Lord, help me to be a good husband/wife. I fully realize that I don't have what it takes to be one without your help. Take my selfishness, impatience, and irritability and turn them into kindness, long-suffering, and the willingness to bear all things. Take my old emotional habits, mindsets, automatic reactions, assumptions and self-protective stances, and make me patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle and self-controlled. Take any hardness of my heart and break down the walls with your battering ram of revelation. Give me a new heart and work in me your love, peace and joy. (Galations 5:22,23). I am not able to rise above who I am at this moment. Only you can transform me.
Show me where there is sin in my heart, especially with reguard to my wife/husband. I confess the times I've been unloving, critical, angry, resentful, disrespectful, or unforgiving toward her/him. Help me to put aside my hurt, anger, or disappointment I feel and forgive her/him, the way you do - totally and completely, no looking back. Make me a tool of reconciliation, peace and healing in this marriage. Enable us to communicate well and rescue us from the threshold of seperation where the realities of divorce begin.
Make me my wife's/husband's helpmate, companion, champion, friend and support. Teach me how to take care of myself and stay attractive to her/him. Grow me into a creative and confident man/woman who is right in mind, soul and spirit. Make me the kind of man/woman that she/he can be proud to call her/his wife/husband.
I lay all my expectations at your cross. I release my wife/husband from the furden of fulfilling me in areas where I should be looking to you. Help me to accept her/him the way she/he is and not try to change her/him. I realize that in some ways she/he may never change, but at the same time, I release her/him to change in ways I never thought she/he could. I leave any changing that needs to be done in your hands, fully accepting that neither of us is perfect and never will be. Only you, Lord, are perfect and I look to you to perfect us.
Teach me how to pray for my wife/husband. Where love has died, create new love between us. Show me what unconditional love really is and how to communicate it in a way she/he can clearly perceive. Bring unity between us so that we can be in agreement about everything. Make us a team, not pursuing separate, competitive, or independent lives, but working together, overlooking each other's faults and weaknesses for the greater good of the marriage. Help us to pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another (Romans 14:19). May we be perfectly joined in the same mind and in the same judgment.
I pray that our commitment to you and to one another will grow stronger and more passionate every day. Enable her/him to be what you created her/him to be in you, Lord.
Help me to understand her/his dreams and see things from her/his perspective. Reveal to me what she/he wants and needs and show me potential problems before they arise. Breathe your life into this marriage.
Make me a new person, Lord. Give me a fresh perspective, a positive outlook and a renewed relationship with the woman/man you have given me. Help me to see her/him with new eyes, new appreciation, new love, new compassion and new acceptance. Give my wife/husband a new husband/wife and let it be me.
In the name of Jesus
Amen and Amen
PRAYERS FOR HUSBANDS AND WIVES
HOME
