How 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!
Tags: friendship, marriage, oneness, spiritual growth
