Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives, when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear. 1 Peter 3What do you do, as a wife, when your husband is not only not obeying the word, but is hellbent on behavior inconducive to marriage and family? When he appears to be battling demons from his past and is challenging every last bit of your resolve to be the wife God has commanded you to be?
I received the call: "What can I do?"
RLB and I talked, we prayed about it, and the answer was clear:
Pray
They were equally yoked when they met and were married. But she received Truth. Now this Truth resides within her. The passage says that he, without a word, may be won by her conduct.
May be won.
Not: "will be won." Not: "is guaranteed to be won." Not: "in three weeks will be won."
For how long must she suffer?
This is a question common to us all when we are walking through difficulty and challenge: "For how long must I suffer?"
We ask if there is hope. Is there hope in my situation?
For her, I know there's hope. Her husband recently talked with her about God. I can imagine this brought the demons out in full force. Just as our Sheppard wants that no sheep be lost, how much more does Satan want to keep the lost from finding their way?
When we read of Paul's transformation and his work that followed, it is clear to see why Satan would want to keep hold of the lost.
Another example is The Machine Gun Preacher:
"Hope is the greatest weapon of all"
The Sam Childers Story
Machine Gun Preacher Sam Childers grew up in the hills of Pennsylvania. His parents were decent, honest people but at an early age Sam started to show a knack for getting into trouble. His father, a former marine, grew fond of saying “Boy, somebody’s gonna kill you one of these days!”By his early teens Sam was constantly in fist fights, selling hard drugs and sleeping with married women. He continued to slide deeper into a life of violence and crime until he became a Shotgunner – an armed guard for drug dealers. It was during this stage of his life that he met Lynn, a stripper, who would later become his wife.
Sam, haunted by his father’s words, became increasingly concerned that he was going to be killed because of drugs and slowly began to distance himself from his former life. He found a job in construction and prospered despite his continuing drug and alcohol habit. Lynn, meanwhile, returned to the Church she had forsaken as a young adult.
Sam also sought to re-establish his relationship with God and began to live a clean life. Slowly, things began to change for the better. Lynn gave birth to a healthy baby girl and Sam started his own construction business. Little did they know that their greatest challenge was just around the corner.
Vox Day writes in The Limits of Desire:
Sin is sweet. But the pleasure one derives from it is fleeting. I threw myself into the pursuit of pleasure with no little abandon and burned out for the first time by 23, at which point I shaved my head, devoted myself to training martial arts six days per week, quit drinking, and refused to have anything to do with women for six months.
Four years later, I became a Christian. Man cannot live as a lotus eater. The same perspicacity and pursuit of truth that caused players like Roosh and Frost to take the red pill will eventually lead them to seek the deeper truths. They are truth seekers, but there is every likelihood that they will become Truth seekers in time.
And while pleasure does not last, joy does. For some, the emptiness of hedonism cannot be grasped until its depths have been thoroughly explored.
Stickwick adds this:
The Christian faith has codified the wisdom that pleasure-seeking is a zero-sum game; every moment of pleasure in life is purchased with an equal moment of pain. One of the great failures of humanism is the exaltation of the vain attempt to defeat this overarching law of biological existence, which is why depression and other functional disorders are rampant in humanist societies.
There are only two directions in which a libertine can go once he reaches burnout: 1) continuation, followed by mental illness and self-destruction; or 2) the realization that pleasure-seeking is pointless, followed by the adoption of an austere philosophy.
And Markku adds this wisdom:
I don't think it's a one to one relationship between individual moments of joy or sadness, like karmic law. Rather, it's a phenomenon of reverse hysteresis. The soul is trying to calibrate its normal state to the midpoint between highs and lows. If it is put in an environment that provides an unusually large amounts of either, the calibration goes wrong in relation to a normal environment. Returning it there will then bias the normal state in the opposite direction for quite some time.
My dear friend, be strong and courageous. Pray without ceasing. We'll be praying too. You're not alone. And, "after you've done all you can, you just stand":
A quick hope would be to google Duck Commander or put in Phil Robertson on youtube. Major Alpha who went on the war path for ten years. His Sister who loved Him preached to him unceasingly and loved on him. Finally, his wife became a Christian and he threw her and his children out of the home in a drunken rage. Three months later she found him crying in the parking lot of her workplace. He gave his life to the Lord and then began preaching like a man on fire. BECAUSE of the huge change in him that his sons saw, ALL FOUR OF THEM are preachers of the word on fire for God. Manly, Godly men who are kind and clean living. Upfront about their frailties. They have been leading others to the Lord since their childhood. But the wife and children endured ten years of horror.
ReplyDeleteThey all say that they owe their family to the strength and faith of the Mother who forgave, prayed for and took back the Father. She now has a DYNASTY of children and grandchildren serving the Lord and a marriage of over forty years. You can have this too.
The sons say the BELIEVED because of the huge change they saw in their Father. This happened in my own family growing up.
This is NOT AN END. STAND FIRM. GOD DOES THE CHANGING, YOU STAND YOU POST SWEET LADY! My family will pray for yours without ceasing.
And Since NOTHING is impossible with God and since the battle is the Lords, praise Him and do not be moved in your emotions or faith.
God Bless and Keep you and yours!
Sunshinemary left this comment on her blog in response to a commenter whose husband is having an affair. I thought it was excellent and wanted to have it here as well:
ReplyDeleteKatherine, I did not know you were Christian. Since you are a Christian woman, you may not divorce your husband. That takes some of the options off the table. As DS pointed out, if your husband leaves, you are no longer bound to him because he is not a believer.
You have not described what you are doing spiritually. I was not a practicing Christian and my husband was an atheist when his many infidelities came to light. I later returned to the faith, but it was quite a while before my husband accepted Christ. In that time, he continued to have the occasional affair.
Your chief weapon is prayer. You are right in the midst of a massive spiritual battle and you should not fight this alone. Who is praying with you? Be exceedingly careful about revealing your marital troubles to other people, especially infidelities. Do not tell your mother or other close female relatives under any circumstances. If he ever accepts Christ and repents of his sin, you would be surprised how unforgiving the female herd can be.
You must engage this battle whether you want to or not. You should be getting up while it is still dark and praying over all his possession that he will touch during the day. Speak verses over everything: his phone, his coffee cup, his very shoes. I wrote scripture verses on bits of silk and sewed them into my husbands pants cuffs. I anointed his car with oil while praying. I got on my knees in the basement every night and cried out to God. I wrote Bible verses on scraps of paper and hid them among his possessions. If you do not know which verses to pray, I can make a list for you. God’s Word is powerful. He tells us that His Word never returns to Him void; it always accomplishes His purposes.
Pray for the women he is having sex with. Pray for them to be pursued by the Holy Spirit. Pray specifically that the very taste of them would be like sawdust in your husband’s mouth. But never, under any circumstances attempt to contact any of these women. There is nothing to be gained by doing so; I learned this the hard way. It will just end with both of you crying and screaming at each other. You already know they are adulteresses and liars, so you cannot trust anything they might say to you. However, anything they do say to you will haunt you. You do not need those images in your mind. Satan will use them to tempt you in many ways.
When you do come together with him, pray unceasingly. I used to beseech God to use my very body to soften my husband’s heart to Christ. I would pray every time we had marital relations for the Holy Spirit to speak to him through me. You should be speaking verses over your bed and inviting the presence of the Holy Spirit to dwell there. Write verses in a fine-tipped sharpie on the inside edge of his pillow.
There is a great deal more I can tell you on this issue, but I suspect this is enough for you to absorb for now. You can find my email address at the top of my blog if you wish to contact me. I will pray for you and your husband.