Message for Husbands – I Peter 3:7
Introduction
Good morning. I actually thought I preached one of the harder messages I’ve ever had to
preach last Sunday but I was wrong. Today’s message has been much more difficult to prepare
because of how revealing it has been of my shortcomings as a husband. It seemed every time I
came to a new understanding about something in this verse I found myself falling short. But, it
doesn’t change the facts about the kind of husbands God calls us as men to be.
There are four specific commands that Peter gives to us as men.
So lets jump right in. Take your Bibles and turn to I Peter 3:7.
Note: as you’re turning there, ladies I was informed after the message last week that the True
Woman Manifesto material I was talking about is actually being studied at the monthly
Saturday Sisters. So if you want to know more about what that’s all about you might want to
check it out this Saturday. And Sherri you can pay me later for that promo!!
(Read the verse)
Pray
I don’t know if you guys have anything material in nature that you place significant value on but
if not you’ve likely run into a guy who has. It could be a car or a motor bike or a truck, etc.
Think about how they talk about that object. How excited they get about it when you ask them
questions about it, how they know the minute details of the object and how they baby it by
making sure it’s always clean and no one damages it in anyway.
Well that’s a bit of a picture of what Peter is saying our response as husbands needs to be
about our wives. He says they need to be our most prized possession treasure, excited about
what she brings into our life, knowing the minute details of her life and interests, and ready to
brag about her at the drop of a hat.
Again the main sentence in our text is
Husbands live with your wives….”
Everything else builds around this sentence. And the first thing Peter says by way of expansion
of this sentence is “in an understanding way”. The NIV says “in a considerate way”, the KJV
says ” according to knowledge”. And the Living Bible Translation paraphrases it to say, “being
thoughtful of her needs”.
In other words we as men are commanded to live with our wives in a way that would indicate
to others that we know them well.
I. Know
That we know what makes them tick. They’re interests, dreams, likes/dislikes, etc.
Now I know some of you guys are already saying, yeh right, my wife’s way to complex and
maybe even unpredictable for me to figure out. And you’e right they are.
Illus - Dr. Craig Massey quotes Song of Solomon 4:3 when describing the complexity of a wife
where it says , “her temples behind her veil are like the halves of a pomegranate.” He goes on
to say that if you open up a pomegranate, you find that it has many sections inside, little ones
and big ones, and that’s what a woman’s mind is like. Complex with many sections, big and
small, which of course we know modern science backs up. We know that the brain contains two
hemispheres—the left and the right. Neuroscientists tell us that women typically have a larger
pathway between the two hemispheres so that information flows more freely. And as a result
they are generally more verbal and more in touch with their emotions and better at forming
deep relationships whereas men are better with non-verbal tasks.
That’s why we have the remote control, and after 20,30, 40 years, still trying to figure our
wives out. But Peter does not give our wives’ complexities an excuse for us to not keep trying.
He says “live with her in an understanding way”. Period.
Which then raises the question, so how do we do that? How do we begin to understand
something as complex as our wives’ minds? Well one of the ways is by
1. Just Listening
I know this a tough one for us guys because we tend to be solution oriented. And so if our wives
present us with a problem, we feel we need to come up with a plan to fix it.
Dr. Eggerich in his book Love and Respect says he’s come up with two questions that have
helped him become a better listener.
Am I in trouble?
Do you need a solution or simply a listening ear?
Not bad advice. Sometimes our wives just want to talk and they want us to just listen. In fact
women in large part figure out what they’re feeling and thinking by talking and so if we’re not
prepared to listen we will have a hard time living with our lives in an understanding way.
Living in an understanding way also involves
2. Listen to what she’s NOT saying
Really? Reading between the lines of a complex mind? But believe it or not we as men actually
have the ability to do that!. Despite the world’s attempt to make us look dumb and insensitive
we actually have the ability to read between the lines - if we’re listening close enough! If we’re
dialed in enough to their cares and interests.
Let me give you a small example of this from my own life a couple of weeks ago.
Illus – as some of you might already know my wife likes Christmas lights! And lots of them!!
That’s why our tree is up the first week of November plus a string of lights on every plug in
available in my house. In fact my nightly bedtime routine at our house for the two months
leading up to Christmas is to go and turn off the lights for the night. Its actually quite an ordeal
and seriously cuts into my sleep time but I do it because I’ve learned over the years that she
loves lights and candles!
Well anyways the other day she said to me in passing that she wasn’t turning on the outside
Christmas lights anymore because she was too embarrassed by all the lights that were burned
out. And that’s all she said. And of course I being the considerate but thrifty kind of guy I am,
told her we would have to take advantage of the after Christmas sales and buy some for next
year. And that’s where the conversation ended.
But as I was preparing the message this week God decided to remind of that conversation and
convict me of not having listened to what Gloria had NOT said. I knew how much she liked
lights and that she would love to be able to have them working this year, even though that’s
not what she said. And so I stopped my sermon prep, went to Home Hardware and bought
some Christmas lights and went home and put them up before she got back from Saskatoon.
Now I know that’s just a small thing and, I wish I could say I always hear what shes NOT saying
but unfortunately I don’t. And that’s because I’m not always dialed into her needs and
concerns. I’m too busy looking after MY stuff. But if we want to live with our wives in an
understanding way we’re going to have be dialed enough to hear what she’s NOT saying.
Which leads me to my next point and that is if we’re going to be dialed enough she needs to
2. Become our Priority
Taking the time, making the effort to figure out what brings joy to our wife’s heart, what makes
her tick, what her gifts are, her desires, her talents, her hopes and dreams are. After all
understanding anything or anyone does not happen by osmosis.
Illus – How many of you remember the old TV game Newlyweds? In the first church I pastored
they loved to get together as a church and play games. And Newlyweds was one of the games
they enjoyed playing. Yeh you guessed it guys, it was women planning these events! And I have
to be honest I dreaded these games as did most of my peers because we saw it as a means for
our wives to show us how little we knew about them. But being the kind of husbands we were
we played along. But we also came up with a plan. Cell phones were just starting to get popular
and so most of us had one. And so what we did we was stick a guy in the audience while the
ladies were answering the questions and then have him text the answers to us. And much to
the surprise of our wives we were much more in touch with their thoughts and feelings than
they had given us credit for. Unfortunately they finally figured it out.
I gave the illustration of a guy and his prized car at the beginning of the sermon. There’s not a
lot of things he doesn’t know about his car but again that knowledge didn’t happen by osmosis.
He invested hours into reading, researching, studying, talking to other guys, etc. so that he
understood everything there was to understand about the car.
And that same kind of investment needs to happen with our wives.
Now I have to say that I find it kind of humorous when I’m counseling couples and sometimes
ask the husband to read something that might help him better understand his wife, that I often
get the answer, “Oh, I don’t read much”! Yet when we can get into a conversation about
something he’s excited about its amazing how much reading he actually does. Listen, if we’re
going to live with our wives in an understanding way we need to be willing to put as much time
and attention in them and their needs as we do to our vehicles or might I add our draft picks.
And if that means reading a book so we can better understand them, that’s what we do! If that
means sitting down with some older more experienced men we do that. Whatever it takes to
live with our wives in an understanding way.
How else can we live with our wives in an understanding way? By
3. Giving consideration to her needs/wants
Of where before we make a decision for our families we stop and ask what our wives would
like. Remember when I said last week that sometimes when a decision has to be made and the
husband and wife can’t come to agreement, that the wife needs to submit herself to the
husband’s decision? Well, this is the backdrop to that decision making process. Gloria and I
have been married over 40 years now and I can count on one hand the number of decisions I
absolutely NEEDED to make a decision without her agreement; of where we weren’t eventually
able to come up with some kind of compromise that we both felt comfortable with.
Illus – I remember when I came up to Melfort here to consider becoming the pastor of this
church. I went home excited and was ready to move, had a house picked out and everything
but that excitement was not shared by my wife, one of the reasons being her mother who was
living with us and dying of cancer. So as the search committee remembers we initially said no.
But as time went on and her mom eventually passed away we began once again to talk about it.
And well the rest is history.
Yes, we as husbands have been given the responsibility to lead our families but Peter says we
need to do that in an understanding way; meaning we do that in a way that takes our wives
cares, interests, etc. into consideration.
That’s Peter’s first point. There’s only 3 more to go!!!!
II. Honor
Peter goes on to say, “showing honor”. The Webster’s Dictionary define honor as “showing
high regard for, showing respect for”.
How do we as men do that? We do that first of all by placing
1. Value on them
If we go right back to Genesis 2 we see that God created the woman for a very specific purpose
and that to be the helpmate for the man. Now I don’t know if this means that God didn’t figure
we as men could make it our own but he did give us our wives to complete us, to maximize our
effectiveness. And therefore we need to value her as one of our most precious gifts. But
unfortunately we so often take them for granted and by so doing not honoring them.
Illus - The Seven Ages of the Married Cold, it reveals the reaction of a husband to his wife's colds
during seven years of marriage.
This is the first year: "Sugar dumpling, I'm worried about my baby girl. You've got a bad sniffle
and there's no telling about these things with all this strep around. I'm putting you in the
hospital this afternoon for a general checkup and a good rest. I know the food's lousy but I'll
bring your meals in from Rossini's. I've already got it arranged with the floor superintendent."
Second year: "Listen, darling, I don't like the sound of that cough and I've called Doc Miller to
rush over here. Now you go to bed like a good girl, please? Just for papa."
Third year: "Maybe you'd better lie down, honey; nothing like a little rest when you feel punk.
I'll bring you something to eat. Have we got any soup?"
Fourth year: "Look dear, be sensible. After you feed the kids and get the dishes washed, you'd
better hit the sack."
Fifth year: "Why don't you get yourself a couple of aspirin?"
Sixth year: "If you'd just gargle or something, instead of sitting around barking like a seal!"
Seventh year: "For Pete's sake, stop sneezing! Whatcha trying to do, gimme pneumonia?"
We laugh at this but its often what happens doesn’t it? And it all has to do with a digression of
value.
Illus – I was talking to Bob about this the other day and he said this was a truth he began to fully
understand after he discovered his wife Imogene had cancer. He said even though the last two
years of their marriage were the hardest because of the cancer, they were also some of the
best because of his realization of just how much he valued her.
We also honor our wives by
2. Bragging on them
There’s an interesting verse in Proverbs 31:31 that says, “Give her(wife) the fruit of her hands,
and let her works praise her in the gates”.
And who was sitting in the gates? According to v. 23 of the same chapter, the husbands. In
other words the husbands were sitting at the gates talking about and praising their wives.
Giving them a place of honor in their lives and in their conversation.
In Ephesians 5, we read that the husband is to imitate Christ’s relationship to the church by his
relationship to his wife in which Christ gave Himself sacrificially for the church, but He is also to
be actively at work to perfect and beautify His bride:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her; that
He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He
might present to Himself the church in all her glory,
I ask how are we doing with this? What kind of conversations do we have about our wives at
our gates, meaning coffee row? Are they being honored in our conversations? Unfortunately
they are often the brunt end of our jokes. I know, I’ve been there, down that in the past. And
although we may think its harmless in that we don’t really mean it, it does not bring honor to
our wives. Peter is saying other men need to see our wives as our most prized treasure.
Illus – Again in Dr. Eggerich’s book he shares a story of a husband who came home to find his
wife discouraged. She had been on the phone with her sister who had told her all the things she
had been doing , resulting in her feeling like she was inadequate. She said to her husband, “I
feel so inadequate when I talk with her. I mean what do I make? Now there’s a loaded question
for a husband to process!!! But here was his answer. He said, “you make me happy”.
Tell me you think his wife felt honored? Without question.
Proverbs 5:18 says, “rejoice in (honor) the wife of your youth”.
III. Protect
“weaker vessel”
Notice he does not say weak vessel, he says weaker vessel. And that’s because what Peter is
acknowledging here is that God has created the male a stronger vessel in comparison to the
woman, not for the purpose of dominance but as a means of protection.
Now I know that the push for equality by the feminist movement is trying to wipe out this
reality but you can’t deny the fact that there are physical differences between the man and the
woman. I mean take our Olympics for example. We have male and females competing in the
same sport but not together. Why not? Because it wouldn’t be fair. In sports that require
physical strength, women, for the most part, cannot compete at the same level. That’s just the
way God made male and female and has nothing to do with one being inferior to the other.
Which when applied to the context of marriage means the husband has the responsibility to be
the protector of his wife. God has designed, has built him that way.
Illus – now of course there are always exceptions. I remember in Bible School there was this
really strange looking couple – he was 6’8 and his wife was 5’ nothing and no more than 100
pounds. But I soon discovered I would much sooner have her on my side when having to walk
down a dark alley them him. She had her black belt in judo and could drop her husband to the
floor in a second!!!
But that doesn’t change the fact that if a burglar broke into their house that he better be the
first one going down because that’s the responsibility God has given him as the protector.
John Piper in his message on this text talks about how our world today is all about competency.
Whoever in the marriage is the most competent is the one who should being doing the task to
which he responds by saying that such thinking comes from one place and one place only – the
pit of hell. And he’s right. Because all its done is created confusion regarding the gender roles in
marriages today.
Another perspective that is equally destructive is that marriage is a 50/50 relationship. I mean
just think about that for a minute. How stupid would it sound if a burglar breaks into a couples
house and the husband turns to the wife and says, “it’s your turn to go to check it out because
remember our marriage is a 50/50 relationship.
Listen men, regardless of what the world may be trying to say to us today about equal rights
and about what our role in marriage ought to be, the Bible is clear that God has designed us in
such a way that we need to be willing to go to the wall for our wives. Not only physically, but
emotionally, spiritually, financially – in every way.
God’s Word does not give us any room to hide behind the fact that we live in a world of where
everything is being pushed to be the same between male and female. God clearly created the
woman a weaker vessel of which we as men have been called to protect.
IV. Remember
“heirs with you of the grace of life”
Even though God has given us men a specific role to play within the context of the marriage
structure, He wants us to remember that our wives our heirs with us of the grace of life.
Now there’s some debate as to what the grace of life refers to. Some think it refers to our
salvation but I’m not sure if that is consistent with the text. First of all he’s not talking about
salvation and secondly it would mean if the husband was a believer and the wife wasn’t that
they couldn’t be heirs of the grace of life.
And so I tend to lean towards it referring to marriage – where marriage is understood to be a
divine institution of God given to man regardless of his attitude toward the Giver. And when we
take into consideration the culture of that day, in which marriage being a companionship was a
foreign concept, this interpretation makes even more sense. In the Greco-Roman culture of
Peter’s day the husbands were generally uninterested in friendship with their wives, expecting
them to merely maintain the household and bear children. In contrast, Peter is saying the
Christian husband is to cultivate all the richness of companionship God designed marriage to
be. Again we can go back to Genesis where God brought marriage into existence and see that
He clearly meant it to be a team effort. Yes, a team in which one of them has been appointed
as the captain but in the grand scheme of marriage equal partners.
Now why is all this such a big deal? Why does Peter go to this extent to teach on the
relationship of husband and wife?
Well if we go to Ephesians 5 it is clear that God meant marriage to be picture of Christ and the
church. Listen to what Paul says. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold
fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. (and now listen) This mystery is profound,
and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his
wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband” .
The other reason is because of its affect on our prayer life. Back in I peter 3 Peter makes it very
clear that the husband not living with his wife in an understanding way will result in his prayers
being hindered – either because he won’t feel like praying and/or because his prayers will feel
like a waist of time.
Piper put it well when he said, a marriage that is out of tune emotionally or physically will soon
be out of tune spiritually. To put it bluntly, we can’t ignore our wives and get through to God.
Conclusion
Four things Peter calls on us as husbands to do; know, honor, protect and remember.
Last week I concluded my message by giving the wives some questions to think about and so
I’m going to do the same thing for me this morning.
1. Would your wife say you know her?
2. When is the last time you have told her that you’re proud of her?
3. Does she know that you are priority no. 1 to her, next to God of course?
4. Is she convinced that you would die for her?
5. Would she say you see her as an equal partner in your marriage?
Pray
Communion
Read Ephesians 5:25-27
Jesus knew what we needed, namely for someone to die for our sins, and loved us enough to
do it.
Jesus honored us by calling us His bride and seating us with Him in the heavenlies.
Jesus protected and continues to protect us against the attacks of the devil so to be able to one
day present us before God without spot or wrinkle.
And so particularly husbands here this morning, as you partake of the bread and the cup think
about the fact that these are symbols of how Christ wants us to respond to our wives. And for
the rest of you, thank God once again for the extent that God was willing to go so that you
could know what it means to have eternal life.