Praying for your marriage, when it is harder than it used to be
Fifteen verses for a marriage in a hard season, arranged around the three prayers that actually help: soften my heart, help us forgive, and hold us together.
Most prayers for a marriage start out as prayers about the other person. Change him. Make her see. It is natural and it is usually where the praying stalls, because it is a prayer you cannot do anything about. The prayers that change a marriage tend to start closer to home.
The verses below are quoted word for word from the World English Bible and arranged around the three prayers that people in hard seasons say helped: soften my own heart first, help us forgive each other, and hold us together when we cannot hold ourselves. These are not verses about weddings. They are verses for the tenth year, or the twentieth, when the vows are being kept by decision rather than by feeling.
If your marriage is unsafe, none of this is a substitute for getting help. If it is simply hard, read on.
Soften my heart first
The most useful prayer in a hard marriage is also the least satisfying: that your own heart would be changed. These verses describe love as patient, humble, bearing with. Pray them about yourself before you pray them about your spouse.
Love is patient and is kind. Love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.
1 Corinthians 13:4, 7 · WEB
Put your own name where love is and see which sentence you cannot say. That is the one to pray.
with all lowliness and humility, with patience, bearing with one another in love, being eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Ephesians 4:2-3 · WEB
Bearing with one another in love. Not fixing, not winning. Bearing with. Eager to keep the unity, which means the unity is worth effort.
You husbands, in the same way, live with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor to the woman as to the weaker vessel, as also being joint heirs of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered.
1 Peter 3:7 · WEB
Addressed to husbands, and the last clause is startling: prayers can be hindered by how you treat your wife. Contempt at home reaches further than home.
Above all these things, walk in love, which is the bond of perfection.
Colossians 3:14 · WEB
Above all these things. Walk in love is the instruction that outranks being right.
A prayer to write
I have been praying that you would change her. I am going to start with me. Make me patient. Make me kind. Take the contempt out of my voice before it does more damage. Soften my heart toward the person I promised to love.
Help us forgive each other
Every long marriage carries a ledger, and the ledger is the problem. These verses are about forgiveness that is not earned, because the one you are married to will not earn it any more than you will.
bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, if any man has a complaint against any; even as Christ forgave you, so you also do.
Colossians 3:13 · WEB
Even as Christ forgave you. The standard is not what your spouse deserves. It is what you received.
And above all things be earnest in your love among yourselves, for love covers a multitude of sins.
1 Peter 4:8 · WEB
Love covers a multitude of sins. Not one or two. A multitude. It is a verse for the thing you keep bringing up.
What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”
Mark 10:9 · WEB
What God has joined. The marriage is not only yours to dissolve, which is also why it is not only yours to save.
Many waters can’t quench love, neither can floods drown it. If a man would give all the wealth of his house for love, he would be utterly scorned.
Song of Solomon 8:7 · WEB
Many waters cannot quench love. Written about a love that had already been tested. Yours has been too.
A prayer to write
We have been keeping score for years. I want to burn the ledger. Help me forgive the thing I have not been able to let go of, the way you forgave me, without waiting for an apology that may not come.
Hold us together
Some seasons are beyond what either of you can fix, and the prayer is simply that the marriage would survive them. These verses describe a bond that is held by something other than the two people in it.
If a man prevails against one who is alone, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Ecclesiastes 4:12 · WEB
A threefold cord. The third strand is the one that does not fray when the other two do.
Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh.
Genesis 2:24 · WEB
One flesh. It is a statement of what already is, not a goal to reach. You are already joined. The prayer is to live like it.
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the assembly and gave himself up for her,
Ephesians 5:25 · WEB
Gave himself up for her. The picture of a husband's love is a sacrifice, not a negotiation.
Whoever finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor of the LORD.
Proverbs 18:22 · WEB
A good thing. Favor of the LORD. On the days it does not feel like either, this verse says what the marriage still is.
Love is patient and is kind. Love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud,
1 Corinthians 13:4 · WEB
Read it again at the end, slowly. Patient. Kind. That is the whole prayer.
A prayer to write
We cannot hold this together on our own right now and we both know it. Be the third strand. Hold what we joined when we cannot. Get us through this season to the other side of it, still married, still kind.
Pray for your marriage on a rhythm
A marriage is not an emergency, most of the time. It is a long thing that needs praying for regularly, and the regularity is what most of us fail at. We pray hard in the crisis and not at all in the ordinary months, and then the next crisis arrives with no prayer behind it.
Prayed lets you tag your spouse as a subject and choose a rhythm for them: every day, every week, every month. Every prayer you write for them gathers on one timeline, from the hard season to the better one, and each comes back to you at three days, a week, a month and a year so you can see what changed. Nothing you write leaves your phone, which matters when the prayer is about the person you sleep next to.
Write one prayer for your marriage tonight. Start with your own heart. Set it to come back every week.
Write the prayer. Prayed finds the verses.
Prayed is a private prayer journal for iPhone. Write what you're praying for and it matches three verses from the same Bible quoted above, on your phone, then brings the prayer back to you at three days, a week, a month and a year so you see what came of it. No account, no server. Writing is free forever.
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