When
you start seeking the Kingdom first, be prepared for all hell to be
unleashed. What's more, our enemies become those of our own household.
Harold
Hill faced a dilemma with his wife and she was won over after he
decided to stand on God's chain of command. Here is his story:
A
long time ago, I had a religious wife. She went to her temple
religiously every Sunday morning, doing the religious things that they
did. She even wore a hat, or a little doily thing on her head that
pretended to be a hat.
Slue
Foot began to work on my wife after I had met Jesus for real, because
he knows that family unity is vital to Christian growth. The home is
the final testing ground for this whole spiritual dimension, and one
night the battle was engaged. My wife came out with it:
"Look,
you Jesus fanatic. I've had it right up to the eyeballs with this
fanatical bit of yours. If you don't quit, I'm getting out of here!
I'm fed up with all this ridiculous 'Praise the Lord,' and 'Thank you,
Jesus' business."
Now,
she had kind of hinted at these things before, but I hadn't taken her
seriously. With a little practice, a husband can tell when a wife is
just threatening and when she is in earnest about something. This time
she meant it, and I knew it. We'd been sitting across the grocery
table from each other for about twenty-five years at that point, and
she came through loud and clear.
I
almost panicked. I didn't want to lose my wife. Jesus was going to
have to come to my rescue on this one, or I was a goner. "Lord,
what do I tell her?" I wailed. The answer I got came in the form
of an understanding: "State your position to her as head of the
house."
He
directed my attention to the Scriptures describing the chain of
command He has established for best results in Kingdom living,
earthside:
Wives,
submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the
husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the
church: and he is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is
subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in
every thing (Ephesians 5:22-24).
Until
that night, I had never realized this chain of command and the reasons
for it were laid out so plainly in the Scriptures. And here I was
being told to explain these things to my wife. It made me more than a
little uneasy, because we had never talked about these things before,
and I didn't know how she would take it. We had a good working
relationship, I thought. I paid the bills and mama did the cooking. I
didn't interfere with her department; she let me run mine. She
couldn't add two and two together, and I couldn't manage to make
instant oatmeal, so it worked out fine. She'd never paid a bill; I'd
never baked a pie. Without each other, we'd be lost. I'd starve to
death, and she'd go to debtor's prison.
Slue
Foot was trying to split us asunder. And it seemed that the advice I
was getting from Heavenly headquarters wasn't going to help matters
all that much. For a while, I wasn't sure I understood whose side God
was on and what exactly He wanted me to do. That called for another
question: "Lord, what do you mean, that I'm to state my position?
What is my position?" I had never thought it through.
"Who comes first in your life?" was how He put it to me. And
then I understood what He was getting at.
"Lord,
give me the words to tell her," I prayed, and this is what He had
me tell my wife: "Look. I hope you don't go. I hope you don't
feel that you have to leave." I was getting it straight in my own
mind as I was telling it to her. "But let's get this one thing
settled right now, once and for all: Jesus Christ is number one in my
life, and you are number two."
Zonk!
She looked as if I had hit her on the head with a chair. After all
these years of thinking she was something really special in our
household, she was confronted with the fact that she had to take
second place. It was kind of rough, and I admit I felt sorry for what
she was going through.
It
was a tense moment. I was learning that you don't make apologies for
God's Word. When you stand on it and tie your statements into eternal
truth, God won't let you down. He'll back you up.
Immediately
Slue Foot got on the defensive. The power of Satan began to leak out
because the truth had been spoken, loud and clear.
"But
where will I go?" mama asked, her voice trembling.
"I
have no idea," I told her. "As far as I'm concerned, you're
welcome to stay, but no more quibbling or argument about one thing:
Jesus is first; you are second. If you have to go, you'll have to
figure out the where for yourself. And if you go, don't slam
the door when you go out. You just might want to come back
sometime."
She
just stood there, thinking about it.
In
the midst of the impossible situation, God gave me a gift of faith
that beat anything my intellect could have cranked up. I stopped
holding my breath, because I felt the faith rise up in me that God
would deliver us out of the sticky situation. He let me know
that if our marriage came unglued, it wouldn't stay unglued forever. I
understood by faith that my wife might go, but that if she did, she'd
be back. As it happened, I got a brand-new wife without having to
bother about divorce or alimony-but not without many trials and
tribulations. It turned out that mama didn't leave. She hung around
and got saved. She became a new creature in Christ Jesus.
Two
friends of mine were talking one night, and I learned that between
them they had seven wives, and not a good one in the lot. King Solomon
did worse than that. He had a thousand wives, all of them pagans. But
the Lord gave me one wife, and made her perfect.
From
the book, HOW TO LIVE IN HIGH VICTORY by Harold Hill, Logos
International, 1977
