R-E-S-P-E-C-T

So the first major point of this book is that women's greatest need from their spouse is love, but men need respect more! Woman base most of their decisions off of emotion and how good a relationship is going to them is determined by how loved they feel. Men, oppositely, would rather feel rejected and unloved than feel disrespected in life and relationships. This is a biblical principle that I have heard preached on many times, but until they put it in this language, it never hit me of the importance of how this played into the husband-wife relationship.

In the Bible God commands husbands to love their wives even as Christ loved the church and commands wives to honor and respect their husbands formost. God knew, obviously, how He had built us and the importance for us to feel validated as wives/women by feeling loved. Christ gave His life for the church and He expects our husbands to have that same kind love, the love that means protecting us and possibly dying, for us.

Wives, on the other hand, are commanded to respect their husbands and revere them like we are to respect and revere the Lord. Sometimes this may mean having to live with a decision we don't agree with that our husbands feel is best for our family, or having to let go when we want to put our two cents in. It also translates into major and minor things that happen in a relationship everyday, but we will get into that more later.

The first thing we need to start practicing to get our hearts and minds on the right track and in line with what God wants us to do is pray for the ablilty to trust and respect our husbands. This is a hard thing for me to do, since I like to be in control, but God put our husbands in charge of our households, and even though most of the time we are the ones home making the daily decisions of life, we need to be praying that God leads us in our decisions and that we follow what our husbands have asked of us when they are home or away.

On a practical note, the easiest way we can start respecting our man is to make sure that we are not bad mouthing him, ever, to others. This means no venting to girlfriends, whining to kids or family, or even thinking bad thoughts about him to ourselves. He has a very tough responsibility, one that I don't want, and no one is perfect. By lifting up our man to the Lord and finding the positive about him in everything he does, we get our hearts in the right place and can help and encourage him to be the man, husband, and father God intended him to be.

Ephesians 5:22
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Ephesians 5:25-30
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.