THE TEST OF HUMILITY.
QUESTION: Will You Be Able To See Yourself As Being Privileged?
…A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven.(Jn.3:27)
Humility And The Pastor’s Wife.
Humility means freedom from pride and arrogance. The test of humility is to check whether you will be able to know and act like someone who is privileged. As a pastor’s wife, you should feel privileged that God has called you along with your husband to carry out an assignment for Him. The realization should affect your relationship with God and make you to honour Him all the days of your life. Humility will also make you to see your husband as he whom God has assigned you with, and has asked you to submit to, unconditionally. Thirdly, humility will affect your relationship with others by preventing you from being too conscious of your position.
Humility To Acknowledge God.
Will you be humble enough to acknowledge God as the Almighty who directs the affairs of men? This will make you to know that there is absolutely nothing He can’t do. Will you be able to reverence God in any situation you are? A pastor’s wife was offended by someone. What the person did was so terrible to the extent that the pastor’s wife decided to do something equally terrible. Someone appealed to stop what she wanted to do in the name of Jesus. She responded by saying that if God could allow what the person did, she would rather remove the first and last letter in the name of Jesus and deal with the situation with ‘esu’s name. Esu in her dialect means the devil. As a pastor’s wife, what will be your breaking point before dissociating from God. There are pastors’ wives who will not mind saying anything against God, just because they found themselves in an unexpected situation. It is easy to affirm your reverence for God when things are easy. But how serious will the situation be before you deny God? How difficult will the situation of your husband be before you offer him the counsel of Job’s wife in Job 2:9-10:
Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die. But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.
Even when the situation is inexplicable, you must acknowledge that it does not stop God from being God. There are a lot of times that things will be happening and you won’t understand the reason why it is so. It doesn’t warrant you now dethroning God and enthroning your own idea. Hear what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:9:
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
The wisest among human beings or the most endowed among prophets only know in part. It is your humility in accepting the omniscience and omnipotence of God that will make you to accept that in whatever situation. God knows better and can intervene in a way no man, however powerful, can intervene.
Humility To Submit To Your Husband.
Every woman knows the area her husband is most vulnerable. However great a man of God is, there is something the wife knows that others do not know about him. Despite your knowledge of that area of vulnerability of your husband, will you still be able to submit to him as your head?
There is a king inside of every man, it is only when you allow that king to reign, irrespective of his area of vulnerability, that you will have the best of the man and the fullness of the blessings of God.
The scripture says in Ephesians 5:22-24
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
I always tell men that there is something called mutual submission in marriage. In other words, the husband cannot just believe that he is the commander-in-chief who can do whatever he likes without respect for the feelings of his wife. However, every woman, however highly placed, must be comfortable with the leadership of her husband in the home. This is the order in the scriptures. If you are not comfortable with this position, you will create problems whose effect will not allow peace at home and will make you to be outside God’s will.
As a pastor’s wife, it is possible that you are the one that is working while your husband is on full time in a young ministry. Although we always counsel that the pastor of a young ministry should be engaged in something that will fetch some money until the ministry grows enough to support his family. However, even if you are in a situation in which your husband believes that he should be a full-time pastor, he is still your head. If you continue to respect him, despite the financial situation at home, you will be surprised how God will be meeting the family at the point of its need through you.
I ministered somewhere and a woman asked for reason (if any) why she should not divorce her husband. He doesn’t do anything in addition to ministry work and the Sunday offering is not able to feed the family for a day. By the time I interviewed the lady further, I discovered that the family is living in their own house, apparently financed by her, two of their children are already in the university with other two in secondary schools, still being sponsored by the pastor’s wife. I asked her if she could remember any of her childhood friends who was neither married nor with children then. I told her the story of a woman I met who had been married for over twenty years without a child who prayed that God should allow her to get pregnant and then lose the pregnancy so that people would at least say that she was once pregnant. Imagine such desperation! I further asked her that if her husband were to be working, what would she have achieved that have not been achieved. She then burst into tears and started begging God for forgiveness. If you are humble enough to forget your problems and just concentrate for a moment on what God has done in your life, you will definitely see a lot of reasons why you should appreciate God. Even if you’ve not yet got your own children but you are healthy, do you know that you have reasons to appreciate God? I know of a woman that went for fibroid surgery to be able to get pregnant. In the process of the surgery, some things went wrong, and apart from other negative results, she lost her sight. Her husband even went ahead to marry another woman, leading to the collapse of the home. Often, we keep complaining that things are not alright with us, but there are people who are praying that God should make them to be like us.
Submission to your husband despite any challenges you may be going through is an unconditional requirement for those who desire to please God. Are you ready to appreciate God and submit to your head?
Humility Will Make You To Know That Your Position Is Transient.
The third area in which your humility will be tested is when you realize that whatever power you have was given to you by God for a time. The implication of this is that you should not look down on others. You will also be conscious of the fact that every position is temporary. Some of those children you are relating with now may grow up to become the wives of ministers of God that may be more relevant than your husband. They may also become powerful decision makers that will be in position to determine a lot of things about you in the future. That means you need to treat people well. Someone said that he doesn’t fear old people because they have already become what they are going to be in life. But he fears the young ones because they are on the road to becoming what they will become. Only God knows what those youths and children that are under you today will become in the future. While you are alive, some of those youths you are seeing now will become great in life and ministry. The light of prominence that is shining on you now will not be in perpetuity. The light may soon move to another person at a time that is only determined by God. What is the memory people will have about how you handled prominence? However great you are now, some of them will become greater than you. Consequently, do everything you can to let people have good memories about you.
As we close, the basic mindset in humility is to see yourself as being privileged to be where you are. As a pastor’s wife, three of the areas your humility will be evident is in your relationship with God, your spouse and others especially those under you.
Will You Be Able To See Yourself As Being Privileged?
Dr. Mike Oluniyi.
