Who's The Boss?

Can I ask you - how do you, as a husband, express love through your role as a husband to your wife? Let me say, this will look different in each of our marriages, because our families have different needs. But allow me to suggest, that there are specific things you and your spouse can do. However there are also some things we should try to avoid, as we live out our different roles.

Today, I will write about our roles as the Husband and how we can use our roles to model Christ. I'm going to provide 4 ways, I think, we can use our God given roles to better serve our wife... Ephesians 5:22-33 is the passage of Scripture I am using to base these thoughts on.

1) Serving our wife with sacrificial love.
In Ephesians 5, the word "love" is used 7 times in 9 verses to explain the role of the husband. Therefore I think it would be fair to say that we should know and imitate Jesus' example of loving the church. Jesus loved the Church sacrificially, therefore so should we. But not only the Church, our wife! If Jesus laid down His life for the Church - should we not lay down our life for our wife?

2) Building your wife up and helping her grow as a Christian will be your goal.
Notice in these verses there is not a description of duties here, rather words that point us to our basic responsibility: promoting the welfare of others in love. As long as our goal is love, there appears to be freedom and latitude to work out the details with our wife in many and different ways. But our motive is building our wife up - NOT tearing her down, embarrassing, berating or humiliating her...

3) Misuse of our authority may hinder our wife's growth.
Being a control freak is not going to serve our wife. By doing this, it does not allow our wife to grow in wisdom. Part of our role as husbands is, developing our wife to exercise her own faith by making choices, and even bad ones. Protecting our wife, which we have been called to do, does not mean we are to try and control everything she does. We need to graciously and wisely provide opportunities for our wife to face situations that require her to trust God, grow in wisdom, and learn responsibility.

4) Intentionally working at getting to know your wife.
If you don't know what your wife's life is like, how can you help her make wise choices? Know her daily routine. Observe her in actions throughout the day. Watch the temptation she faces to become irritated and agitated. Seek ways to spend time with her, drawing her out and getting to know what she thinks on things. LISTEN!!! If your not listening to your wife and understanding her, she won't accept or be confident in your advice. Right honey?

Men, we are only stewards of this authority! You and I are called to use it for His goals and purposes.

Go well!!!