The Power of a Praying Wife Devotional (33 page)

L
ORD,
help me to fulfill Your commandment to love my husband as myself (John 13:34). I pray You would enable my husband to love me in that same way. Teach him to show his love for me in ways I can perceive. Open my eyes to see the ways he already shows his love for me that perhaps I am not appreciating. Although You require him to love me as he loves himself, I don’t want to pressure him to do more than he can at this time. But I do want him to live Your way so that he can receive the blessings You have for him.

Enable my husband to open up to Your love for him so that he can better express his love for me. Where love has waned or even died between us, rekindle it in each of our hearts. If unforgiveness in either of us has been a destroyer of love, I pray You would help us to forgive each other completely so that our prayers are not hindered and Your love can flow freely between us again. Where I have been neglectful of him, or not been affectionate enough, or not shown love to him the way I should, help me to change that. Only You, the God of love, can teach us how to love each other the way that You love us.

In Jesus’ name I pray.

62

Let him who thinks he stands
take heed lest he fall.

1 C
ORINTHIANS
10:12

W
HEN YOU ARE WORKING HARD
to establish your business or career, or you are consumed with raising children or with other interests, it’s easy to devote far more time to that than to your marriage. And when things are going well between you and your husband, you can mistakenly believe they always will and so you don’t have to try as hard as you used to. But every marriage takes a deliberate effort by both people in it in order to see that the other person feels loved, cared for, valued, respected, and understood. You cannot go about doing what you do day after day and expect that to just happen. It doesn’t. You have to make an effort to not take your marriage for granted.

You are probably already thinking along these lines or you wouldn’t be reading this book. It’s more likely that you are concerned about your husband taking
you
for granted and not putting enough effort into your marriage. If so, pray that his eyes will be opened to see the truth about that. No married man should ever assume that he and his wife can never drift apart, or find other interests, or just stop loving and caring for each other. It happens all the time. On top of that, you both have the added concern of an enemy who wants your marriage destroyed, because he doesn’t want anything in your life to be glorifying to God.

Besides praying for your husband to make an effort in the marriage, pray that God will show you how to convince your husband that you don’t ever take him for granted. Hopefully, your actions will open his eyes and inspire him “who thinks he stands” to “take heed lest he fall.”

My Prayer to God

L
ORD,
I pray You would show my husband and me how to avoid taking each other for granted. Teach us to put a consistent effort into our marriage by extending ourselves to each other in kindness, consideration, and love. Help me to do that whether my husband extends the courtesy to me or not, but I pray You will convict
his
heart about this as well. Inspire him to communicate love, caring, understanding, and concern. Teach him to see our marriage as a gift You have given to our lives. When either of us is acting like a gift the other one would like to return, enable us to become more like You so we will have
Your
heart for each other and be the blessing to each other that we should be.

Reveal to me, even now as I am praying, what I can do to bless my husband today. How can I show him I value who he is and what he means to my life? Break through any hardness in my heart that is resistant to doing that. Show him the same thing about me, and take away any resistance in him as well. Don’t let him become so sure that our marriage will never fail that he feels he doesn’t need to invest anything of himself in it. Help him to see our marriage as something to carefully protect and preserve for our pleasure and Your glory.

In Jesus’ name I pray.

63

Again I say to you that if two of you agree on
earth concerning anything that they ask, it will
be done for them by My Father in heaven. For
where two or three are gathered together in
My name, I am there in the midst of them.

M
ATTHEW
18:19-20

W
HEN YOUR HUSBAND
’
S
or your needs are serious, you must take heed to these verses in Scripture and call in the troops. Pray for each of you to have two or three friends who are strong believers—people who are mature in the Lord, who understand and believe His Word, who have strong faith, and who live God’s way—and cultivate reliable and solid friendships with them. Find people who will
pray with you,
and
you with them,
whenever either of you need it. Not enough can be said about the power of praying together with others. Every couple needs that, no matter who they are.

When we only pray alone, it is too easy to become discouraged if we don’t see answers to our prayers. Prayer with others, however, forces us to focus on what our needs really are and to verbalize them in such a way that people understand how to pray for us. Praying together with other believers encourages us to not give up. It inspires hope and renewed faith. Another important aspect of praying together is that it helps us to form great and lasting friendships. That’s because we always grow to love the people we pray for. We become very closely connected to them in a spiritual way—and they with us—and that creates a bond which is not easily broken.

Finding friends with whom you can pray when you need to is something you must pray about. Ask the Lord to lead you and your husband to at least two good, godly friends for each of you—girlfriends for you and male friends for your husband. Also ask Him to give you one or more godly couples with whom you feel comfortable going to for prayer as a foursome, as well as for companionship. Even if you see no one in your lives right now who could possibly fulfill that need, God can bring people to you who are right for both of you. The promise of His presence when two or more are gathered in His name is more than enough incentive to follow through on this.

My Prayer to God