the more time you spend with the Lord, the more radiant you will become. Pray for God to show you what steps to take and then enable you to take them. Invite the Holy Spirit to dwell in you and your home. Letting Go of Expectations Shortly after we were married, my husband called from work and said he wanted me to prepare a certain chicken dish for dinner.
I want lamb chops. This was not an isolated incident. Similar ones happened far too frequently. I finally learned that it did no good to be angry, hurt, or resentful. That only made matters worse. I realized it was healthier for both of us if I rearranged my expectations.
If Michael was able to join us, it was a pleasant surprise. I recount how he sometimes helps with the household chores and the cooking. He is faithful and does not give me reason to doubt it. He is a believer who goes to church, reads his Bible, prays, and has high moral standards.
He loves me and our children. He is a good and generous provider. Of course there are some basics that should be agreed upon before the wedding date, such as fidelity, financial support, honesty, kindness, basic decency, high moral standards, physical and emotional love, and protection.
The pressure to do that and fulfill your dreams at the same time can be overwhelming to a man. Instead, take your needs to God in prayer and look to Him for the answers. Let go of as many expectations as possible.
Instead, ask God to make any necessary changes. Accept your husband the way he is and pray for him to grow. Then when change happens, it will be because God has worked it in him and it will be lasting. Your greatest expectations must be from God, not your husband. Loss of respect seems to precede loss of love and is more hurtful to a man than we realize. The consequences of losing respect for your husband can be very serious. In another example, Queen Vashti refused to go to the king at his command.
The king was giving a feast for his friends, he was in a party mood, and he wanted to show off his beautiful wife. All he asked of her was that she put on her royal clothes, don her royal crown, and make a royal appearance to the people he was entertaining. She declined, knowing full well it would be humiliating for him. The result was that Vashti lost her position as queen.
She not only wronged her husband, the king, but the people as well. The price is too high. There is a wall in my heart that I know was erected as a protection against being hurt.
But I am ready to let it come down so that my heart can heal. I confess the times I have shown a lack of respect for him. I confess my disrespectful attitude and words as sin against You. Show me how to dismantle this barrier over my emotions that keeps me from having the unconditional love You want me to have.
Tear down the wall of hardness around my heart and show me how to respect my husband the way You want me to. It will enable you to say something positive that will encourage, build up, give life, and make the marriage better.
Love is diminished if we dwell on the negatives. Love grows if we focus on the positive. Ask God to give it to you. When you are praying for yourself—his wife—remember this model of a good wife from the Bible. It says she takes care of her home and runs it well. She knows how to buy and sell and make wise investments. She keeps herself healthy and energetic and dresses attractively.
She works diligently and has skills which are marketable. She is giving and conscientiously prepares for the future. She is strong, solid, honorable, and not afraid of growing older.
She speaks wisely and kindly. Her children and her husband praise her. She supports her husband and still has a fruitful life of her own which speaks loudly for itself Proverbs Shall we? Prayer Lord, help me to be a good wife. 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, mind-sets, automatic reactions, rude assumptions, and self-protective stance, 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 I am not able to rise above who I am at this moment.
Only You can transform me. Show me where there is sin in my heart, especially with regard to my husband.
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. Help me to create a peaceful, restful, safe place for him to come home to. 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 May the God of patience and comfort grant us to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus Romans Help us to pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another Romans I pray that our commitment to You and to one another will grow stronger and more passionate every day.
Help me to understand his dreams and see things from his perspective. Reveal to me what he wants and needs and show me potential problems before they arise. Breathe Your life into this marriage. Make me a new person, Lord. 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.
And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.
For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. MATTHEW Through wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. The problem is that Kim is not content to bear the entire burden of supporting the family on her shoulders indefinitely, and Bill has been pursuing his dream for seventeen years with nothing to show for it. Steven is working himself to death. He can never rest and enjoy the success of his labor.
He seldom spends time with his family, and his teenagers are fast approaching adulthood. These are extreme examples of how a man can relate to his work. On one hand is laziness—avoiding work out of selfishness, fear, lack of confidence, depression, or apprehension about the future.
In other words, a lazy man will never get anywhere, he will never have anything, he will have a rough road ahead, and it will ultimately destroy him. In other words, workaholism is draining and pointless. Neither extreme promotes happiness and fulfillment. Only a perfect balance between the two, which God can help a man find, will ever bring that quality of life.
What causes a man to go to either extreme can be, oddly enough, the same reason: fear. He needs to be appreciated and he needs to win, and his work is often a means of seeing both happen. It frightens him to think he may never experience either.
If he is doing work that is demeaning to him, he feels devalued as a person. If his work is not successful, he feels like a loser. Gary, his father, and his grandfather all had difficulty making a living. In fact, it was very late in each of their lives before they were even able to discern what they were supposed to be doing. They went from job to job without any clear leading. They struggled financially. None of them had parents who prayed for them to have their gifts and talents revealed, to know the calling of God on their lives, to have doors opened to them, and to become all they were created to be.
History tends to repeat itself without the intervention of God. Their careers may not take off immediately, but they have a sense of purpose and destiny that propels them in the right direction. There is needless floundering, disappointment, doubt, and despair as he tries to carve out a place for himself.
If your husband had that kind of start, your prayers can change his life. You can pray for his eyes to be opened to see what God wants him to do, and where God is leading. Your prayers can help him feel appreciated and encouraged enough to recognize he has worth no matter what he does. You can assure him that God has uniquely gifted him with ability and talent and has something good ahead for him. Then pray for God to reveal it and open a door of opportunity which no man can shut.
Your prayers can pave a path for him. My husband, who is a songwriter and record producer, said he felt my prayers have prevented him from working with the wrong clients. He has never worked with anyone who is difficult, weird, evil, or unsuitable, which is nothing less than a miracle in his business.
He knew I always prayed that God would lead him to the right people and remove from his path those who would be trouble. While our prayers cannot ensure a trouble-free road for our husbands, they can certainly steer them clear of many problems. If your husband is a hard worker, make sure he has times of rest and enjoyment—to do things that entertain him and give him a reprieve from the weight of a lifetime of supporting a family.
The site is set up for educational purposes. We respect copyright and give users the opportunity to get to know the world literature and communicate also. More details about us. Passwod Reset New account. Log in. Find A book. The Paris Wife. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Hemingway's obsession with his writing is evident from early on but it soon starts to intrude heavily on the marriage and we are able to see how it might have been for an intelligent, independent woman such as Hadley - as her wishes and needs always seemed to come second to the great author.
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