Making Marriage Ministry Series: Culprit, Pride.

Thanks so much for joining me again on our series about the culprits that try to cripple and destroy the ministry of our marriages. We left off talking about what began my journey in this revelation that the Lord was showing me, how He was revealing to me that I was acting in pride towards my husband and it was taking a toll in our marriage. So today let's investigate the culprit of pride, what it looks like, how we can detect it, and how we expel it from our marriages.

Pride

Proverbs 16:18

18 "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."

The spirit of pride is probably the most dangerous of all the culprits that attack godly marriages because it is a stronghold spirit, and all the other culprits that we outlined in part 1, are spirits that come from the spirit of pride. A stronghold spirit is like a spiritual anchor that other spirits can attach to in order to strengthen the oppression in a person's life. The bible says in Mark 3:

27 "No man can enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house."

In this scripture verse, Jesus is referring to defeating the kingdom of satan. He is saying that in order to cast satan's kingdom from a house that you must first bind the strongman or the stronghold spirit that inhabits the home. Once the strongman is bound all the other spirits that are attached to it will fall as well. In marriages, pride, if active in a marriage will be the biggest stronghold. Pride is actually a defensive spirit, it is a spirit that we often use to guard ourselves against intimacy. Someone with a prideful spirit tends to feel shame about revealing their true nature, intentions, feelings, emotions, this can also translate to the inability to admit when we are wrong, or difficulty apologizing. I already know what many of you are thinking, yes I know that your husband probably exemplifies many of these attributes, and it is well known that men tend to deal with pride more often than women do but don't be deceived, us as women also suffer from pride too, we just show it differently.

The Lord had to show me clearly how I was reacting pridefully toward my husband and the damage it was doing. First and foremost pride is a selfish spirit, it is a spirit that causes us to be at the forefront of our attention and needs. When acting out of pride, everything that we do is done to bring us some kind of satisfaction, or validation. Nothing is done sacrificially without the need for praise or accolades, nothing is done unto God, without needing to be acknowledged, but everything that we do is done unto us, and if we don't get the praise or accolades we believe we deserve, we won't do it. This is why we as women tend to complain about our families, especially our husbands because we want the praise and accolades that match the amount of effort that we expel trying to please them. When we work all day, then come home cook a delicious meal, and then wash the dishes, we want our family to through us a mini-parade, we want our husbands to say "honey let me rub your feet after all that hard work you did." So, when they don't, we get offended and begin to complain about them, and become dissatisfied.

Detecting Pride

Pride is an emotional spirit, therefore it is a spirit that works in our emotions and soulish man. Pride is a spirit that likes to get hurt, cause then the spirit can react emotionally. What I mean is that when our pride is hurt, we act out emotionally through pride to guard ourselves, and that is just what the spirit wants. The selfish spirit of pride keeps couples from sharing with each other how they really feel about things, it keeps them from sharing intimate details of their lives to each other, and it keeps them from totally trusting each other. Pride tells us that we don’t need our partners to know that much, that is not necessary to share sensitive things. It also makes us feel that we don’t need our partner in emotional ways that we can handle emotional issues on our own. Pride is self-seeking, it's self-serving, it's self-aggrandizing and self-destructive. Again, pride is not just a man’s issue, it is a woman’s issue too. Although men and women display and react to the spirit of pride in very different ways, pride is still pride and it is very dangerous in marriage. There are many manifestations of pride between men and women but for the sake of this article will talk about one. It is important to know how pride manifests so that we can recognize it, and it can be exposed for what it is, and can no longer go on working undetected in our marriages.

Lack of emotional intimacy

This attribute of pride is more prevalent in men, however, women can also demonstrate pride this way as well. However, even this manifestation between men and women looks different. For men, in some cases, it’s a lack of knowledge of how to be emotionally intimate that plays a major part of the problem. Whether from childhood experiences, where pride was taught, through an unspoken rule such as “boys don’t cry”, or the “always be tough” rule, emotional intimacy can be difficult for some men, for this reason, it's a taught pride. For some men, there was no in-home example of how to be emotionally healthy as a man, or how to handle emotional issues in a healthy godly way. Lack of emotional intimacy is used to remain emotionally distant, to try to secure themselves as the man of the relationship, fearing that sharing their emotions too much to their spouse will make them appear weak to their spouse and their peers. This turns into difficulty with allowing their spouse to counsel them, or give them advice, no matter how sound it is. The man wants to come up with his own solutions, he wants to handle his own problems, he does not want to rely on his wife.

For women, we display pride through a lack of emotional intimacy with our spouse by retreating into our emotions. What do I mean by that? Since pride is an emotional spirit that likes to get hurt, for women who are more susceptible to responding emotionally, we tend to retreat into our emotions when we are hurt instead of being open and honest to our husbands. We retreat to the hurt, we dwell on it, we hold on to the anger, when we are beginning to get over it, we rehearse it to ourselves to get angry about it again, we allow the pride to comfort us, instead of sharing our hurt with our husband. Which means, that we lack the intimacy enough to turn to our spouse to tell them how we feel, it's hard for us to say, "hey, when you said that it hurt." We don't trust them enough to give us the response we need, we don't believe that they will care, so instead, we allow our pride to keep us from the emotional intimacy of vulnerability.

This is where I struggled with this pride. Along with wanting accolades for all my hard work in taking care of my husband during his sickness, I wanted him to cater to all my emotional needs, forgetting his needs altogether, and when he didn't live up to my expectations I would become angry and offended by everything that he did. Yet, instead of just telling him that I was offended, or even telling him that I needed more validation, which might I add I now know is not his job either, I stayed silent and keep all my emotions to myself. Well at least momentarily, because let's be honest anger never stays quiet for too long, all it takes is one annoying situation for all the backlogs of slights to come up like a volcano, and this is what happened every time. Instead of trusting my husband to care about what I was feeling, I didn't believe that he would care and I kept every slight and recorded them, and replayed them and used them as evidence to belittle my husband in my mind. My pride turned my husband into my enemy, someone who I had to protect myself against, instead of my life partner, a continuation of myself who God blessed me with to rely on. Seeing this revelation and expelling the spirit of pride from my life and marriage started our journey to healing.

Pride will destroy your ministry

The spirit of pride aims to destroy the ministry that you have to one another as husband and wife. The spirit of pride aims to make our husbands feel as though they don't need to rely on us and to make us feel like we don't need to rely on our husbands. However, just as Jesus didn't do anything without seeing the Father do it first, just as Jesus relied on God, and the Father relied on the Son the carry man's sin to the cross, husbands and wives need each other. We are to rely on each other, we are to understand that we are an extension of one another, we are one. The selfishness of pride seeks to destroy the oneness of the God-ordained marriage, it wants for self-centered couples to be two separate people in a marriage and not ONE. However, our ministry to each other cancels self and only aims to meet the needs of the other, the truth is when our focus is on the needs of our husbands and their focus is on our needs and we're both aiming to please God everyone's needs will be met, and no one will be dissatisfied. This is how we make our marriage ministry we expel the pride of self, we give ourselves deeply, and intimately to one another, we rely upon and trust one another and we both submit ourselves to Jesus Christ. Join me in the next installment when we will talk about the next culprit to our marriage ministry Selfishness.

Charmarie W.V.