So Your Prayers Are Not Hindered

You husbands, in the same way, live with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor to the woman, as to the weaker vessel, as being also joint heirs of the grace of life; that your prayers may not be hindered. (1 Peter 3:7, WEB)

Peter gives husbands a startling warning at the end of an instruction about marriage. He tells them to live with their wives in an understanding way and to show honor to them as fellow heirs of the grace of life, and then he adds, "so that your prayers may not be hindered." How a man treats his wife, Peter says, can clog the pipe between him and God. The two things a man might think are entirely separate turn out to be joined.

This should sober any man who thinks his secret life is sealed off from his spiritual life. The dishonor of pornography, the way it reduces women to objects and leaves a husband disconnected from the real woman beside him, does not stay in one room of the soul. It seeps into everything, including your prayers, which can feel strangely dead when you are living a double life. You kneel down and the words go nowhere, and you assume God has grown distant, when the truth is closer to home than that.

If your prayers have gone flat, this may be part of why. The way back is not complicated even when it is hard, and it begins where the trouble began, in how you regard your wife. Turn toward honoring her again, in your thoughts before anyone can see them and in your treatment of her where she can, and ask God to clear the line between you and him that dishonor has fouled. When a man starts treating his wife as the fellow heir Peter says she is, he often finds his prayers coming back to life at the same time. The two were never as separate as he imagined.