This Proverbial couplet warns a wife that she can be either a help or a hindrance to her husband, but we must look elsewhere in Scripture for practical instruction on what being a help or being a hindrance looks like.
In Proverbs 31 we have a picture of a virtuous wife. From her we can glean the following advice:
· Be competent with our work so that when our husbands can leave home for the day they trust that we are handling things well, enabling him to serve in the community.
· Be industriously productive and creative for the sake of the family’s provisions and to produce extra income for the family.
· Manage the family resources and live within our means well enough that there is excess to offer to the poor
· Manage our tongues so that we give wise advice and speak in an edifying and kind way.
· Extend charity to the poor on behalf of the family.
From descriptions of the qualifications of church officers (see I Timothy 3 and Titus 1), we can glean the following instructions for not only officer’s wives, but for all of us:
· We must control our tongues (Hmmm… that one comes up rather often). Note that a man cannot be a deacon if his wife is a gossip.
· We must show respect for our husbands and their leadership and teach our children to do the same. (Otherwise he will not be considered a competent leader.)
· We must practice hospitality. Actually the text says that the elder must be hospitable, but how can a man be hospitable if his wife is not?
Here’s a Proverb that makes me smile and shudder at the same time: Prov. 19:13 “The contentions of a wife are a continual dripping…” I just picture that leaky faucet in the old two-room apartment we lived in when we were first married. It’s the sort of thing that can be unbearably annoying on a sleepless night. Drip…drip….drip. So are we contentious? Is this house too old, the food budget too small, the gutters long overdue for a cleaning, so on and so on. Drip…drip…drip. It’s enough to make a guy feel like he can’t do anything right—and lose his motivation to try.
1 Corinthians 15:33 affirms that, “Evil company corrupts good habits.” It is a sad truth that often the weaknesses and shortcomings of one spouse can corrupt the other spouse, especially if they share weaknesses. Imagine a household in which both the husband and the wife tend to listening to and sharing gossip. Each will be emboldened by the other and soon the household will be a bitter one. At some point this bitterness will be evident not only in the home, but also in their public lives. The same could be said of other sins: gluttony, indulging lusts, laziness, lying, complaining. We are much more comfortable sinning when there are others around us doing the same thing, and no one is keeping us accountable. So we need to keep careful watch over our weaknesses, especially those we share with our husbands, and pray especially for deliverance from those sins which can bring us both down.
The positive side of the issue of shared weaknesses is to look for skills or habits that are lacking in the family and work to contribute those ourselves. Do neither of us know how to balance a checkbook? A helpful wife could set out to learn the what she needs to know to take over that task.
I'm sure the Scriptures hold many more treasures on how we can be a help rather than a hindrance to our husbands, but that's plenty for me to be working on for now!
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