The Law Was Not Abolished

The Husband as Prophet, Priest, and King

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areas in your marriage where you need to start showing some leader ship. Ask your wife to point out areas where you can be leading her and your family. Examine the major areas—your faith, your marriage, your family, your job, your relationships with friends, your service to the community, your physical health and well-being, your stewardship over the resources God has given you, and your recreational time—and decide where you need to begin to take some initiative and lead. As you lead, make sure to check your heart. Are you making deci sions that will bring honor and glory to Christ and that will lead you and your wife to grow in your relationship with Him? Do you stand to gain personally from the decisions you’re making? Remember, when you exercise your leadership for selfish purposes, you’re abus ing the important responsibility God has given you. Do some strategic planning. Most successful businesses have a strate gic plan, mapping out where the company is headed over the next five to ten years. Things change, of course, and the businesses adapt. They work hard to consider market conditions, examine competing orga nizations, access their own strengths and weaknesses, look for oppor tunities on the horizon, and then set the course for their businesses. Many of those same businessmen, who can establish a successful plan for a company, are clueless when it comes to thinking strategi cally about the spiritual, emotional, physical, and social needs of their wives. Ask them about their five-year plan for their marriage and you’re likely to get a deer-in-the-headlights look. In their book Intimate Allies, Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III write about this aspect of how a husband should function as king in marriage: “We are called to cultivate Christ in our spouses. . . . To do so effectively, we must be guided by a vision of who they are, a pic ture of who they were meant to be [like Christ] and a grasp of our role in helping them become like Christ.” 8 During a “FamilyLife Today” radio interview about the book, Allender talked about writing a short-term mission statement for his wife. When he began explaining the idea, I thought it sounded pre sumptuous. But as Dan talked about encouraging and exhorting his wife to become all God wants her to be as a woman, as a wife, and as