Just one week after I got married, I was given a book called, “The Power of a Praying Wife” by Stormie Omartian. I was just starting my fairy tale life with my flawless Prince Charming, so I was thrilled to charge into our life together with power and prayer. I’ve read through the book several times since then and love it because the author teaches you how to pray using Scripture, but it’s the first chapter’s prayer that I have almost memorized. It stopped me in my tracks as a brand-new, dreamy-eyed bride. Omartian said the first thing to pray for in marriage is your husband’s wife. Keeping your own heart clean and humble changes how you pray for your man and your marriage! Every time I hit a bump in my thoughts or feelings toward my husband, or when we go through a hard time in marriage, I go straight back to this prayer. I want to share it with you today! It’s lengthy but so good! Write it down or print it out and tuck it into your Bible, put it on your nightstand, or save it as a note on your phone. You will be amazed at how God can use it to change your heart!
“Lord, help me to be a good wife. I fully realize that I don’t have what it takes to be one without Your help. Take my selfishness, impatience, and irritability and turn them into kindness, long-suffering, and the willingness to bear all things. Take my old emotional habits, mindsets, automatic reactions, rude assumptions, and self-protective stance, and make me patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled. Take the hardness of my heart and break down the walls with your battering ram of revelation. Give me a new heart and work in me Your love, peace, and joy. I am not able to rise above who I am at this moment. Only You can transform me.
Show me where there is sin in my heart, especially with regard to my husband. I confess the times I’ve been unloving, critical, angry, resentful, disrespectful, or unforgiving toward him. Help me to put aside any hurt, anger, or disappointment I feel and forgive him the way You do – totally and completely, no looking back. Make me a tool of reconciliation, peace, and healing in this marriage. Enable us to communicate well and rescue us from the threshold of separation where the realities of divorce begin.
Make me my husband’s helpmate, companion, champion, friend, and support. Help me to create a peaceful, restful, safe place for him to come home to. Teach me how to take care of myself and stay attractive to him. Grow me into a creative and confident woman who is rich in mind, soul, and spirit. Make me the kind of woman he can be proud to say is his wife.
I lay all my expectations at Your feet. I release my husband from the burden of fulfilling me in areas where I should be looking to You. Help me to accept him the way he is and not try to change him. I realize that in some ways he may never change, but at the same time, I release him to change in ways I never thought he could. I leave any changing that needs to be done in Your hands, fully accepting that neither of us are perfect and I look to You to perfect us.
Teach me how to pray for my husband and make my prayers a true language of love. Where love has died, create new love between us. Show me what unconditional love really is and how to communicate it in a way that he can clearly receive. Bring unity between us so that we can be in agreement about everything. May the God of patience and comfort grant us to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus. Make us a team, not pursuing separate, competitive, or independent lives but working together, overlooking each other’s faults and weaknesses for the greater good of the marriage. Help us to pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another. May we be “perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment”.
I pray that our commitment to you and to one another will grow stronger and more passionate every day. Enable him to be the head of the home as You made him to be, and show me how to support and respect him as he rises to that place of leadership. Help me to understand his dreams and see things from his perspective. Reveal to me what he wants and needs and show me potential problems before they arise. Breathe Your life into this marriage.
Make me a new person, Lord. Give me a fresh perspective, a positive outlook, and a renewed relationship with the man You’ve given me. Help me see him with new eyes, new appreciation, new love, new compassion, and new acceptance. Give my husband a new wife, and let it be me. Amen.”
Five years into single parenting in the African bush, a Tennessee man also entered the mission field. We met and decided to stay in South Africa and get married.
We are now living in Cape Town, South Africa building up the local church with our teenager and toddler boys.
Help Club for Moms became a lifeline to me when I was lonely on the mission field with a new baby in a foreign country. I am so thankful to write for this community and to document God’s work in my own family at http://www.ladd.family
- Mom To Mom with Kacy: Your Purpose is Not in Your Perfection - September 25, 2023
- Embracing Special: A Mom’s Journey to Learning How to Thrive as a Family with Special Needs - September 19, 2023
- Turn Your Groaning Into Gratitude - July 13, 2023
One Comment on “Praying for Your Husband’s Wife”
Pingback: How God Brought Me My Husband: 7 Signs I Knew He Was the One - Beloved and Worthy