Christmas is a time of celebration where I get so excited! I absolutely love this holiday because we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, but also because God has truly been changing my heart throughout this whole year. I was so excited to “give” during Christmas!
In particular, there is one gift I really want to work on giving my husband this year… ME!
The man who finds a wife finds a treasure, and he receives favor from the LORD – Proverbs 18:22
I have spent a lot of time praying the prayer “Change him Lord,” maybe not in those exact words, but that was the bases of my prayers in the past. Then last year God changed my heart to pray the prayer “Change me Lord.”
One of the greatest gifts you can give your husband is your own wholeness. The most effective tool in transforming him may be your own transformation. – Stormie Omartian
God has changed my heart for my husband and even though there are moments when I could strangle him, I love him so very much; especially sense God has really been showing me what love really is. I want to see him become the man God created him to be, not the man I want him to be. I want to see his dreams become a reality and his work be prospers. I want to make him smile and laugh. I want to be the one he can come too when he just needs to breath, needs advise or just needs a safe place for him to land.
1 Peter 3:4 holds a special kind of place in my heart, it is what I think of when I think of the kind of women I want to be.
A lot of my energy has been directed towards my physical appearance in the past. For a great deal of my marriage, I thought all our problems would be solved if I could just lose the weight I had gained. My husband would be attracted to me again and our problems would just fade way, and we would be in perfect bliss. Change didn’t happen in my marriage or my life until my heart was changed and my energy was put into getting to know my Heavenly Father and finding out what kind of women, wife, and mother HE wanted me to be. Ultimately having a close relationship with Jesus made me want to be more like Him.
You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God – 1 Peter 3:4
I thank God for the man He has gifted me, and in this season where we tend to get wrapped up (quite literally) in the joy of receiving, I truly want to honor my Father and my husband by yielding and allowing God to continue making changes, so that I can be counted as a gift in the sight of my husband.
Oh, and by the way, when I turned my focus and energy into becoming a woman of Godly character; everything else just seemed to fall in place!
Go before God, ask Him to change you. I promise you, especially in this instance, it truly is better to give, than receive.
Building strong marriages together,
Ashley Ladd
************************************
Below are a few scriptures for encouragement:
“And if they have a change of heart in the land where they are held captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their conquerors and say, ‘We have sinned, we have done wrong, we have acted wickedly’”(1 Kings 8:47)(NIV)
“If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever” (Jeremiah 7:5-7) (NIV)
“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” (Romans 12:2) (NLT)
“But forget all that—it is nothing compared to what I am going to do. For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:18-19) (NLT)
“And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) (NIV)
Thank you, Ashley, for sharing your heart of change with us. This is one of the most important prayers we should pray as a wife. Takes the focus off our husband and onto us. This is a cry the Lord hears and answers. And self-improvement is sexy. Joy is sexy. Loving our husbands for who they are (while we wait on the Lord) is sexy. I praise the Lord for all He is doing in you and every Imperfect Wife as we yield our rights and hearts and seek to be the wife He wants us to be. That will lead to the marriage He wants us to have.
Love and prayer,
Deborah Sewell
Thank you Deborah ❤️I love having you in my life, your wisdom is so encouraging. Thank you fur your prayers
Great message, Ashley! Change always begins with us! If we aren’t willing to change, we can’t expect our husbands to change too. I’ve prayed many times “Lord, just empty me of me, and fill me with You”. It’s a prayer that I think we wives need to pray often! 🙂 God bless you, and your writing!
Amen & thank you 😉