prayer coach

In my last post in What to Pray to Find the Right Spouse, I mentioned that there were two ways to get the perfect spouse: find the right person and allow them to become the right person. This post will tackle the second option.

When I got engaged, I loved my wife as best as I knew, but as I look back I think the major motivation was to find someone who made me feel loved. I had a deep hole and I latched on to the person that made even a small effort to fill it. I can see now how I set myself up for major issues in marriage, therefore I am constantly encouraged by the wife God did give me.

However, there have been several things I had done right after the wedding vows. Early on in our marriage we started the habit of praying together every night before going to bed. I also prayed on my own for our marriage, specifically that our marriage would reflect Christ’s love for His Church. We attended marriage conferences and read marriage books to give priority to getting all that God had for us out of our marriage. Therefore while my motives may not have been pure going in, we developed our marriage well. Here are some areas for your to consider as you develop your own marriage.

7 Ways to Develop a Perfect Spouse

1. Prayer

Spending time with God with your spouse and alone is the greatest thing you can do for your marriage. God delights in your marriage and offers help to make sure you experience every blessing He has hidden there. Commit your marriage to God.

I am often amazed how I seemingly lucked out in marriage. The things I most appreciate in my wife; I had no idea to look for them while I was dating. I knew I wanted a wife who would love Jesus, but I didn’t count on me getting a rockstar. Yes, I wanted a wife I thought was pretty, but I didn’t know she would keep getting prettier each year. When I think about it, I know that God set me up to get more than I could even ask or imagine. How did this happen?

I think there are two reasons: 1. Find the right person. 2. Allow them to become the right person. I will address these as two separate posts.

How do you find the right person?

There is no guarantee that you will ever make a right pick. This keeps many people from even wanting to get married. The real thing to keep in mind with regards to marriage is to trust God in the process. He created marriage and intends it to be a blessing to you. Marriage can be the most wonderful thing you ever do, but you will have to work at it. So, before even getting started, here are some things to pray through in order to find the right spouse.

1. Lord, help me to know myself and live out of who you created me to be.

This should be your first prayer because you cannot truly be one with your spouse if you are not living from who you are. Choose not to trick someone into liking you be becoming someone different than yourself. That’s a recipe for disaster. You want to find someone who loves you for who you are, and you can’t find that person if you are not willing to be yourself. Trust what God says about you. “All My works are wonderful!” You are amazing, and as people get to know the real you, you will find that one person choose to focus on your amazing qualities.

Tim Keller, Senior Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, recently posted his regiment of daily prayer. It is great to see what leaders in the church do regularly to maintain their connection with God. There was a lot to like about his short post, but a couple things did stand out to me.

1. I appreciated how he dealt with not keeping to his plan. He just laid it out there. It happens, but he strives to maintain the routine because he know he is effected by it.
2. He has a commitment to pray daily with his wife. I strongly believe in this practice but hear very little on it. It was refreshing. I also liked his presentation. This is what I do. This is why I do it. We are glad we are committed to it. There is a strong call to follow his example as a man who is a respected Christian leader believes in it strongly. But, at the same time, there is no hint of condemnation for those who don’t do it.

Thank you, Tim Keller, for sharing your thoughts and practices on daily prayer. May God continue to bless your life and ministry.

Several months ago I wrote a post on 10 things to pray for your wife. I’m finally getting around to complete those thoughts with a list of prayer items for your husband. For the wife I followed closely to the Proverbs 31 passage, not wanting to assume I know what I wife would need. However for the husband I took liberties. Here are things I would like my wife to ask God for me.

10 Things to Pray for Your Husband

1. Grant him more than enough income to provide for your family.
2. Give him success in all that he puts his hands to.
3. Recharge him at home more than at work or play.
4. Help him develop friendships with other men that would encourage, validate, bless, and focus him on who God says he is.
5. May he will see you as his helpmate and may you be his best friend, supporter, and lover (Proverbs 5:18-19).
6. Make your image the model of beauty for him. (This is a concept I got from Gary Thomas’ book, Sacred Marriage)
7. Help him to know that you believe in him, trust his decisions for the family, and are proud of what he is able to accomplish at work.
8. May we take every opportunity to bless each other and allow the Holy Spirit to be the one to convict of sin.
9. Allow him to truly enjoy time with Jesus and look to Him for direction and life to give to the family.
10. Open his eyes to God’s plan for his life. The plan he was created for and would stir up energy and passion in him.

Additional resources:

• The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie Omartian
• Prayer Resources

image courtesy of FamilyLife

In the garden God said it was not good for man to be alone. Man had perfect communion with God, but God said He was alone. Then He creates woman as a help-mate for him. The answer to man’s loneliness was not more of God; it was woman. Isn’t that strange?

Unfortunately, it did not take long for the oneness between man and woman was jeopardized. The forbidden fruit was eaten, and shame and blame enter the garden. Separation occurs between God and man, but it also occurs between man and women. “This woman, she…”

So many of us thought that marriage would be the answer to the pain in our lives. We saw our spouse as the miracle drug to end all of our loneliness. Unfortunately, marriage is often the source of greater loneliness.

The point is God created marriage for oneness, but sin distorts God’s plan. Sin and shame keep us from moving out of our shell we have created to protect us of exposure and pain. As we remain isolated from our spouse, additional pain and shame are added to it. Then we pull even more away into our protective shell. We are on a deadly spiral, and we need something or someone to stop the bleeding.

God in His masterful plan usually puts two people together that are perfectly matched to heal all of the pain. The thing is that in order to enter into that healing there needs to be tiny deaths to self along the way. Are you going to choose to deny yourself to allow healing to flow? When your spouse shares their struggles with impure thoughts, are you going to offer grace or shame? When your spouse tells you about their eating disorder, do you offer love or condemnation? When your spouse confides with you their fears, do you offer words of life or dismiss them as unrealistic?

image used courtesy of Project M: Marriage Blog

Recently God is putting a lot of people in my path that are struggling in their marriages. There is a consistent encouragement that God has been allowing me to share that I think appropriate here.

Many people with marriage issues face an emotional roller coaster. Good days and bad days. The good days are encouraging, but they are also emotionally draining because you just do not know what you are going to get. Some days your spouse thinks you are the source of everything wrong; other days they are offering hope to something better.

What is going on? Is your spouse bi-polar? How come you do not know what you are going to get?

On those good days, your spouse is living out of their true self. All God’s works are wonderful therefore when our lives reflect the fruit of the Spirit, we are living out of who God created us to be (Psalm 139:14 and Galatians 5:22). Even if your spouse is not a Christian, deep down God has created in them the desire to have a good and healthy marriage with you.

Since this is God’s will for your spouse, the enemy will try to steal, kill, and destroy it (John 10:10). He is feeding lies into your spouse about you, them, and your marriage. Therefore the ups and downs in your marriage are your spouse’s choice over which voice they will listen to.

Now before you think this is only a matter of spiritual warfare, your spouse does have responsibility in the matter. And, choices they have made in the past allow the enemy greater influence.

I  hope most of you are like me and married up. You know what I am talking about – you married someone that amazes you everyday. I know I am truly blessed because I could have never been as picky to get all of the things I got in a wife.

Whether you know you are as blessed as I am or not, you can enjoy this gift even more by handing your spouse over to the Lord. Here are 10 things to pray for your wife taken from Proverbs 31. There are two extra items of prayer from the passage, but they are more items for you in regards to your wife. As you pray these things for your wife, look to how God answers your prayer. These are prayers He loves to answer because prayer is a way we can make our wife holy, care for her, and present her to Jesus without stain (Ephesians 5:25-29).

10 Things to Pray for Your Wife

1. Make her of noble character (v. 10).
2. Bless the work of her hands (v. 12-14).
   • Help me to always show my confidence in her (v. 11).
3. Give her compassion for the poor and needy (v. 20).
4. Lead her into what is best for the children (v. 21).
5. Help her love me, even when I don’t deserve it, to encourage greatness in me (v. 23).
6. Give her confidence in You, O Lord (v. 25).
7. Let the words of her mouth be wisdom directly from You (v. 26).
   • May the children and I never cease to praise her (v. 28).
8. Put in her a healthy fear of You (v. 30) and may she experience the joy of the Lord.

Gary Thomas is becoming a quick favorite in the Christian community with his series of books. I just recently finished leading a group at my church through a study of the his Sacred Marriage book and would encourage it to you. In a society that views life from the filter of what is in it for me, Thomas lays out a thesis in the Sacred Marriage that marriage is about making you holy. This book should challenge your thinking and redouble your efforts to work on your marriage. There is a choosing to follow God with your marriage; you cannot just let it come on its own.

Marriage is meant to be hard because it is two incomplete people trying to make life work together. The glory of this union is that as you succeed in making it work, you also learn how to make that same type of union work with God. That to me is one of the greatest gifts of marriage is the insight it provides to our relationship with God. Your marriage to your spouse is intended to represent Christ’s love for the Church (Ephesians 5:31-32). That means that every aspect of marriage will teach us more about God’s love for us. This is the angle I took on the study questions for Sacred Marriage (PDF) I put together our class. Each lesson looks at Thomas’ teachings and than goes through a Bible study related to that topic.

I recommend this book as it will encourage you in your marriage, and it is easy to read. This make it great for group discussions. I was able to do more than one chapter per week, and even though my crowd was parents of preschoolers, they were able to find time to read the chapters.