During my early childhood years, my father used to drive us to church on Sunday morning and came back to pick us up after the service. For many years, I thought that was normal routine, because church was for women and their children, and perhaps a few “abnormal” men.
divineinsight BY PHILLIP CHIDAVAENZI
While women were known for their heavy involvement in church affairs, most of their husbands were mere observers. In retrospect, it wasn’t surprising that whatever the women heard and learnt in church never found a way into their homes and, consequently, remained ineffective in their lives. Some were even stuck in struggling marriages! The women were not able to create an effective spiritual environment in their homes because the husbands often proved to be a stumbling block.
A Christian wife living with an unbelieving husband can easily backslide because she lacks the relevant support in the home — in fact, the husband can actually set in motion the wife’s spiritual retrogression and sometimes the woman might give up on her faith.
If you are to strike the right chords in marriage, you have to marry for the right reasons, of which the first and most important reason is that your partner should help you to serve God in a better way. This is why the Bible describes Eve as Adam’s “help meet”, which means a suitable helper. In the same manner, the man also should be a suitable helper, assisting the woman to accomplish God’s will in her life.
It however becomes problematic when the man, who was given the spiritual mandate to lead his family in line with God’s principles, is not a believer. In many such cases, it is left to the believing woman to bring that godly dimension into the family, sometimes with many challenges. This is a spiritually discordant couple, and such a marriage can be a burden to the believing partner. There was a member of my church whose husband often tore up her Bible, locked her up in the house on Sunday mornings (just so that she would miss church) and sometimes beat her up just so she would turn her back on God.
The scriptures stress that believers are not to be “unequally yoked with unbelievers” because light has no relationship with darkness (2 Corinthians 6:14). Understandably, some people got married before coming to the Lord. If your partner is not a believer, you have a spiritual obligation to stand in the gap on their behalf until they give their life to Christ. Sometimes you try talking to them and they resist, or are downright intransigent, but then you have to do it in your prayer closet because our fight is not against that husband or wife (Ephesians 6:12).
Married people ought to soar together physically, emotionally and, most importantly, spiritually. They have to encourage and inspire each other, motivating and uplifting one another. Let God so dominate your marriage that it will be proof you were not only given God-like powers to procreate, but to re-create your marriage in line with His perfect will.
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In 1 Corinthians 7:10-13, Paul gave us the solutions to the problem of spiritually discordant couples: “Let not the wife depart from her husband…and let not the husband put away his wife… And the woman which hath an husband that believeth not, and if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave him.”
The unbelieving partner will be “sanctified” by the believing partner. The hand of the wife brings a special spiritual ministration to the husband. There are times a pastor’s hand might not bring healing to a sick man quickly, but the hand of his wife will do just that. This kind of sanctification, however, does not imply that the unbelieving partner will go to heaven upon death on the basis of the believing partner’s faith.
Phillip Chidavaenzi is the author of The Gospel of Grace –From the Old to the New Testament (2016) and Walking in the Spirit (2017). He can be reached on [email protected]
