Honor Your Wife - 1 Peter 3:7 Series

1 Peter 3:7 Husbands, in the same way live with your wives according to knowledge as a weaker, feminine vessel, showing honor as also coheirs of the grace of life so that nothing will hinder your prayers.

Introduction

There is a movie titled “What Women Want,” and the main character of that movie is a man who, for some reason, suddenly has the ability to hear the thoughts of the women who are around him as if they were talking out loud. And in the movie, he wins all kinds of favor with all these women because he is the one man on the whole planet who can finally understand women. I don’t think the people who made that movie understand women. If you think that just because a man could hear all a woman’s thoughts, he could therefore understand her – you do not understand women. There are some women, who, if you heard all her thoughts, all it would do is thoroughly confuse you. She knows all her own thoughts, and she does not even understand herself. There is a lot more to a woman than just her thoughts. There are attitudes and emotions and inclinations and desires and appetites and affections. Someone sent me an email with the subject line: “The Unabridged Manual for Understanding Women.” And you scroll down and see this picture:

No doubt about it – women are complex. But before we join in with everyone else with the jokes and just throw up our hands and say, “Understanding women is utterly impossible,” let’s remember that if you are a Christian man and you are married, you are commanded to understand at least one woman. We have been studying verse by verse through the book of 1 Peter and we come this morning to chapter 3 verse 7.

7 Husbands, in the same way live with your wives in an understanding way…

We live in a culture that hates God’s design for the family. They are head over heels in their pursuit of alternatives. And many of those attitudes have infected the Church. So many Christians do not want to be looked down on by the culture, so they try to merge worldly ideas about men and women with the Bible. And whenever you do that – whenever you merge human wisdom with God’s Word, what you end up with is 100% human wisdom with religious lingo. So what we have is a corrupted culture and confused church. And so for the last two weeks Peter has been setting us straight in our attitudes toward the role of the wife, and now, in verse 7, Peter is going to instruct husbands.

This is significant, because in order for Peter to do this he has to stray from the topic at hand. The topic at hand is how the Church is to deal with unbelievers. And the way to deal with unbelievers is by being submissive to their authority in order to win them to Christ. And Peter gives three examples. But in each case Peter only addresses the person who is under authority. When he speaks of the governing authorities, he implies that those in power should carry out justice, but he does not address them directly. And when he speaks to slaves, he implies that the slave owners should be good and considerate, but he does not speak to them directly. But after talking to wives, Peter breaks that pattern and goes ahead and addresses the one in authority – the husbands. When it comes to the marriage relationship, there is so much at stake that Peter does not want to leave the husband’s side up to a mere implication. Even though it is a little off his topic, he wants to take the time to really make it clear how the husband is to behave toward the wife.

Understand Her Weakness

7 Husbands, in the same way live with your wives in an understanding way

Literally, it is live with her according to knowledge. And when the Bible uses the word knowledge in the context of a relationship, the idea is experiential knowledge. It means to know something by experience. I think the NIV gets it right – this is referring to knowing your wife so well that you live with her in an understanding way. You get inside her skin to the point where you really do understand what life is like for her.

Women Want to be Understood

Women want to be understood. The comedian Tim Allen once said, “When a man designs a stop sign, it just says ‘STOP.’ If a woman designed a stop sign it would say, “If you really loved me, you would know what to do right now.” Comedians have gotten a lot of mileage over the years out of the tendency women have to want their husbands to know what they are thinking. Why are women like that? They are like that because God made women with a strong desire to be known. There is something especially wonderful about being thoroughly and deeply known by someone who loves you and understands you. That is why the psalmists make so much of the fact that they are known by God.