Sacred Influence (4 page)

and find refuge in the worth and purpose you have as his daughter.

Through this mighty spiritual core you can influence the world —including your husband.
God
,
not your marital status or the condition of
your marriage
,
defines your life.

You may have thought that biblical submission sentences you to a second-tier status, that you must be your husband’s doormat and allow him to walk all over you without ever raising your voice as you quietly pray in the corner. Such an outdated view comes from the culture, not the Bible.

Don’t think I am promoting a radical feminist agenda here! In fact, I believe it is important to affirm differences in gender roles (we’ll talk more about this later). Men and women
aren’t
the same — but they
are
equal in God’s eyes, and there is a unique glory in both genders.

I believe you owe it to the God who created you — and to yourself, to the husband who married you, and to any kids you’ve given birth to — to become the woman he designed you to be, in all your glory, power, strength, and wisdom.

When Marriage Becomes Idolatry

While some women define themselves on the basis of how one man (or men in general) views them and accepts them, as a
Christian
woman you have the opportunity to define yourself in relation to your Creator — not in defiance of your husband but in a way that will complement your marriage and bless your husband. It will unleash in you the glory of being a godly woman.

Let’s apply some simple theology here. Who does the Bible say is your refuge — God, or your husband? Deuteronomy 33:27 provides the answer: “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

In whom does your hope lie? Your husband’s continuing affection? First Peter 1:21 says, “Your faith and hope are in God.”

Where will you find your security? Your husband’s ability to earn a living and his commitment to stay married to you? Philippians 4:19 answers, “My God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”

Where will you find supreme acceptance that will never fade or falter for all the days of your life? “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,” replies Isaiah 62:5, “so will your God rejoice over you.” If you’re trying to find your primary refuge in your husband, if you’ve centered your hope on him, if your security depends on his approval, and if you will do almost anything to gain his acceptance — then you’ve just given to a man what rightfully belongs to God alone.

And that means you’ve turned marriage into idol worship.

When you do that, both you and your husband lose. You can’t love a false idol long term. You just can’t. You may worship it for a while, but eventually that idol’s limitations will show and you’ll become bitter and resentful. Just as surely as a block of wood can’t speak wisdom, so a human man can’t love you as God created you to be loved. And what happens when an idol disappoints you? Ah, that’s the type of experience that gives birth to the cliché, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

In addition, how will you ever find the courage to confront someone whose acceptance so determines your sense of well-being that you believe you can’t exist without him? How will you ever take the risk to say what needs to be said if you think your future depends on your husband’s favor toward you?

Your future depends on God, not on a fallen man. Your security rests with your caring Creator’s providence, not with your husband’s paycheck. Your acceptance as a person became secure when God adopted you, not when your husband proposed to you. If you truly want to love, motivate, and influence your husband, your first step must be to connect — and to stay connected — with God. Find your refuge, security, comfort, strength, and hope in him.

This line of thinking is neither academic nor theoretical. Statistics show that most women will die as widows. Women, by and large, live longer than men. Since most women marry men as old as or older than they are, the math isn’t all that hard to figure out.
If you
die while still married to your spouse
,
you’ ll be in the minority.
Sooner or later, you’re probably going to have to live without your husband.

This means the day will likely come when you will need strength, courage, and character like you’ve never had before. You’ll have to stand on your own. So then, why not develop that strength, courage, and character
now
, while your husband is still living and you’re not beside yourself with grief? Why not bless this world with the example of a woman defined by God, living a life that reveres God, twenty or thirty years sooner than widowhood forces it on you?

Before I address the practical issues of how to influence your husband, I encourage you to reevaluate and affirm your biblical standing as a woman. More often than not, this will be a process — perhaps you’ll have to pray over the Bible verses in this chapter until they become real to you. But you
must not
accept any identity that gives you less than the Bible offers you. Before you run the race, you have to train. Before you can influence someone, you must become spiritually strong enough to stand up to your husband’s “functional fixedness.”

We’ll discuss this, and much more, in the next chapter.

Chapter 2: The Strength of
a Godly Woman

Becoming Strong Enough to Address
Your Husband’s “Functional Fixedness”

D
r. Melody Rhode often uses a psychoneurological term to describe a man’s reluctance to change:
functional fixedness
. Men don’t normally change if what they’ve been doing seems to be working for them. When a woman allows her husband to treat her with disrespect, he has no motivation to change — and so it’s unlikely he ever will.

Melody notes, “There’s a simple question I ask wounded women who seek help to endure belittling or degrading treatment from their man: ‘Why does your husband treat you badly?’ Answer:
because he
can
.” This is not, in any way, to blame a woman for the abuse but to develop a new blueprint for a different future.

Melody continues. “If what he’s doing is working for him, why change? He needs a compelling reason to change, and it needs to be more compelling than your unhappiness or private misery with the situation.”

I would think that a God-fearing man would be motivated to change simply by understanding that his actions hurt you. But I’m also a realist. Some of you may be married to a man who doesn’t much care if his actions hurt you, as long as he gets what he wants. In such cases, allowing the behavior to continue while complaining about it won’t change anything. It’s not
your
pain that motivates him but
his
pain. You have to be willing to create an environment in which the status quo becomes more painful than the experience of positive change.

Here’s the trap I’ve seen too many wives fall into: a woman keeps expressing to her husband how he is doing something (or
not
doing something) that is hurting her. Even after several such conversations, he doesn’t change — or he’ll change for a few days and then go back to his old habits, at which point the wife complains again. Still, no long-term change. The wife reads a book or attends a seminar and decides she needs to find a better way to communicate so she can get her message across, but even after this, there’s no permanent change. Her error is assuming that she’s not getting through. In point of fact, she
is
getting through to her husband — he may fully understand and be completely aware of her pain, but he’s not motivated by
her
pain. If he likes the marriage as it is, he’ll put up with an occasionally disagreeable conversation now and then.

In such cases, spouses need to make a serious evaluation. There was a point in “Jenny’s” marriage when she realized, based on her and her husband’s parents’ health history, that she and “Mike” could be married for sixty years. At the time, Jenny had been married for just fifteen years, but that left, potentially, another forty-five years of being together — which also meant another forty-five years of a situation that Jenny wasn’t sure she could live with.

“There is no scenario in my life plan in which I want divorce — none,” Jenny told me. “At the end of my life, my fervent hope and determination is to be, unreservedly, a one-man woman. But I also know enough not to overestimate my patience. I could put up with some disappointments at the time, but was I willing to live with this for another forty-five years?

“At that point, I felt I needed to be more honest about some struggles and more up-front about making a change. It created some discomfort for a season as I stopped pretending that everything was OK — but was a season of discomfort worth changing the course of our marriage for the next forty-five years? Without question!”

Without nagging and without petty recriminations (withholding sex, the silent treatment, a critical spirit, and so forth), Jenny gently but forcefully made her husband see that as long as he acted the way he did, their marriage was going to suffer in specific ways — ways that affected
him
. It was only when Mike started feeling his own pain that he was shaken out of his functional fixedness enough to change his behavior.

I believe Jenny makes an important point: be wary of overestimating your willingness to live with a glaring hurt or a gaping need. Don’t pretend that Satan won’t exploit it or that you won’t be tempted by another man who happens to be strongest exactly where your husband is weakest. If, like Jenny, your ideal life plan leaves no room for divorce, you must honestly accept your weaknesses and be willing to create a climate in which your spouse will be motivated by his pain. This is a courageous and healthy movement toward your spouse and toward preserving and strengthening your marriage, and it is an act of commitment, not rebellion.

All this requires a very specific application based on your spouse’s personality, so I can’t give you “five steps to overcome functional fixedness” here — but you’ll receive plenty of ideas and suggestions as we touch on various topics throughout this book. At this point, it’s enough to say that if merely communicating your hurt isn’t solving the problem, you’re most likely dealing with a case of functional fixedness, and you’ll need to be strong to address that issue.

Some women fall into the trap of failing to speak up for fear of losing their man; they don’t want to “rock the boat,” even though it appears that the boat is headed toward a waterfall. But this passive acceptance makes it
more
likely that the husband will stray; he won’t respect his wife for putting up with his poor behavior, and this attitude will only reinforce his disrespectful behavior. Sadly, many women think their husband’s anger is the great enemy of their security, but, in fact, weakness and the corresponding relational boredom pose a far more potent threat.

If you can stand strong and secure in your identity and in your relationship with Christ, courageously making it clear how you will and will not be treated, you will be amazed to see how the respect you show for yourself rubs off on your husband.

Things Must Change

Here’s the male insider’s view, right at the start: you have more influence over your husband than you realize. When you are a woman of respect, the last thing your husband wants is to lose you. If he thinks he can have you
and
his aberrant behavior, he’ll take both. But if the day comes when he knows you won’t simply turn a blind eye to what he’s doing, when he thinks he might even lose you if he continues down the path he’s walking, he’s going to be shaken out of his functional fixedness and at least consider making changes.

Your reactions and opinions matter greatly — far more than you may realize. In a later chapter, I’ll discuss how
desperately
men want their wives’ affirmation. When a woman stands up and says, “This
will
affect our relationship and my view of you,” most men will at least start listening. You’ll notice as you read this book that many of the women who moved their husbands toward holiness came to a point where they decided that things could not and would not stay the same. They stopped “playing the game” and made it clear to their husbands that they were determined to stand strong in the Lord. As noted earlier, too many women have given up this power to influence their husbands because they fear being left alone. “If I say, ‘No more,’ he may leave me. Then what?”