Archive for the ‘Marriage’ Category

Praying with Your Spouse

Wednesday, February 13th, 2013

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Praying with your spouse will deepen your marriage in incredible ways. The wife will see her husband’s spiritual heart, which will help her to honor and respect him the way that Scripture commands her to in Ephesians 5:33. All Christians desire to please God. If you don’t desire to please God, you are not saved. So if your husband is saved, you will be attracted to him spiritually when you pray. Even if you only pray for less than five minutes, the oneness you experience as you grow in your prayer life together is wonderful.

What do you do if your husband doesn’t want to pray with you? First of all, pray that God will change his heart about it. Most men do not want to be spiritually vulnerable with their wives. My own husband had someone rip his prayer to shreds one time while in college. He was praying aloud to God with all his heart, and afterwards a man criticized his prayer. He never wanted to pray aloud again.

If your husband has similar baggage, God needs to heal him. Talk about it, and let your husband know that you don’t care what he says in his prayers, that you love and accept him for who he is. What initially caused my husband to pray with me was my desperation in a particular situation where I had nowhere else to turn but to my husband.

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Another thing you can do is to make sure you never preach at your husband through your own prayers. I know people who do that. The person is talking to me and not to God because they are trying to convince me about something. Don’t ever do that. Men know when they’re being preached at, and they despise it because it’s pretentious.

If your husband doesn’t want to pray out loud, you can talk about a particular issue, then you can hold hands and close your eyes and pray together silently. It doesn’t have to be out loud. Just this simple act can draw you together, and eventually you can transition to praying out loud whenever you feel ready.

I’ve heard testimonies of couples who were fighting, and they decided to pray together while they were still angry. Each one asked God to forgive what they did wrong. After praying, they had already made up! That’s because all the other person wants is for you to admit whatever you did wrong. This is great for “not letting the sun go down on your wrath” (Ephesians 4:26), which means that you never go to bed angry with your spouse so that bitterness does not get a foothold (Hebrews 12:15).

One absolutely transforming way that God has used my husband to lead me as a wife spiritually is through my husband praying with me over specific sin issues in my life. Sometimes I will tell my husband I am struggling with anger or pride towards someone, and my husband will pray with me, and I feel released from the sin. One time my husband told me that I didn’t trust God, so we asked God to help me trust Him more. God answered in a huge way over the following months, just in response to that one prayer that my husband said over me that one night. God works in incredible ways when we join together as one with our spouse before the Lord in prayer.

For more prayer posts, follow my prayer page on Facebook.

Top 10 Ways to Listen to Your Spouse

Monday, February 11th, 2013

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Couples often say that their spouse doesn’t listen to them. Here are the top 10 ways to listen to your spouse:

  1. See the situation through the other person’s eyes. You’ll be able to change their mind easier if you know exactly where they are coming from.
  2. Ask questions to clarify what they are saying.
  3. Don’t let your mind wander. Listen for the main idea so you can make sense out of what they’re saying and respond correctly.
  4. Don’t antagonize them. “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.” Proverbs 18:13
  5. Part of loving a person is enjoying them. Care about what they care about.
  6. Look at the person who is talking to you. Don’t be distracted by other things. Stop what you are doing.
  7. Don’t be impatient, shaking your leg and wanting to be out of there.
  8. Paraphrase occasionally to make sure you understand what they are saying.
  9. Create an environment where your spouse feels safe and loved and not judged.
  10. Treat them how you would like to be treated.

Listening requires time and effort, but it’s worth it because you end up with a greater oneness in your marriage.

For some fun examples of how to listen to your spouse, watch this free webinar: “Listening to Your Husband.”

Linked to Sheila Gregoire’s blog hop.

True Friendship with Your Husband

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

true-friendship-with-your-husbandHow do you get to a point where you have true friendship with your husband? First you have to die to yourself. I asked God to show me my selfishness, and God showed me. You must ask God to give you a love for your husband that is greater than your selfishness. Even if you love God with all your heart, you are selfish to the core. I’m speaking about myself.

My prayer was, “God, make me holy. Do anything.” If you can’t pray this prayer, then Jesus is not functionally Lord of your life, and you will never love others with the supernatural love that causes you to be one on every level of your being with your spouse. If you don’t like that prayer, “ease” is lord of your life, since you want your own comfort more than you want God. It’s true. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking otherwise.

So God answered and painfully showed me my sin. There were about 30 different categories of sin I had no idea that I was guilty of. It was horrifying to me, since I’ve been saved since I was 4 and always was obedient and pure to the best of my ability, repenting whenever I knew of any sin. The fact that I had ungratefulness towards my mother, for example, was something that I was blind to. But the ugly claw of the sin of ingratitude caused me to react to my mother with venom, which caused her to not be able to love me properly. Since I didn’t feel loved by her, this was all a vicious cycle. God broke the chains, I repented of the ingratitude, and we began loving each other for real. And now my mother is one of my closest friends. This is a testimony of God’s grace in my life, since this would have been impossible 10 years ago. God is a God of miracles.

In the same way God will show you your sin toward your husband, because all of us have sin. I know, you think of your husband as being the one with faults, and of course he has faults. The only thing you can do besides pray heavily for your husband is to ask God to change you. I’m serious. You think of yourself as godly and selfless, and your husband as lazy and fill-in-the-blank, but in reality, you are blind to the stench of your own sin before God. Most Christian women think they are more godly than their husbands, and then they talk bad about their husbands behind their husband’s backs, ruining their reputations through their ugly sin of gossip. Meanwhile the husband is quietly enduring your nagging and being disrespectful. I see this all the time. I should write another article titled “How I Sort of Overcame Nagging.” That would be a correct title. Ha!

So when God transforms you by showing you your sin, repent of it and ask God to change you. Your face will radiate beauty, and you will be more attractive to your spouse. Then he will react differently to you, and your marriage will be sweeter than you ever thought possible.

Whenever God convicted me of sin and transformed me, my husband would tremble and see that God was at work. It frieked him out to the point that he asked God for wisdom to lead me spiritually. Then he began to lead me spiritually. It wasn’t until I asked God to change me that through that change, God caused my husband to become the man He wanted him to be. And my husband grew spiritually by leaps and bounds. Of course, he always loved the Lord and accurately handled Scripture before. What was different was the deep oneness that we had spiritually and emotionally. It’s worth having!

Our 15th Wedding Anniversary

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

15th-wedding-anniversaryLast night Alan and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. When the waiter came to the table, he told us that he was about to get married in a couple of weeks. He turned to my husband and asked him what he needed to know to get to his 15th anniversary. “What is your secret?” he asked, and he was earnestly wanting to know. People who see my husband and I together notice that we are one and are comfortable with each other, act sweet with each other, and still have chemistry.

15th-wedding-anniversary-2My husband paused a moment before answering, “Love is an act of the will. If you believe that love is a feeling, you won’t last, because a few months into the marriage, you’ll be sick of each other. Feelings come and go.”

“And they deepen and get much better,” I added.

The waiter said, “I’ve never heard it said that way before.” He actually paused and stood there for a minute before finally taking our order.