A Wife's Greatest InfluenceSample

As a wife, you have been uniquely positioned to influence not only your marriage, your family, your home but also the legacies your family members leave behind. It is easy to get distracted from this overarching purpose, especially when the issues of daily life present themselves. After all, life comes packaged with struggles, failures, sins, betrayals, hurts, wounds, disappointments, and crushing defeats.

Yet your marriage provides the opportunity to discover the grace of endurance but also to model that grace to all of those around you, leading your home into a season of joy.

If you think you’ll be able to avoid experiencing difficulties in your marriage, you are naive and your life will be filled with disappointment, discouragement, and despair. Why? Because your expectations are not realistic in this fallen world. All of us struggle with our selfish sin-nature that must be brought into submission to the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures, and our spouse.

Our response to the challenges life brings is always more important than the actual event. As Jesus and others in the Bible said so many times, the point of life is to “overcome” that which is difficult and painful.

Each of those difficult moments or seasons is simply an obstacle that God permitted in your life so you can learn the deeper secrets of how to overcome and enjoy surpassing victories. They are actually gifts that feel like disasters but are heaven’s hidden stepping-stonesto becoming more like Christ, who overcame everything thrown against Him. Indeed, said He, “I have [even] overcome the world” (John 16:33 nkjv).

When you model the grace of overcoming, you demonstrate that hope to all those around you. You leave a lasting imprint on the lives within your circle of impact. As a wife, you are empowered to lift the hearts and minds of all those with whom you come into contact. And the starting point is always prayer.