With All Due Respect - Lisa U Maki
One of the biggest barriers that wives have when it comes to submitting to their husbands is the lack of respect. Honestly, it is easy to submit to someone who you look up to, emulate, and admire. Take these away and submission will be very trying, if not impossible.
A wife starts losing respect for her husband when he continues to fail to provide for his family. Since she looks up to him as the head and the provider, he loses her respect in this area when he doesn't fulfill this role. Other than this, a wife loses respect for a husband who does not live up to what he says he will do. A husband is the head of the marriage and the wife expects to lean on him for support and guidance. When he fails to do this, the wife loses trust in his capacity to lead her and be her stable pillar, and therefore he loses her respect once again. Another area where a wife can lose respect for her husband is when the husband cheats on her. This doesn't have to be an actual cheating. It can be being overfriendly with other women, or viewing porn. A wife needs all the love she can get from her husband. This is the reason why God commanded the husband to love his wife. She gets security from this love; she feels beautiful when she is loved; and she operates at her best when she feels loved. This love is threatened when she senses that her husband is paying attention to other women. She will then move away from him and eventually her respect for him will also go away. Put all these together and we can sum up in two reasons why wives lose respect for their husbands: not fulfilling their God-given role in the marriage, and not being the husband who God designed them to be.
Without this respect for the husband the wife will never be able to submit to him. In fact, she will end up filling up the vacuum, which she is very good at. In the absence of a leader, she takes over. In the absence of stability, she becomes the pillar. In the absence of love, she detaches herself.
Given all these realities about a woman, and a wife for that matter, does she have an excuse not to submit to her husband? Unfortunately, no... she doesn't have an excuse. God's command to the wife to submit to her husband does not have conditions. It does not say, "submit only if he is worthy of respect". In fact, every Scripture about submission points back to "as unto the Lord", meaning, we have to do it as a service to God. It doesn't have anything to do with the kind of husband you have but out of love and reverence for our God.
I know this is easier said than done because I am a wife myself and I have been in different situations where I lost respect for my husband. No matter how perfect your husband may be, there will always be something about him or an incident that will make you lose your respect for him. This is the devil's tactic, actually. He knows that when we lose respect for our husbands, he can easily coax us into not submitting to them.
In understanding the true meaning of respect in the light of the Word of God, we will also learn that it is not very difficult to practice it even if the situation is challenging. Let us now look at the different definitions of the word "respect" and connect it to God's Word and plan.
1. Respect means esteem for a sense of the worth or excellence of a person.
When you look at your husband for who God made him to be, you will begin to see from God's eyes and not your eyes. Think of it this way... Jesus died for your husband, which makes him so much worthy in God's eyes. And how about you? Aren't you worthy and precious in the eyes of God? So if He chose you as the wife for this man, you who are precious, then this man must be valuable for Him as well. For why will He give something precious to a man who doesn't deserve your preciousness? This in itself should make you see the worthiness of your husband and esteem him for it.
Ask God to make you see your husband from His perspective at all times. In your prayer, let God reveal to you who your husband is the way He sees him.
2. Respect means deference to a right, privilege, privileged position, or someone considered to have certain rights or privileges.
"Now 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." (1 Corinthians 11:3)
God placed the man above the woman not for him to lord over her but for the sake of order. There can't be two bosses in a marriage or there will be chaos. This is an order that God Himself has set and which we should obey without questions asked.
When you realize this Divine order, you can now give due respect to the role of your husband in your marriage. Submitting to him is not so much submission to his personality but to the order that God instituted.
So the next time you can't submit to your husband because of feelings of disrespect, go back to the Divine order and give God His due respect.
3. Respect means proper acceptance or courtesy.
Obedience to God starts by believing and accepting that His Word is infallible and should be our only standard. If He says something, then it is. If He commands something, then we should obey because it's what He says. When we look at His Word this way, then respecting our husbands come easy. Again, it is not so much for our husbands but for God, out of our love and reverence for Him.
Respecting our husbands is more of obedience to God than anything else. It is also a matter of putting our full trust in Him and not on our own understanding. Think about it... if it is so easy to respect our husbands, then where is the effort there? Just as it is easy to love a loveable person but not an un-loveable person, it is also easy to respect a respectable person than someone who is not respectable. Yet, it is in loving the un-loveable and respecting the unrespectable that we truly love and respect. As Jesus Himself said, "You can enter God's Kingdom only through the narrow gate". (Matthew 7:13)
Lisa Maki is the founder of God'z Gurlz, a Bible-based online magazine for women whose mission is to is to provide a place where women can learn to manage their emotions, experience healing, receive love and acceptance, be free to be who God made them to be, and be the best they can be in their homes, schools, professions, relationships, and calling, through sharing of insights and experiences, counseling, prayer, and devotionals, thereby learning from and supporting each other. For more of Lisa's articles, visit http://godzgurlz.com/ Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lisa_U_Maki Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7278727
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