The Power of a Praying Wife
Chapter 1 - "His Wife"
My favorite Three-word prayer..."Change him, Lord." But the Lord's favorite three word prayer for you to utter is: "Change ME, Lord."
When you pray for your husband to change, you can surely expect changes. They'll be in YOU. God sees things we don't. He knows where we have room for improvement. He uncovers attitudes and habits that are outside His perfect will for us. This whole requirement is especially hard when you feel your husband has sinned against youw ith unkindness, lack of respect, indifference, irresponsibility, infidelity, abandonment, cruelty or abuse. But God considers the sins of unforgiveness, anger, hatred, self=pity, lovelessness, and revenge to be just as bad.
If you are angry with your H, tell God. Don't lit it become a cancer that grows with each passing day. Don't say, "I'm going to live my life and let him live his." Instead, confess the anger, hurt, unforgiveness, disappointment, resentment, and hardness of heart towards him. When there is behavior that needs to change in either of us, I pray you would enable that change to happen.
[i]Sometimes the best things you can do is not say anything, when all you want to do is talk, explain to him what he needs to do. If you do have words that are hard to hear, pray and ask God to give you the right moment and the right words to say so your H will recieve it. If your H is not a believer, you probably already know how much good it will do to keep talking to him. [i]
Prayer
LORD, help me to be a good wife. I fully realize that I don't have what it takes to be one with Your help. Take my selfishness, impatience, and irritability and turn them into kindness, long-suffering, and the willingness to bear all things. Take my old emotional habits, mindsets, automatic reactions and self-protective stance, and make me patient, kind, good faithful, gentle and self-controlled. Take the hardness of my heart, and break down the wall with Your battering ram.
Show me where there is sin in my heart, especially with regard to my H. I confess the times I've been unloving, critical, angry, resentful, disrespectful or unforgiving toward him. Help me to put aside any hurt, anger, or disappointment I feel and forgive him the way You do -- totally and completely. Make me a tool of reconciliation, peace and healing in this marriage. Enable us to communicate well and rescue us from the threshold of sepaation where the realness of divorce begins.
Make me my H's helpmate, companion, champion, friend, and real support. Help me to create a peaceful, restful, safe place for him to come home to. Teach me how to take care of myself and stay attractive to him. Grow me into a creative and confident woman who is rich in mind, soul and spirit. Make me the kind of woman he can be proud of to say is his wife.
I lay all my expectations at Your cross. I release my H from the burden of fulfilling me in areas where I should be looking to You. Help me to accept the way he is and not trry to change him. I realize that in some ways he may never change.
Teach me how to pray for my H and make my prayers a true language of love. Where love has died, create a new love between us. Show me what unconcditional love really is and how to communicate it so that we can be in agreement. Bring unity between us so that we can be inagreement about everything. (Amos 3:3)
I pray that our committment to you and to one another will grow stronger and more passionate every day. Enable him to be the head of the home as yOu made him to be, and show me how to support and respect him as he rises that place of leadership. Help me to understand his dreams and see things from his perspective. Reveal to me what he wants and teach and show me potential problems before they arise. Breathe Your life into this m.
Make me a new person, Lord. Give me a fresh perspective, a positive outlook, and a renewed relationship with the man You've given me. Help me see him with new eyes, new appreciation, new love, new passion, and new acceptance. Give my H a new wife, and let it be me.
