Good Morning Friends,
“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.
… Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself
up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through
the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or
wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. … This is a profound
mystery-but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you
also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”
(Ephesians 5:22-33)
God wants to see our marriage relationship
healthy and beneficial to both husband and wife. The key is for each spouse to
put the deepest needs of the other before his or her own needs.
For a wife, that means to focus on how she
treats her husband, not on how he treats her. The core of what Paul tells wives
to focus on is respect and the demonstration of that respect in a willingness
to follow the husband’s leadership. Respect is the deepest need that a husband
has. The place from which respect is most important is from his wife. As a general
rule, men have trouble believing they can accomplish anything worthwhile. They
doubt themselves and when someone else believes in them it helps to release
them to be and to accomplish more of what God wants them to be and to do. A
man’s wife holds the key to that release.
For a husband, meeting the deepest needs of his
wife means that he focuses on loving her and demonstrating that love by a
willingness to sacrifice anything for her, even his own life. Wives, too,
struggle with seeing their own value. What they most deeply need is to know
that someone cares about them so much that he would do anything for her good. When
a wife is genuinely and sacrificially loved by her husband that frees her to become
what God wants her to be.
His, by Grace,
Steve
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