I’ve always loved to pray scripture. It’s not that I can’t find my own words to pray…but honestly…why spend any effort trying to come up with my own words when everything I need is right there in the Word? I’ve been a serious Word-prayer for a few years now.
I love to encourage friends and family with the promises of God’s Word for their lives…you can often find sticky notes placed all around my house with scriptures I’m praying for my family…A few months ago I began praying Malachi 4:5-6 for my husband.
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers…”
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers…”
Every day it seems I hear a story about another failure…another child whose life hung in the balance when a father turned away. I’ve been reading statistics about fatherless families and the irreplaceable impact of the father on sons and daughters. Ironically, it research shows that while moms are important, dads are even more so.I watch my husband, devoted as he is to us, try to shoulder that great responsibility…and I see him sometimes weighted down by the heaviness of it and I know he needs me. But not in the way you might think…I believe the best thing I can do for my husband is to pray for him. In fact, I want to suggest that we start praying for the fathers in our lives now more than ever.
The Elijah Prayer Project is my attempt to bring mothers together to pray for the fathers of their children. Whether they are single moms, happily or unhappily married, divorced or separated doesn’t really matter. Their children need fathers whose hearts are turned toward God and toward them.
Elijah Prayer Project happens each Thursday on my blog and is a place for moms to ask for prayer, share what they’re praying for dads and encourage one another to press on. It is NOT a place to come bash men or share info from the “more than I needed to know” file. Each week I list instructions and rules so that the purpose of the project is clear
In your years of marriage, what have you learned about the wife’s role in the man’s life and how she can influence her husband?
Early in my marriage, after an intense fight with my husband, the Lord led me to 1 Peter 3: 1-6. I had read these verses explaining the wife’s responsibility to be subject to their own husbands many times before. But that day, as I was crying out to the Lord for insight, He showed me something different. I noticed that God, through Peter, placed great emphasis on Sarah, raising her up as an example to women everywhere. It had been a long time since I read the entire story of Abraham and Sarah, so there, in my bedroom, fresh out of a fight with the love of my life, I plowed through five or six chapters of Genesis and what God showed me changed my life. You can read all of my thoughts on submission on my blog. I’ve actually re-organized them into a Bible study I call “Imperishable Beauty,” and I hope to have it published someday.
In another words: How do you see the role a woman can play in her marriage and in her husband’s life? Why do many underestimate the wife’s role in marriage and in the husband’s life?
As Christians, we are Christ’s ambassadors on the earth. That means we represent Him to the people in our lives, most importantly, our husbands and children. To wives (including myself) I ask these questions: Based on your heart and your behaviors, who does your husband think Christ is? What are you showing your husband about Christ’s heart toward him? Are you showing him that Christ is compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love? Or are you showing him a false Christ who loves only when loved in return, isn’t a safe place to fall and cares nothing for the issues of his life? The answer to this question matters! Today’s woman underestimates her influence over her husband because we’re so obsessed with what we think we deserve in our marriage. Christ asks us to lay down our expectations, what we think we have a right to and what we think we deserve in order to follow Him…and nothing else. We’re being duped into believing in something that only exists in fairy tales.
It was another great post from our interview with Brooke, and there is more to come. Check out the next post first thing Monday morning. But now, you can read more of her writing on her blog a life in need of change.
1 comment:
Another amazing post. To be honest I have never even thought about praying for my firstborn's father who I am no longer married to. I suppose because I am disconnected from him, I do not acknowledge the importance of his role as my daughters father. I pray for my current husband and the father to our young one (not enough of course yet Brooke is inspiring me to do it more) I never even thought to pray for him and I feel so encourage to do so as an ex wife who does care about the impact he has on our daughter. Can't wait for Monday's post.
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