Lead Her From Your Knees Before You Lead Her From Your Mouth

Most men want to lead their wives. Almost none of them pray for her by name.

Sit with that for a second, because it's the whole problem in one line. A man will read a verse about being the head of his household and feel it in his chest, feel the weight and the calling of it, and then go a week without once bringing his wife before God. He wants the position. He skips the place it actually comes from.

Headship doesn't start at the mouth. It starts on the knees. A man who's leading his home from his mouth, laying down opinions and decisions and corrections, but never leading it from his knees, is trying to run on a battery he never charges. Sooner or later it dies, and he can't figure out why the harder he pushes the less anybody follows.

Here's what praying for your wife does to you before it does anything to her. It changes who you are in the fight. You cannot hold a woman before God in the morning and hold a grudge against her by noon. Try it. The two won't live in the same chest. Prayer for her softens the man doing the praying, which is exactly the man who needs softening.

It's hard to stay hard toward someone you're carrying to the throne.

And it moves your eyes. A man who prays for his wife starts noticing things. The thing she's worried about that she hasn't said. The way she's been tired lately, the real reason and not the surface one. You can't intercede for a person and stay blind to her at the same time. Prayer makes you pay attention, and paying attention is half of love.

Job did this. Before anything went wrong, when his house was still whole and his children were grown, he was found "rising up early in the morning and offering burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job said, 'Perhaps my sons have sinned...'" (Job 1:5). That's a man standing between his family and God on purpose, in the good times, before there was any crisis to pray about. He wasn't waiting for the house to be on fire. He was covering it while it was still standing.

Most of us only pray for our marriages when they're already smoking. She's pulled away, or we have, or something got said that can't get unsaid, and now we're on our knees because we're desperate. God takes that prayer. He's not proud. But a man who only prays for his wife in the emergency is like a man who only checks the oil after the engine seizes. The prayer that protects a marriage is the boring daily one, said before there's anything to fix.

I know how this sounds to a tired man. One more thing to do. One more discipline to fail at. So let me take the pressure off, because Jesus already did. "When you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words" (Matthew 6:7). God isn't grading your sentences. You do not need the right words to pray for your wife. You need her name and thirty seconds. "God, be near her today. She's carrying more than she says. Make me the kind of man she can lean on." That's a prayer. That covers a marriage.

Do it where nobody sees it. In the truck before work. In the shower. Standing in the kitchen while the coffee runs. It doesn't have to be a scene. It has to be real, and it has to be about her and not about you getting your way through the back door.

Here's the part nobody tells young husbands. The prayer changes the pray-er more than the prayed-for. You start out asking God to work on your wife and somewhere in it He turns and starts working on you. The man who prays for his marriage every day becomes a man worth being married to. That's not a trick. That's just what happens when you get close enough to God to want what He wants for her.

There's a promise sitting right next to Peter's warning about how a man treats his wife. He says to honor her "so that your prayers will not be hindered" (1 Peter 3:7). Flip it around. Treat her right and the line to God stays open. The husband's prayer life and the husband's marriage are wired to the same panel. You can't neglect one and keep the other.

So start tomorrow morning. Before the phone, before the noise, before the day gets its hands on you. Say her name to God. Ask Him to guard her and to change you. Thirty seconds.

You want to be the head of your home. Good. That's a right thing to want. Just remember where the head is supposed to bow first. Lead her from your knees, and by the time you open your mouth, there'll be something behind it worth following.