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.
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.
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This is so useful. It is not easy to be on the same spiritual level with our partners. These are good tips for being together in God as a couple. Thanks for sharing!
I feel so much closer to my husband spiritually now that we pray together. I want couples to know how beneficial it is to their marriage, and it doesn’t have to take very long.
A thoughtful post, Susan.
I think one aspect that spoke spoke to my heart was the aspect of feeling “released” because of the prayers of your husband. In my mind, I broadened it from the sin aspect just to about any aspect in life.
Thanks for sharing and all the best to you both!
Lee
When we leave our burdens with God, we do feel released. Concern about circumstances, for example, can be replaced with a supernatural peace.