6 Ways to Help Your Husband Be the Spiritual Leader in Your Home
Women
Audio By Carbonatix
By Lynette Kittle, Crosswalk.com
When it comes to a husband’s spiritual leadership in the home, it seems to be an all-too-common complaint with women that their husbands are overall lacking in this area.
Yet, as women and wives, we often have unrealistic expectations for our husbands, expecting them to automatically be the spiritual leaders we believe God wants them to be in the home.
Still, God is more patient with men than many wives are, willing to give them time to grow and learn, whereas we often expect them to have the skills and know-how to lead at the get-go of our marriages.
Some men have the advantage of growing up in a home with a father who was a strong spiritual leader, providing a strong model to follow.
Yet so many young men today grow up with either no father or one who wasn’t the spiritual leader in their home, leaving them to start out without the mentorship of a spiritual leader in the home.
Although men come with various gifts and callings, becoming and being a spiritual leader at home requires the help, patience, and time from their wives to fulfill God’s will in their role.
Help Needed
It’s no surprise that husbands need their wives’ help with being the spiritual leader in their homes. After all, God created Eve to be Adam’s helper, so it shouldn’t surprise us when we find they actually need our help.
Some husbands are amazing at providing financially, but that doesn’t mean it automatically translates into being an amazing spiritual leader at home. Some husbands struggle to provide financially, but have strong spiritual leadership skills. Either way, both need their wives’ help because God said they do.
Genesis 2:18 records His words, “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’”
Even pastors who lead huge congregations need their wives to help them be the spiritual leaders in their homes. Sadly, sometimes a pastor’s family can be spiritually neglected, so consumed by meeting the needs of their congregants that their wives and children receive the leftovers from a husband caring for his church members, leaving them to fend for their own spiritual needs.
It’s a Tough Job, but Somebody Has to Do It
Women often forget that God has ordained a very tough job for husbands to be the head of the wife. In its own right, this is a difficult position to fill, but even more so nowadays, where a majority of women seem highly resistant to a man’s leadership, including some believers in Jesus Christ.
However, it is God’s plan, as the Apostle Paul explains in Ephesians 5:23, “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is the Savior.”
It’s a description that makes many women rise up in rebellion towards men, when, in reality, at its core, it is disobedience towards God and His authority in our lives.
Paul describes again in 1 Corinthians 11:3, “But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.”
Resist Usurping Our Husbands’ God-Given Role
Even so, some wives try to usurp their husbands’ position, resisting the authority and will of God, choosing disobedience over submission to Him. Wives who resist and step away from embracing Ephesians 5:22, urging, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”
Yet submission to one another is part of our Christian walk for all believers, as Ephesians 5:21 states: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”
Likewise, many women overall don’t like the Genesis 3:16 decree God spoke after the fall of mankind. “To the woman He said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’”
Still, in 1 Peter 3:7, God holds husbands accountable for how they lead, giving them specific direction, “Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.”
As Ephesians 5:24 describes, the husband-wife relationship is modeled after the church, serving as a witness to the world. “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”
6 Ways to Help Our Husbands Fulfill Their Spiritual Role
The following are six ways we can help our husbands fulfill their spiritual roles as husbands and fathers.
1. Watch, read, and share God’s truth with our husbands to encourage their faith.
As wives and in our daily, everyday experiences with our husbands, we have the opportunity to do what Ephesians 5:19 urges: “Speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord.”
We, as wives, have a front-row seat to cheer our husbands on in their faith. Even if at times we don’t think so, or believe it, we are in a highly influential position to share God’s truth with him by living it out genuinely in our own lives.
2. Show our husbands godly respect, always keeping the truth of God’s Word in front of us.
Respect is a key to our husband’s heart and to him fulfilling his God-ordained role as the spiritual leader in our homes.
We are to respect our husbands even if we don’t think they deserve it because respecting them is respecting God. Rather than looking at their human frailties and faults, we can choose to do what honors Him over following our own hesitations and reasoning.
As Ephesians 5:23 instructs, “However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”
Even if it seems like our husbands are falling short in loving us, we want to obey God regardless and leave it in His hands to transform them. When we do, God moves within our husbands’ hearts to lead them to love us like Jesus loves the Church.
3. Pray for our husbands on a daily basis.
Colossians 4:2 leads us to, “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.”
Daily, hourly, minute by minute, we can devote ourselves to praying for our husbands, trusting, waiting, and watching with grateful hearts for God to move in their lives.
4. Pray with our husbands.
We can initiate a time to pray together with our husbands. If not every day, at least once a week, so that they can hear our hearts and we can hear theirs, helping us know how to pray effectively for them.
James 5:16 describes the benefits of doing so.
“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”
Praying with our husbands leads to God moving in powerful ways in our marriages, families, and our lives.
5. Invite our husbands to share in our spiritual disciplines.
We can initiate and invite our husbands to participate with us in spiritual practices such as Bible study, fasting, and communion.
Sharing biblical disciplines helps to draw us closer to God and closer together as a couple.
6. Live out our faith before them.
1 Peter 3:1-6 encourages wives and gives a powerful example of the spiritual impact they can have on their husbands when they live out their faith before them in their own homes.
“Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.”
Related:
Why Should Men Be the Spiritual Leaders in the Home?
4 Ways to Overcome Insecurities about Being the Spiritual Leader of Your Home
