Purity Prayer, For God To Search My Heart

12 Verses to Pray for Your Husband

“My man.”

I’ve never really been into that phrase.

“I’m waiting for my man to come home.”  “So proud of my man.”  “Enjoying some time with my man.”

It’s a status favorite.

It’s just not my favorite, not my personal style or verbal inclination.

But still this is truth.

Song of Songs:

I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine (6:3 NIV).

Paul said it, too:

 The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife (1 Corinthians 7:4 NIV).

Mine.  Joined to me and fused into me so strong that blows to him suck the breath right me and the way he smiles on the good day is my joy, too.

He’s my blessing, this gift.  Mine to treasure, to enjoy, to love.

But gifts aren’t just enjoyed; they are watched over, cared for, tended, and kept safe.  God entrusted him to me.

He’s mine to respect, listen to, encourage, fill up and build up, support and to stand by.

And mine to pray for. 

Stormie Omartian wrote, “Prayer is the ultimate love language” (The Power of a Praying® Wife, p.29).

Here are 12 of my favorite verses to pray for my husband:

• A wife of noble character is her husband’s crown, but a disgraceful wife is decay in his bones (Proverbs 12:4 NIV).

Lord, help me to be a godly wife, an encouragement and support to him.  Show me how to love him and help me to see him with your eyes.  Forgive me for my mistakes and failings and help me be a better wife every day.

•  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength (Mark 12:30 NIV).

God, draw my husband closer to You each day and stir in him a passion for You and Your Word.

• Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me (Psalm 51:10 NIV).

Create in my husband the desire for purity.  Help him to hunger and thirst for righteousness and give him the steadfast spirit, the strength, and the discipline to choose what is right and godly.  When he is tempted, help him to overcome and to run closer to you.

• But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.  Matthew 6:33

Show my husband how to balance the priorities and stresses on his shoulders.  Help him always to place You first and then allow every area of his life to fall into place as a result.

• Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.  Proverbs 3:5-6 NIV

Help my husband trust in You and submit to You in all ways.  Make his path straight.  Show him where to step and how to walk in obedience.  Renew his faith even in the tough times and the dark places.  Remind him of Your presence with Him and the way You have gone before him.

•  If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you (James 1:5 NIV).

Fill my husband with Your wisdom so that in all things, in every situation, he will know Your will.

• Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up…Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm…Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 NIV)

Strengthen our marriage daily.  Unite us as a team that cannot be broken.  Show us how to love one another selflessly, to communicate, to show affection, to work together and always to honor You in our relationship.  Teach us how to forgive and give us opportunities to laugh and find joy together.  Defeat any attempt by Satan to divide us with anger, bitterness, infidelity, divorce…

• Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4 NIV).

Father God, be with my husband as he parents our children.  Help us be in agreement as we care for and discipline them and attempt to “bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”  Give him wisdom and compassion, fairness and grace, strength and sensitivity.

• Let love and faithfulness never leave you…Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man (Proverbs 3:3-4 NIV).

Make my husband’s godly character shines in every situation.  Give him favor with You and with man, especially in the work place.  Protect his reputation and allow his life to be a witness to those around him.

• May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us– yes, establish the work of our hands.  Psalm 90:17 NIV

Establish the work of his hands.  Let it be successful and fruitful labor, well-rewarded and recognized.  Help him overcome obstacles and solve problems with creativity and wisdom.  Reveal solutions to him.  Protect him  from mis-steps and bad decisions.

• The Lord was with Joseph so that he prospered…the Lord gave him success in everything he did,  Genesis 39:2-3

Just as you blessed the work of Joseph, bless the work of my husband.  Let everything he touches be successful and prosperous.  Prosper his business/company because he is there.

• But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin (1 John 1:7 NIV).

Give my husband friendships with godly men.   As he walks in the light, give him this “fellowship with one another” so that he doesn’t walk alone, but is strengthened and encouraged by other men of God.

In Jesus’ name….Amen.

You can also check out 14 Days of Prayer for Your Marriage With 1 Corinthians 13 and grab that free printable resource, too!

Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer and worship leader.

  Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness.

  Her upcoming book, Ask Me Anything, Lord: Opening Our Hearts to God’s Questions, will be released in November 2013!  To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

Copyright © 2013 Heather King

Источник: //heathercking.org/2013/05/24/12-verses-to-pray-for-your-husband/

Blessed Are the Pure in Heart

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

The first thing we learn from this beatitude is that Jesus is concerned with our heart. It is not enough to clean up our act on the outside.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of extortion and rapacity. You blind Pharisee! First cleanse the inside of the cup and of the plate, that the outside also may be clean. (Matthew 23:25–26)

The aim of Jesus Christ is not to reform the manners of society, but to change the hearts of sinners you and me.

So, for example, Jesus would not be satisfied with a society in which there were no acts of adultery. You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.

” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–28).

Who You Are

The heart is what you are, in the secrecy of your thought and feeling, when nobody knows but God. And what you are at the invisible root matters as much to God as what your are at the visible branch. “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). From the heart are all the issues of life.

What comes the mouth proceeds from the heart . . . For the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man” (Matthew 15:18–19).

“Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit . . . For the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:33–34).

So the heart is utterly crucial to Jesus. What we are in the deep, private recesses of our lives is what he cares about most. Jesus did not come into the world simply because we have some bad habits that need to be broken. He came into the world because we have such dirty hearts that need to be purified.

The Impotence of Government

Have you thought recently how helpless the local, state, and federal government is to solve problems of our society? A month ago, CBS aired a program called “The Vanishing Family — Crisis in Black America.

” The focus was on the black community but the problem is true in differing measures in all groups of our society. The statistic was given that fifty-eight percent of all black babies are born to unmarried mothers.

Only about one percent of these are put up for adoption.

“Jesus came into the world because we have such dirty hearts that need to be purified.”

So over half of the next generation in the black community is being raised without a dad at home. The long-term effect of that tragedy nobody knows. What can the government do? It seems that all it can do is try to find ways to soften the financial burden on these children and their mothers.

Do you see how amazingly relevant the words of Jesus are? He says, “ the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication.” the heart comes fornication! All babies born to unmarried mothers (and fathers!) are born from fornication.

And the impotence of the state to deal with the inner collapse of our culture would be replaced by the power of purity.

The Centrality of God and Social Relevance

Now the reason I mention the social relevance of Jesus’s teaching on purity of heart is not because that is what the beatitude is about.

In fact, this beatitude is emphatically irrelevant if measured by contemporary social standards.

Blessed are the pure in heart, Jesus says, not for they shall save the legislature millions of dollars in AFDC payments. Rather, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

The reason I mention the social impact implicit in Jesus’s teaching is so that our socially sensitive consciences can gladly affirm the centrality of God in this beatitude. My own conviction is that the fundamental problem in American society and culture is that we attempt to solve human problems while neglecting the centrality of God in the life of the soul.

We are so bombarded by human tragedies of poverty and crime and abuse and neglect and war and the manifold injustices of man to man, that we are tempted to agree with the world that it is useless pie in the sky by and by to be concerned with whether the soul will ever see God.

But this is the greatest of all tragedies — that in seeking to relieve the temporal miseries of man we set aside the centrality of God.But Jesus comes to us this morning and says, “Blessed are the pure in heart,” not first because they change society, but first because they will see God. Seeing God is the great goal of being pure.

Abandon that goal and human culture collapses into ruin.

Three Questions

So let’s ask briefly in the moments we have,

1. What is it to see God?
2. What is it to be pure in heart?
3. And, how are these two things bound together?

To Be Admitted to His Presence

First, to see God means to be admitted to his presence. After the plague of darkness on Egypt, Pharaoh exploded to Moses with these words:

“Get away from me; take heed to yourself; never see my face again; for in the day you see my face you shall die.” Moses said, “As you say! I will not see your face again.” (Exodus 10:28–29)

When a king says, “You will never see my face again,” he means, “I will never grant you admission again into my presence.”

In the same way, we call the doctor today and say, “Can I see Dr. Lundgren today?” We don’t mean, can I see him from a distance. Or, can I see a picture of him? We mean, can I have an appointment to be with him?

So the first thing seeing God means is being admitted to his presence.

To Be Awestruck by His Glory

Second, seeing God means being awestruck by his glory — by a direct experience of his holiness. After God confronted Job in the whirlwind, Job said, “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

“Seeing God is the great goal of being pure.”

Virtually all of our spiritual sight in this life is mediated to us through the word of God or the work of God in providence. We “see” images and reflections of his glory. We hear echoes and reverberations of his voice.But there will come a day when God himself will dwell among us.

His glory will no longer be inferred from lightning and mountains and roaring seas and constellations of stars. Instead, our experience of him will be direct.

So seeing God means not only being admitted to his presence, but also being awestruck by a direct experience of his glory.

To Be Comforted by His Grace

Finally, seeing God means being comforted by his grace. Again and again the psalmists cry out to God that he not hide his face from them. For example in Psalm 27 (verses 7–9) David says,

Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud,    be gracious to me and answer me!

   . . . Hide not thy face from me.

“Hide not thy face from me,” is the same as saying, “Be gracious to me!” This means that seeing the face of God is considered to be a sweet and comforting experience. If God shows his face, we are helped. If he turns his face away, we are dismayed.

So when Jesus promises the reward of “seeing God” there are at least these three things implied: we will be admitted to his presence, not just kept in the waiting room. We will be awestruck with a direct experience of his glory. And we will be helped and comforted by his grace.

And this we will have — in part now, and fully in the age to come — if we are pure in heart.

2. What is it to be pure in heart?

Søren Kierkegaard wrote a book called Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. That is not a bad definition, provided that the one thing we will is the glory of God.

According to David

Let me try to show you where that definition comes from in Scripture. We start with the closest OT parallel to this beatitude, namely, Psalm 24:3–4:

Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?    And who shall stand in his holy place?He who has clean hands and a pure heart,    who does not lift up his soul to what is false,

    and does not swear deceitfully.

You can see what David means by a “pure heart” in the phrases that follow it. A pure heart is a heart that has nothing to do with falsehood. It is painstakingly truthful and free from deceitfulness. Deceit is what you do when you will two things, not one thing.

You will to do one thing and you will that people think you are doing another. You will to feel one thing and you will that people think you are feeling another. That is impurity of heart.

Purity of heart is to will one thing, namely, to “seek the face of the Lord” (verse 6).

According to James

You can see this idea of purity in James 4:8:

Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you men of double mind.

Notice that just Psalm 24 there is reference to both clean hands and a pure heart as preparation for drawing near to God, or “ascending the hill of the Lord.” But notice how the men are described who need to purify their hearts: “men of double mind.” That is they are men that will two things not just one thing. The impurity of double-mindedness is explained in James 4:4:

So the double-minded man of verse 8 has his heart divided between the world and God, a wife who has a husband and a boyfriend. Purity of heart, on the other hand, is to will one thing, namely, full and total allegiance to God.

From Jesus’s Mouth

So if we ask, Where in the gospels did Jesus explain purity of heart in this way? The answer would be Matthew 22:37:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.

Not with part of your heart. Not with a double or divided heart. That would be impurity. Purity of heart is no deception, no double-mindedness, no divided allegiance.

“God is the one who purifies the heart, and the instrument with which he cleans it is faith.”

(Note: you can see the echo of this meaning of purity of heart in 1 Timothy 1:5, “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere [i.e., unhypocritical faith].”)

Purity of heart is to will one thing, namely, God’s truth and God’s value in everything we do. The aim of the pure heart is to align itself with the truth of God and magnify the worth of God. If you want to be pure in heart, pursue God with utter single-mindedness. Purity of heart is to will that one thing.That leaves one last question:

3. How are the two bound together?

Jesus only gives us part of the answer here. It is a true part, but only part. He says that the pure will see God. That is, purity is a prerequisite for seeing God. The impure are neither granted admittance to his presence, nor are they awed by the glory of his holiness, nor are they comforted by his grace.

Jesus’s point is the same as Hebrews 12:14: “Strive for . . . the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” In other words, blessed are the holy for they shall see God. There is a real purity and a real holiness which fits us to see the king of glory.

And of course, that leads every sensitive soul to cry out with the words of Proverbs 20:9, “Who can say, ‘I have made my heart clean; I am pure from my sin?’” And with the disciples: “Who then can be saved?”

Jesus’s answer comes back just it did to the disciples in Matthew 19:26 — and this is the rest of the answer — “With men it is impossible, but with God all things are possible.

” In other words, God creates a purity for us and in us so that we can pursue purity. And by his grace we must seek that gift by praying with David, “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10).

And we must look to Christ “who gave himself for us . . . to purify for himself a people” (Titus 2:14).

And the response of our hearts to God’s act of creation and Christ’s act of sacrifice is single-minded faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. As the Scripture says in Acts 15:9, “God made no distinction between us and them, but purified their hearts by faith.”

God is the one who purifies the heart, and the instrument with which he cleans it is faith.Therefore, trust in the Lord with all your heart (Proverbs 3:5). Will this one thing. And you will see God.

Источник: //www.desiringgod.org/messages/blessed-are-the-pure-in-heart