Read: Proverbs 31:25-30 & 1 Peter 1:14-16 & 1 Peter 1:22b-23 & 1 Peter 2:15-3:6
How can a woman trust the Lord completely when her home, her children, her husband and the whole world around her rages? The answer is through the power of the Holy Spirit.
In Proverbs 31, we find the wife of noble character “laugh[ing] at the days to come.” What does this even mean? Most of us worry about the days to come, not laugh. But Proverbs shows us a woman who is carefree and confident, not because she doesn’t have work to accomplish or plenty to be concerned about, but because she fears the Lord. She relies on God to control what she cannot, and she fulfills her responsibilities out of a heart of faith.
1 Peter says a husband who is disobedient to God’s word can be won over by his wife’s noble conduct, by the “imperishable beauty of [her] gentle and quiet spirit.” Gentle and quiet is the opposite of nagging and worried, but many of us spend our energy trying to change our husbands through the latter rather than the former. We practice passive aggression and manipulation, unaware that the means we use to change our husbands undermines the very fruit we seek. Men desire respect above almost anything else, and passive aggression and manipulation are nothing but disrespectful and belittling. Instead, we should try the thing we haven’t tried before, the thing God says to do: adorn ourselves with a gentle, quiet spirit, trusting in God to accomplish what we cannot. Because by God’s grace we have the fruit of the Spirit, and the same God who raised Jesus from the dead lives inside us. In Him, we are more than conquerors (Romans 8:37).