Tag: husband

Nurturing Your Marriage – Part Three

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Clear Priorities

A thriving biblical marriage can be characterized by having three priorities in place.  The first priority is to have a growing
relationship with God.  As I said in the previous post, God ordained marriage for His children.  Those outside of the faith cannot have a true biblical marriage.  Our relationship with
God should be preeminent.  C.S. Lewis said, “When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall
love my earthly dearest better than I do now.”  My husband and I have an understanding that God comes first in our life.  We’ll gladly settle for second place.  When we are each putting God first we are both moving in the same direction and our marriage is strengthened.

The second priority is a growing marriage.  Other than God, nothing should come before your marriage.  That includes your children, family, friends, or career.  The Christian marriage is like a triangle.  God is on top and the husband and wife at
each bottom corner.  The closer they get to God, the closer they get to each other.  The Scriptures declare, “A threefold cord is not quickly broken,” Ecclesiastes 4:12b. Wife, your husband should know that he is a priority in your life.  He should know that you understand and embrace your calling from God as help meet to him.  He should know that, next to God, nothing is more important to you on this earth than your relationship with him.  I like what Martin Luther said about marriage.  “Let the wife make the husband glad to come home and let him make her sorry to see him leave.” This is a God-honoring marriage that points other’s to Him.

The third priority is a growing relationship with the children.  Notice the order.  As precious as children are, they should not come before the marriage.  The home is
not to be “child-centered.”  If the children are the focus, what happens when they leave?  God’s design is for the children to eventually leave, cleave, and weave their own family together. Therefore, mother should not devote all of her time and energy to them.  She should save some for her husband.  Of course, this is not always easy to do.  It takes a lot of time and energy to raise children.  Homeschooling takes even more.  But the most wonderful gift you can give your children is a deep love for their father.  A strong marriage brings security to the home and an environment that children thrive in.

Tomorrow we will look at the third key to nurturing your marriage – practical application of these truths.

Nurturing Your Marriage – Part Two

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Recognizing Your Role

The first key to nurturing your marriage is recognizing your role as wife.  Modern society and the feminist agenda whisper lies into the ears of many Christian women.  One very subtle lie is that marriage is a corporate merger.  The idea is that you will bring in your career, assets, goals, and hobbies into the marriage and I’ll bring in my career, assets, goals, and hobbies and we’ll merge the two together.  What it looks like played out is the husband goes one way and the wife another.  They have two separate visions with two separate goals.  This idea is secular and worldly
and it destroys many marriages.

The biblical role of the wife is to be the help meet to her husband.  We are shown God’s perfect plan for marriage in Genesis chapter two.  When Adam is created God places him in the garden and gives him a job to do and a law to keep.  Adam was to work and tend to the garden.   But he needed help. “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him,” Genesis 2:18.  God did not created Adam and Eve together.  He created Adam, set him on his path, and then created Eve to come along side him to help accomplish all that he had set out to do.

Today, we see a different take on marriage.  It seems oppressive to say a wife’s job is to help her husband with his career, plans, goals, and dreams.  She should be seeking her own heart’s desire.  He should respect her need to be independent and they should both give and take in the marriage vision.  While that might sound good and noble, it is a distorted view of biblical marriage.  (Remember, marriage is for the saved.  God ordained marriage and the unregenerate cannot achieve marriage as He intended.  They do not know true love and they certainly cannot follow the mandates of Scripture.)  Here is what often happens in today’s society.  A husband has a vision and goes to work.  But, due to materialistically enslaving ourselves with homes, cars, and consumer debt, we are told that both husband and wife must bring in an income in order to survive.
So the wife becomes career focused and goes out into the world and works for another man or woman.  She spends her life building up the empire of another person.  She has taken on man’s curse to work by “the sweat of thy face.” She comes home over worked and exhausted, having no energy for her husband and her family.  She is no longer “husband focused”.  Because she is sharing in his role of providing, he now has
to step in and partner with his wife in tending to the children, managing the home, cleaning house, doing chores, etc.  While some Christian women willingly choose this way of life, I believe that deep down most women resent it.  I lay this problem mostly at the husband’s feet.  He should recognize his role as provider.  Unfortunately for them, most men have never been taught this.

Biblical marriage looks a little different.  The husband takes the responsibility to provide for his family. The wife comes along side to help him fulfill his goals.  Now, it might be that for a season she works for another in order to help her husband do this.  I am not implying this is wrong.  In no way am I saying that it is a sin for a Christian woman to work outside the home. (I will, however, say in confidence that it is God’s plan for mothers to be at home with their babies and young children and for her life to be centered on the home. Read Titus 2 and Proverbs 31.)  Her priority in life should be to help her husband achieve his goals.

Why would I as a Christian wife go out into this world and spend all my talents, time, and energy building up the kingdom of another man by working for him?   I would much rather spend my talents, time, and energy building up my husband’s kingdom.  When his kingdom is built, so is mine!   If we would step back and honestly look, we would see that most of society at best does not understand biblical marriage and at worse views biblical marriage in disdain.  Let me give you an example.  The other day my husband was talking to man at our church and turned to me and said, “We are going to have dinner up here Friday night at 7 p.m.  Please take care of that.”  I said, “Sure, no problem.”  Later the comment was made that this man felt sorry for me because my husband told me what to do and I had to do it.   Let me ask this.  If I worked as a secretary for another man and he turned to me one day and said, “We need a meal catered in for a board meeting, take care of it” would people feel sorry for me?  I don’t think so.  The thought would be that it is my job to do as I’m told.  But for some reason when a wife takes her role as “help meet” seriously it is perplexing to people.  Sadly, I believe it is partly due to the fact that biblical marriage is just not taught to Christians anymore.

Now, I realize that this article is addressing homeschooling mothers.  Most of them do have lives that are centered on the home.  However, it should be noted that just because you are not out in the world building up another’s kingdom, does not automatically mean that you are building up your husband’s kingdom.  Are you the help meet God intended?  Do you use your time and talents to help your husband achieve his goals?
Do you use your energy to further his kingdom?  Are you investing in the things that your husband wants you to invest in?  Are his plans for life your plans?  Or, are you both trying to achieve two separate goals in life?  Are you moving in two separate directions?  These are important questions to ask.

One of my favorite scriptures in Proverbs is, “Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands,” Proverbs
14:1.  In order to build my house I must recognize my husband’s needs.  Automatically society will say, “No, no, no, you need to worry about
your own needs.”  But, a true understanding of “two becoming one” (Genesis 2:24) is that when I meet my husband’s needs, I am meeting mine.  Husbands have three basic needs – respect, sex, and food.  All of them are scriptural.  Ephesians 5:33 says, “see that she reverence her husband.”  This is the number one need of a husband.  Whether or not a man deserves respect is not the issue.  It is the position of husband that deserves respect. It is no different than respecting those in authority, like the president, because of their position.  The second need is sex.  Sex is only for marriage and by God’s design the wife is the only one that fulfills this need in her husband.  I Corinthians 7:3-5 explains this and the importance of it.  My husband will encourage husbands to give their wives 5 to 6 “non-sexual” hugs a day.  Women are built to need that.  But let me encourage women.  Your husband needs 1 sexual hug a day.  It truly makes for a great marriage.  The third basic need husbands have is
food.  They need it to survive.  I Corinthians 7:34 says, “she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband.”  A husband that has respect, sex, and good food will be a blessed man indeed.  It will be easy to love and provide for a wife who joyfully meets all of these needs.

Part three in nurturing your marriage will address the second key– Having Clear Priorities.

A Bat in My Skimmer

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My husband had an exhausting weekend.  Due to a wake, funeral and church function, he spent 26 hours at the church house between Friday and Saturday.  Around 8 p.m. Saturday evening, as we were walking back over to the house, my husband said, “All I want to do is go to bed.”  But trying to be a thoughtful wife I said, “Why don’t you take a swim with me.  You’ll feel refreshed.  Then you can go to bed.”  There really is nothing like an evening swim where we live.   With the Desoto National Forest behind us, it is quiet peaceful.  So, the children put on a movie and we went for a swim.  All was well for about 5 minutes; that is until my husband went to clean out the skimmer and found a dead bat.  I won’t go into the details, just let me say that it was not pleasant!   We are logical people and we know in our minds that the 18,000 gallons of water could not possible be contaminate by one dead bat.  But that did not change the fact that my husband was not happy.  In fact, he was rather disgusted.  He got rid of the bat and tried really hard to enjoy the water.  He just couldn’t.  We got out.  He went to bed.

You know, there is a biblical principle that applies here.  It is found in Ecclesiastes 10:1.  “Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour.”   How true it is that it just takes a little folly to wreck a person’s reputation.  A person can work their whole life on building a reputation of wisdom and honor and one act of foolishness ruins it.  This is how sin works.  It just takes a little.  It is true with the individual person but also with the family.  I try to teach my children that when one person in the family sins the whole family is affected.  It is especially important that my boys learn this truth.  They will one day be the head of their homes.  The responsibility of being a leader is extremely weighty.   The decisions they will make as husbands and fathers will affect their whole family.  But not only is it true for the individual and families, it is also true for the church.  This is because the church is a family of families.  Galatians 5:9 says, “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.”  I realize that we live in a society that says, “Don’t judge me.  What I do is none of your business.  How I live is my personal decision.”  But, according to Scriptures, when it comes to the church we are our brother’s keeper.  Why?  Because a little leaven  leaveneth the whole lump.          

So, I will try to remember that it just takes a little sin and that little sin doesn’t just affect me, but also those around me.  I’ll also try to remember that a dead fly can spoil all the perfume, that folly can wreck a reputation, and that a little leaven leavens the whole lump.  Oh, and that one dead flying rodent ruins the whole swim.