Sacred Influence (5 page)
Consider this: what if he stays and then grows in the Lord because of it?
Has your past acquiescence ever changed
anything
? If not, why should it change anything in the future? God’s provision and strength will help you face the consequences of obedience. God won’t leave you alone, regardless of what happens. God, not your marital status, defines your life.
Embrace this freedom and the glory of being a strong woman who is alive to God! God has given you the power to influence your man. But even if your man should leave, God will give you the grace and power to cope. Once you fully understand your status before God, you need never again live at the mercy of a man’s approval. Understand the power you have, and utilize that famous “mystery” of a man with a woman (Ephesians 5:31 – 33).
Dr. Melody Rhode sees the threat of a husband’s losing his wife as perhaps the greatest possible motivator for a husband. Of course, we have to place this within the context of a covenantal, committed marriage. The Bible is very specific and very limiting regarding what constitutes an acceptable divorce. Discontentment, seeming incompatibility, and mere displeasure
don’t
qualify! Melody points out, “A woman’s power needs to be surrendered to God and used for his purposes, not our own.”
She also stresses, however, that most women, because of our culture, don’t realize the power they have to move their husbands. “They feel powerless because of their sex,” she observes, “and this has resulted in a lot of pent-up anger, frustration, and even desperation.” As your brother in Christ, I’m encouraging you to be bold, courageous, and strong. Use the natural and very real spiritual in-fluence and role that God has designed for you to move the man in your life.
Be Bold
The first thing so many women in the Bible had to be told was to stop being afraid, to become bold. When Hagar was abandoned by her husband and exiled to what looked like her and her son’s slow starvation and death, God’s angel encouraged her, “Do not be afraid” (Genesis 21:17). When the women who had been faithful to Jesus were beside themselves with grief, wondering what had happened to the body of their precious Jesus, an angel admonished them, “Do not be afraid” (Matthew 28:5).
I know I may sound as though I’m encouraging you toward risky action, but the “safe” path is sometimes a slow drift toward destruction. One of my favorite Christian philosophers, Elton Trueblood, put it so well:
The person who never goes out on a limb will never, it is true, have the limb cut off while he is on it, but neither will he reach the best fruit. The best fruit which human life offers seems to come only within the reach of those who face life boldly . . . with no excessive concern over possible failure and personal danger. The good life is always the gambler’s choice, and comes to those who take sides. Neutrality is seldom a virtue.
1
Fear gives birth to paralysis — and sometimes inaction is our greatest enemy. Marriages can slowly die from years of apathy. I’ve seen many relationships wilt from unhealthy patterns that one or both partners refused to address. The most damaging thing you can do in an unhealthy relationship is
nothing
. FedEx CEO Frederick Smith observes, “Too many think inaction is the least risky path. Sometimes action is the most conservative and safest path. Not doing anything is exceedingly dangerous. Before Pearl Harbor, they put all the airplanes in the middle of the airfield thinking saboteurs were the biggest risk, not a carrier-borne attack. They were undone by cautiousness, not bravado.”
2
If you always play it safe in your marriage, you’re going to end up in some ruts. What I believe will give you the most boldness and courage to address issues that need to change is, first, understanding who you are in Christ and, second, letting God, not your marital status, define your life. Armed with that acceptance, security, and empowerment, you become a mighty force for good. You can then claim the power of Moses’ words in Deuteronomy 31:8: “The LORD himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”
Fear and discouragement create stagnancy and persistent disappointment in marriage. If you’ve had your fill of those, why not try God’s path of faith and boldness?
Hope Is
Not
a Strategy
One of the things I’ve been trying to do in these opening pages is to awaken in you a capability not often expressed to Christian women. Our culture in general — even Christian culture — is on a long slide toward passivity that completely goes against who God made us to be.
Let me be blunt:
hope is not a strategy
. Merely “wishing” that your husband would change, merely “wanting” your marriage to be different, won’t do anything. The problem is that some Christians spiritualize wishing — we call it “praying.” Please understand, I’m not knocking prayer; I’m challenging a
misconception
about prayer, namely, that we can merely voice our displeasure and expect our world and our relationships to be transformed. True biblical prayer is about much, much more than that. It involves receiving our marching orders and then
acting
on them.
A good marriage doesn’t happen by accident, and a good marriage isn’t maintained by accident. I’ve never written a book by accident, and you can’t build a business by accident. These endeavors require deliberate choices and much perseverance. When you start acting instead of merely wishing, when you begin taking initiative instead of simply feeling sorry for yourself, you become an active woman, and active women mirror the active God who made them.
Active God, Active Women
Genesis 1 provides our initial glimpse of who God is. The first thing God wants us to know is that he is an extraordinarily
active
God. In Genesis 1 there are
thirty-eight
active verbs describing what God does: he creates, he speaks, he separates, he calls, he blesses, he gives, and much more — all in just
one
chapter.
Then — and this is key — he tells the woman and the man
to do
the same
: “God blessed them [male and female] and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground’ ” (Genesis 1:28).
God made you, as a woman, to rule in this world, to subdue it, to act according to his image. Sin begins with sluggishness, despair, and despondency. People give up on their marriages, give up on prayer, give up on their churches, give up on their kids, and eventually even give up on themselves. They say, “It’s no use,” and start to sulk instead of painstakingly remaking their marriage — simply because their first (or even tenth) attempt failed.
This may sound like a hard word, but readers of my previous books know I’m not one to shy away from that.
Your marriage is what
you make it
. The relationship you have is the direct result of what you’ve put into it, and in many cases, a marriage can rise only to the level of your courage. Initial romantic intensity is unearned; it seems to fall on us out of nowhere. But marriage has to be built stone by stone. We have to make deliberate choices; we have to be active and confront the weaknesses we see in ourselves and in each other.
A Quick Test
Before you proceed to the next chapter, please take a quick test. On a scale of 1 to 10, how strong do you think you are? An answer of “1” would denote a fearful woman who lets everyone run over her and who never speaks up — for herself or for anyone else. Five would be a woman who is willing to occasionally speak up for others but not for herself. Ten would be a strong woman who stands courageously with God to become a change agent in her home, her church, and her world.
The second question to ponder is this: how can God use one of the current challenges in your marriage to move you from a “3” to a “5,” or from a “7” to a “9”?
Finally, the test ends with this; it requires a simple yes or no answer: Will you allow God to make you stronger by courageously addressing the issues in your marriage and by persevering through the fallout as he guides you?
It’s my firm belief that the current challenges in your marriage may well be God’s vehicle for you to become the strong woman he created you to be.
How God Uses the Weaknesses of Others
to Help Us Grow
B
estselling author and historian David McCullough stumbled across a startling letter by John Adams, written to his wife, Abigail, in the heat of the Revolutionary War: “We can’t guarantee success in this war, but we can do something better. We can deserve it.”
Later, McCullough read another letter, this one by George Washington, which uses the exact same line. He traced the words to a play called
Cato
. This line summarizes the spirit behind the birth of our country, and it can help modern women reform their marriages. McCullough explains, “That line in the Adams letter is saying that how the war turns out is in the hands of God. We can’t control that, but we can control how we behave. We can deserve success.”
1
The same principle is true for you in your marriage. You can’t guarantee how everything will turn out; you definitely can’t control another human being. But you
can
“deserve” success. You can act in such a way that transformation is most likely.
I want you to think about something: What if your husband’s faults are God’s tools to shape you? What if the very thing that most bugs you about your man constitutes God’s plan to teach you something new? Are you willing to accept that your marriage makeover — the process of moving a man — might begin with you?
“Be Worthy of Me”
Napoleon Bonaparte’s astounding military success found a rival only in his raging ego. In one letter he chastised his wife, “I insist you have more strength. I am told you are always crying. For shame, that is very bad! . . . Be worthy of me and develop a stronger character. Make a proper show in Paris. . . . If you are always weeping I shall think you have no courage or character. I do not like cowards. An empress should have heart.”
2
While Napoleon’s condescension both nauseates and offends us, I think he stumbles onto an interesting turn of phrase: “Be worthy of me.” This should be the goal of every husband and wife — a man aspiring to be “worthy” of his wife, and a wife aspiring to be “worthy” of her husband.
In our self-esteem-obsessed culture, telling someone he or she needs to become “worthy” sounds anathema, but there’s biblical precedence for this. Jesus says that anyone who fails to take up his cross is not worthy of him (Matthew 10:38). Paul asks the Romans to receive Phoebe “in a way worthy of the saints” (Romans 16:2). He urges the Ephesians to live a life “worthy of the calling you have received” (4:1). Saints are urged to be worthy, or commended for being worthy, in Philippians 1:27; Colossians 1:10; 1 Thes salo nians 2:12; 2 Thes salonians 1:11; 3 John 6; and Revelation 3:4.
This is a clarion call for us to seriously develop deep spiritual roots, to keep cultivating relational skills. We need to search the Scriptures, grow in wisdom, keep praying, and keep developing spiritual insight. With Christ in us and the Holy Spirit transforming us, we really have no excuse for continuing immaturity.
The apostle Paul charged Timothy to fully develop the gifts God gave him, and then he wrote, “Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress” (1 Timothy 4:15). Paul wants Timothy to know, “You’re not perfect, but people should see
progress
in your life. In five years you should be wiser, stronger, and more mature in character than you are now.”
My wife married a very immature twenty-two-year-old. I sincerely hope that her husband is now more mature, more loving, and less selfish than he was back then. And I pray fervently that in another ten years, her husband will have become that much more mature, that much more loving, that much kinder and wiser and selfless.
This growth won’t happen by accident, of course. It won’t occur unless I am — to use Paul’s words — “diligent in these matters,” unless I “watch [my] life and doctrine closely” (1 Timothy 4:16), “persevering” in them. If I won’t grow, my wife may well grow past me. I can’t give Lisa a perfect husband, but I certainly don’t want to give her a spiritually lazy one. I want to become “worthy” of her. I may never fully get there, but it won’t be for lack of trying. I’ll never be as thin as I once was, and I’ll never have the hair I did back then, but I can become a man whose character far outshines that of the twenty-two-year-old she married.
You see, when you grow in character, when you sink your spiritual roots deep, when you learn to hear God’s voice and build your mind with his wisdom, when you allow his Holy Spirit to transform your character and reshape your heart — then you can make your husband fall in love with you over and over again, and he’ll be all the more motivated to maintain your respect and affection. Nothing compares to being married to a godly woman —
nothing
. And nothing gets more tiresome more quickly than living with a narcissist or a weak wife or a fearful one.
Your husband chose you as you were and accepts you as you are — but you can bless him with the woman you want to become. Will you do that? Will you honor his faith in you by becoming a woman he could only dream about?