Your Marriage: A Great Place to Grow

Is your marriage promoting health and growth for both of you? Many marriages do just the opposite. The people in them wither. Like struggling trees in a polluted environment, they are choking, longing for some fresh air and sunshine. But with God's help we can create a healthy atmosphere in our marriages and homes, an atmosphere that helps everyone in the family flourish.

People thrive in an atmosphere of love and grace. With love and grace filling the air, we are far more likely to reach our potential. In this series you will discover seven important actions that flood your marriage with love and grace. When you take these actions your marriage will become a great place to grow. Guaranteed!

Read: Numbers 6:22-27

Pray and Believe for God's Best

Praying for your husband or wife is the absolute, number one, very best thing you can do. Nothing can do what prayer does. Why? Because in prayer we bring needy people under the powerful, loving influence of God. Believe me, all of us are needy people and no one knows that better than our spouses. So all of us need God and need someone who prays for us.

I have noticed that there is a great difference between praying ABOUT someone and praying FOR someone. It’s a change in focus. When I pray ABOUT I see the person as a problem. When I pray FOR I see the person as someone who needs God just as much as I do. And I really need God. That’s why I am glad to have a wife who prays for me, not about me.

Not a person of many words? Then know the great words. BLESS is a great word. That one word can contain a whole heart of positive desire. When we say, “Bless my husband,” or “Bless my wife,” we are asking our God to infuse their lives with all his wisdom, love, power, and security. We are praying for wholeness and completeness in every possible dimension of life. We are asking God to prosper our partner, to make our spouse flourish like a healthy tree. We are praying for protection, correction, personal development, and all provision. We are asking the almighty God to pour his riches, his fulness, into their emptiness. That, and much more, is what it means to bless our partner. The passage we read in Numbers six ends with these powerful words: “So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.”

As you pray for blessing, your heart and mind will expand. You may move from a general prayer of blessing to specific expressions of blessing that are right for your spouse right now. You’ll pray for health and healing; for deliverance and ongoing freedom; for prosperity and wisdom.

Praying and believing for God’s best for your spouse is not always easy. You will encounter resistance, but probably not from your husband or wife. Lies, fear, false guilt, even pride can stop the power of blessing in a life. Most of us have some amount of those infecting us. So Jesus tells us to never stop praying. Pray for blessing, and pray too for the overthrow of all obstacles to blessing.

Too many husbands and wives live with spouses who never speaks their names in prayer. Don’t let your spouse be one of those. Pray and believe for God’s best.