Why It's Important to Respect Your Wife or Husband

As a husband your purpose in marriage is to respect your wife, even when you don't feel like it. When a man gets married he takes on the added responsibilities of marriage, which include being respectful and caring. A husband is to love his wife as he would love himself.

In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church. (Ephesians 5:28-29)

He FEEDS and CARES for it just like Christ does the church. This scriptural analogy here is showing husbands "how to love their wives" - in the same way Christ would feed and care for his church. Wow! It is a big responsibility and sometimes a challenging one at that, but God designed husbands for this purpose in marriage.

If a husband is not respecting his wife in the way he should, then could it be because he is not respecting himself? Usually this means a husband is mistreating himself somehow with too much work, or too much womanizing, or too much pornography, or too much drugs, or too much alcohol, or too much resentment, too much selfishness, too much control over his wife, or too much bitterness from within.

All of these things would keep a husband from truly respecting and caring for his wife properly. If we don't love ourselves, how can we love another?

Respect is a principle that supports and sustains many aspects of marriage. If a husband respects and regards his wife with high esteem it will make her feel good about her role as a woman and of being his wife. Marriage will undoubtedly have its troubles, but if you remember the principle "to treat your wife the way you would like to be treated" then most marriage problems can be resolved amicably before they get out of hand.

If a husband totally disregards his purpose to love his wife because he disrespects himself then he will need inner healing before he can learn to love and respect his wife properly - in the way God intended for a man to love his wife. Respect is an important component of marriage, which keeps it flourishing with abundance no matter what issues may arise.

When a woman gets married she now has a new responsibility, to love and respect her husband, even when she doesn't feel like it. Your whole purpose as a wife is to be the loving woman to your man that God wants you to be. Marriage is not just about a wife's feelings and what she wants and needs, but what both husband and wife want and need as a whole and together in the marriage!

The principle I am just about to tell you should be posted on every mirror and refrigerator in a married couples home so they don't forget it. Here is a great and awesome principle for your marriage. If you study it, remember it, and apply it into your marriage, you will understand and regard the principle of respect with more importance.

"Marriage is not about two separate individuals doing their own thing, but about two intertwined individuals working together to be one whole. A wife is her husband's other half and a husband is his wife's other half. Together a husband and a wife create "one flesh" in the marriage."

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become "one flesh". (Genesis 2:24)

A wife should respect the leadership of her husband, encouraging him to become all that he can be for the marriage and to God. A husband should love and care for his wife in the same way he would care for himself, encouraging her to become all that she can be for the marriage and to God. God wants us to live righteously by having a right relationship with Him first, so we can have a right relationship with the person we married.

Author : Angie Lewis