Men, if you seek to commit yourself to love your wife, to serve her, and to become the spiritual leader in your marriage, you should prepare yourself for major spiritual attack. Satan will throw everything at you to prevent you from being the man God calls you to be, and his attack on you will be strategic. Satan does not want you to love your wife, and He will try and prevent it. If you have a warm and caring relationship, that is not necessarily a threat to him and his designs on your family and your children. But he does not want you to lay down your life for your wife, and he will continually tempt you to serve your own needs rather than hers. However, a man who serves his wife still is not a grave threat to Satan. However, if you want to obey the third command, if you desire to make it the primary mission of your life to encourage faith and character in your wife and children, that Satan will not tolerate, and he will do all in his power to prevent it.
Let me illustrate how this spiritual attack happens. Men, consider the following three questions:
• Do you believe that praying with your wife is an important thing to do?
• Do you believe that God wants you to pray with your wife?
• Is praying with your wife easy or hard, compared to climbing
Mount Everest? (In other words, is it easy or hard to hold your wife’s hand, and say a few words to God?)
Most guys are going to answer yes, yes, and easy. Now for the fourth question:
• Do you struggle to pray faithfully and consistently with your wife?
Most of us reply with another yes.
This makes no sense! We believe that praying with our wives is important. We believe God wants us to do it, and we know it is physically easy to do. Despite all that, men frequently struggle to pray faithfully their wives. How could this be? The reason this is played out in millions of Christian homes around the country is because we fail to identify another part of the equation. Although prayer with my wife is important, God wants me to do it, and it is easy to do, Satan does all in his power to prevent me from doing it!
So Amy and I, like so many other Christian couples, struggle to pray as a couple. For the first twelve years of our marriage, our prayer life as a couple was inconsistent at best. By God’s grace we are finally breaking through and experiencing consistency in a short time of prayer together before we go to sleep. But the battle is not over! Amy and I have prayed together almost every night for the past year. Yet, I know what will happen when I get in bed tonight. As I think that I should pray with Amy, I will then immediately feel a sense of discomfort and embarrassment, mixed with some laziness. Where do all those feelings come from? They certainly do not come from Amy. She loves it when I lead us in prayer. God would never lead me astray. Those are moments of spiritual attack from the enemy, who is desperate to do all he can to prevent Amy and me from coming before the Lord with one heart in prayer. Why is he so desperate to prevent my taking any role of spiritual leadership in our marriage? Because once that happens, our family begins to function with transformational spiritual power! Our marriage and our home become a threat to Satan and a dynamic ministry tool in the hands of God.
Read more in Visionary Parenting – http://amzn.to/in7TOr
and Visionary Marriage – http://amzn.to/bMAeVX