A Husband by Design
Marriage is not primarily a mechanism for personal happiness. It is a mechanism for spiritual growth. The qualities a good marriage requires align very closely with what Christlikeness looks like in a man’s life. It means dying to yourself. That is not a metaphor. It is the daily reality of what it means to be a Christian husband.
Peter is the one disciple we know directly from Scripture was married. In his first letter, he instructs husbands with two directives and two reasons these ought to matter. First Peter 3:7 gives us God’s blueprint: “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.”
1) Live With Her
The first quality may sound obvious: live with your wife. But this is not a throwaway line. The word Peter uses carries the idea of genuine closeness, the kind of dwelling together where intimacy is not only possible but probable. Husbands and wives are to be under the same roof, in the same home, sharing the same life.
Over the years I have encountered too many marriages where one spouse is absent, not filing for divorce, but existing in a separate arrangement, and still calling it “marriage”. This is not Christian marriage. The church ought to treat this as abandonment. What it leaves in practice is a wife sitting alone in the house, wondering for years what is going to become of her situation.
But Peter is not just talking about physical geography. He says husbands are to live with their wives in an understanding way, literally according to knowledge. A husband is called to live with his wife not as a roommate but as a student, a PhD student of his wife, seeking to understand how God has wired her, what her likes and dislikes are, what gets her excited and what discourages her, and what her dreams are.
When a man hears that he is called to present and to invest real time and energy into understanding his wife, there is often resistance. I know it in my own heart. But we are called to care about what our wives need and how they feel. That is the death of self. When a man dies to his independence and is resurrected as a husband who is genuinely intertwined with his wife, a better man comes out on the other side, a more Christlike man, a more loving man. Because what is love if not living for the joy of somebody else rather than for your own needs?
2) Honor Her
The second instruction Peter gives is this: show honor to the woman as the weaker vessel. Please do not bristle at this phrase. Peter is pointing to what is universally understood, that men are generally physically stronger than women. Generally speaking, there is a kind of delicate beauty in women that is not weakness, but feminine loveliness in the way that fine china is beautiful precisely because it is delicate.
The carnal man sees that difference and sees an opportunity to exploit it. You can trace a great deal of human history through that lens: abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and predatory behavior. But Peter calls Christian husbands to do the exact opposite. Instead of exploiting it, honor it.
Wives are like flowers. A flower can bloom in all its beauty on a calm sunny day. But when the hailstorm comes, it is destroyed. It needed protection to blossom. Women live in a world that is constantly threatening to exploit their feminine beauty and they spend their lives wondering if it is safe to bloom. In Christian marriage, God says to the husband: make it safe for her to bloom.
Why These Instructions Matter
Peter gives two reasons a husband should care about all of this. The first is that she is a co-heir with you of the grace of life. That woman you see every morning and every night, in the bad days and the hard seasons, is a woman for whom Jesus died. God the Father elected her in eternity past. She will one day receive a glorified body and stand as a co-heir with Christ Himself. That woman is an object of the eternal love of God Almighty.
The second reason is to protect the husband’s relationship with God through prayer. A Christian husband who is dishonoring his wife and then going to God in prayer about his career or his health or his finances should not be surprised when God is unresponsive. God sees His daughter being mistreated. The horizontal relationship with his wife has everything to do with his vertical relationship with God.
A Christian husband can experience both spiritual growth and personal pleasure when he obeys God’s imperatives for marriage by living closely with his wife and honoring her. Husbands, listen to your wife, ask her questions, and seek to understand her. She is not just a woman you happen to share a home with. She is the daughter of the Most High God, and a Christian husband, of all people, should treat her like one.
