What Kind of a Wife Are You

Its Saturday again, and a very beautiful weekend I am praying it will be for us all in Jesus name. I pray you are able to rest well and get your energy well stored up for the coming working days. May the Lord bless the works of our hands in Jesus name.

In my post today I will not share a story; I perceive the Lord will want me to ask the wives a question on their assignment in the lives of their husband, so I will start by asking this: “What kind of a wife are you?” This question will be the basis of what I will be sharing today, and I pray that the Lord will bless lives and touch homes by this post in Jesus name.

Job 2:7-10

So satan went out of the presence of the Lord and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.

His wife said to him, “Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!”

He replied, “You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?”

In all this, Job did not sin in what he said.

1 Samuel 25:2-3, 14

A certain man in Maon, who had property there at Carmel, was very wealthy. He had a thousand goats and three thousand sheep, which he was shearing in Carmel. His name was Nabal and his wife’s name was Abigail. She was an intelligent and beautiful woman, but her husband, a Calebite, was surly and mean in his dealings.

One of the servants told Nabal’s wife Abigail: “David sent messengers from the desert to give our master greetings, but he hurled insult at them. Yet these men were very good to us. They did not ill-threat us and the whole time we were out in the fields near them nothing was missing. Night and day, they were a wall around us all the time we were herding our sheep near them. Now think it over and see what you can do, because disaster is hanging over our master and his whole household. He is such a wicked man that no-one can talk to him.”

Abigail lost no time. She too two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of wine, five dressed sheep, five seahs of roasted grain, a hundred cakes of raisins and two hundred cakes of pressed figs and loaded them on donkeys. Then she told her servants, “God ahead; I’ll follow you.” But she did not tell her husband Nabal.

I want us to have a comparison of these two wives and try to know where we fit in as wives and in doing this we should try and be sincere with ourselves.

Job’s wife was married to a very wealthy man just like Abigail. The interesting thing about her is that nothing was ever said of Job’s wife except her foolish advice to her husband when the tables turned and things went soar. So from the look of things she didn’t have much contribution in the success story of her husband's life. She didn’t know how he arrived at his wealth or how he ran his life. Based on the records of the Bible, it appeared she didn’t feature in his life at all. One would have wondered if Job did have a wife safe of the fact that he had children who would have been born to him by his wife going by his righteous life. And then the foolish advice given by her.

For a wife who made no meaningful or commendable contribution in the life of her husband worth mentioning in the story of his life, it’s no surprise the kind of advice that came out of her to her husband in the face of challenges. So whether Job lived or died apparently didn’t matter. So I want to ask this: “Are you that kind of a wife to your husband?”

The direct opposite kind of wife is Abigail. We can see that from the moment Nabal’s name was mentioned in the Bible his wife’s name was mentioned alongside his own. If you read the introduction of the story of Nabal, the first thing that was used to describe him was his wealth; what he owned, then his name was mentioned and that of his wife. But when their characteristics were to be described, Abigail’s came first. She was described as intelligent and beautiful and then the Bible tells us that Nabal was mean and surly.

Thinking deep on these issues one is tempted to conclude that the story of Nabal the wealthy man is not complete without the mention of his beautiful and intelligent wife. This will be so because she must have played a major role in whom Nabal had become – a very wealthy man.

So I ask the wives again, “What kind of a wife are you.” Abigail fulfilled her God given assignment in the life of her husband. When danger was knocking as a result of her husband’s negative attitude, she didn’t go to home to fight him or tell him to right his wrong, she didn’t run away from the scene to safe her own life, she tried to right the wrong on behalf of her husband and tried to atone for the situation without even letting her husband know.

Has your husband offended someone and you try go mend the fence and appease the person when you know and are convinced your husband was obviously wrong? Or did you blindly take side with your husband and fanned the embers of his wrong as the hero with mighty powers or did you go to your husband telling him to his face that he was wrong and then he felt betrayed by even you which has resulted in a gulf in your marriage or did you just pray? Whatever you did tells the kind of wife you are.

Abigail knew who her husband was, interestingly enough she never tried to change him so as not to appear controlling or domineering, she just simply became in his life all that he wasn’t. She was the beautiful and intelligent part that was missing in Nabal’s life. She became his missing rib. She controlled what was under her power to control which was herself, and she left that which she could not control. If Nabal would not give David supplies, she went ahead and did it, knowing that Nabal didn’t have any justifiable reason to deny a man who had always helped him a favor that was within his reach to do and by so doing put himself in danger. And she didn’t do this to blow her own trumpet, she didn’t do it to exonerate herself; she did it on behalf of her husband. She did it to plead the course of her husband and he didn’t even know it.

Are we playing this kind of roles in the life of her husbands? Are we performing the role of a suitable helper in the lives of our husbands in fulfillment of God’s purpose for our lives or are we just doing our thing and seeking fulfillment in ourselves other than what God purposed for our lives? What kind of a wife are you?

If we have all wives like Abigail, I can imagine how beautiful our world will be. You might say that Abigail didn’t succeed in changing Nabal, well she wasn't meant to change him, she was meant to compliment him, pray for him and allow God use her to change him. And when God was tired of who Nabal was, He took his life Himself. But Abigail’s life was even better afterwards; she became a queen in the palace of David. What a wife to be married to King David. She proved herself worthy of that position by character and deeds.

This lesson I want the wives to keep close to their hearts, Abigail never allowed her mean and surly husband to drag her down into the pit. She did what she had to do as a wife irrespective of who or what her husband was. Wives, our husbands should not be an excuse to fail.