New from bestselling author Stormie Omartian is a book close to her own heart—The Power of a Praying® Wife Devotional. Following up on the insights and prayers of The Power of a Praying® Wife (more than 3.5 million books sold) 100 brand-new devotions, prayers, and supporting Scriptures offer a praying wife fresh ways to pray for her husband, herself, and her marriage. The Power of a Praying wife is a great guide for women who love God and love their husbands, and who want to help them through prayer. The book is also a good lesson in relinquishing control and an exercise in faith that God will listen and respond to prayers, making this method more effective (and less frustrating) than arguing or nagging. There is a constant feeling in this book, a previously mentioned, that prayer is a special power you can tap into. She talks about what makes your prayers stronger or weaker, as if we have any control over God and how he responds to us. Indeed, the focus often isn't on God and what he can do, but what YOU can do through prayer, which is a totally wrong focus on things. It also constantly dips into the charismatic, prosperity gospel outlook that good things will come to you if you just pray.

The Lord said to just forget that and start praying for him as a child of God. “God, show him his purpose. Help him to be strong in faith. Help him to be a good father. Help him to have godly relationships that are a blessing to him. Bless his work. Bless the things that he does with his hands. Help him to find acceptance in the city gates, as it says in the Bible, that he would have respect from people that he works with. Help him to have integrity.” Of course you can't force him to do something he doesn't' want to do, but you can access God's power through praying for His Voice to penetrate your husband's soul. Great concept! Wives need to pray for their husbands, and can be their husbands best prayer warrior. There are many aspects of your husband’s life to cover in prayer, and I think this book points out some great ones! It definitely motivated me to start actively praying more deeply for my husband every day. Chapter 10: "If your husband is not a full-time fool, so to speak but he does occasionally engage in foolish behavior, don't try to fix him. God is the only one who can do that." And maybe lovingly correct him and try to point out the error of his ways?Seems to be for women who think their husband is desperately immature spiritually; at least, that’s the picture she paints of her own husband. She seems to think his unique struggles are universal. If she said that prayer was “cheaper than a divorce” one more time, I was gonna throw my book at the wall!!!!

Stormie Omartian: It means you have got to surrender yourself to the Lord and say, “God, I’ll do what it takes to be a good wife, to be the kind of wife you want me to be.” That’s a hard decision to make, especially if you’ve had a lot of hurt and… you’ve had a lot of disappointments, anger, and unforgiveness. I have been a Christian the whole time I have been married, so I thought I was a forgiving person. I was working on that all the time, but I realized when I came to an impasse in my marriage that I wasn’t as forgiving as I thought. One of the last 20 days mentioned negative emotions being “not from God” and something you should just pray away. God literally created us with all our emotions including fear, anger, and sadness. These should be prayed through and worked through not avoided.Inside this Book – I wish I could say that I’ve been regularly praying for my husband from the beginning of our marriage until now. I haven’t. At least not like I’m suggesting in this book. Oh, I prayed. The prayers were short: “Protect him, Lord.” They were to the point: “Save our marriage.” But most commonly they were my favorite three-word prayer: “Change him, Lord.” When we were first married, I was a new believer coming out of a life of great bondage and error and had much to learn about the delivering and restoring power of God. I thought I had married a man who was close to perfect, and what wasn’t perfect was cute. As time went on, cute became irritating and perfect became driving perfectionism. I decided that what irritated me most about him had to be changed and then everything would be fine. It took a number of years for me to realize my husband was never going to conform to my image. The Power of a Praying Wife PDF I think I may have found this book at Wal-Mart, which is good because that means it can hit a wider base if people than if it were just sold at B&N, for example. Anyway, Mrs. Omartian divides the book into 30 chapters, each with an aspect of a Christian man's life, from sexuality to faith to fatherhood. Actually, that is one of the best things about it, its holistic approach to protection through faith.

Begins with a challenge to seek God’s change in your own life before you start wanting Him to change your husband. Let me put a huge disclaimer on this and say, if any of the lovely women who did this with me for a prayer group see this, I was so encouraged and uplifted by our discussions and prayers, and I believe we got some good things out of this book. My critique of this book is in no way a critique of our group or the talks we had, and I was so happy to do it with you all. There is some good stuff in this book, and I've rethought how I pray for my husband through it. But enough of the content worries me that I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone.Chapter 25: "Suzanne was a praying wife who never stopped believing that God would bring her husband to repentance." I use this last one because there is a constant use of "will" "Would" verbiage that implies prayer always equals results. Sometimes, God might have a reason for not answering your prayer, no matter how fervent and well intentioned you are. There is no guarantee that if we just follow the magic formula of a praying wife we'll get good results. Can it happen? Yes. Should we pray? Yes. But don't make it out as a problem solved sort of situation. There is a joke in our household when I refer to the number of years Stormie and I have been married. I always say, “It’s been forty wonderful years for me and forty miserable years for her.” After forty years of marriage to Stormie, there aren’t any phases of my complex personality left for her to discover. She has seen me triumph, fail, struggle, be fearful and depressed, and doubt my competency as a husband, father, and musician. She has seen me angry at God because He wouldn’t jump when I asked Him to. The Power of a Praying Wife PDF If there is something I’m not seeing that’s adding to this problem, reveal it to me and help me to understand it. Remove any wedge of confusion that has created misunderstanding or miscommunication. Where there is behavior that needs to change in either of us, I pray You would enable that change to happen. As much as I want to hang on to my anger toward him because I feel it’s justified, I want to do what You want. I release all those feelings to You. Give me a renewed sense of love for him and words to heal this situation.” A Challenge After a number of years, with little change, I cried out to the Lord one day in despair, saying, God, I can’t live this way anymore. I know what You’ve said about divorce, but I can’t live in the same house with him. Help me, Lord. I sat on the bed holding my Bible for hours as I struggled with the strongest desire to take the children and leave. I believe that because I came to God in total honesty about what I felt, He allowed me to thoroughly and clearly envision what life would be like if I left: Where I would live, how I would support myself and care for the children, who would still be my friends, and worst of all, how a heritage of divorce would affect my son and daughter. It was the most horrible and unspeakably sad picture. If I left I would find some relief, but at the price of everything dear to me. I knew it wasn’t God’s plan for us. Each devotional starts out with a verse, a devotional that includes guides on how to pray for your husband, and a prayer.

I'm going to try and summarize my issues in a few different categories here. The examples are not comprehensive but hopefully show where I'm getting my opinions from. Praying Wife" was different to what I was expecting and at first I found it hard to relate to the topics as they didn't seem relevant to where my husband is in his journey with Christ. However, I realised that I could just use the topics as a starting point for my prayers for my husband. The prayers were quite specific, so it was hard to find them personal for our situations/circumstances, but I would like to go through the headings again and write up my own prayers for my husband, based on those. The author got me thinking about things to pray about for my husband, that I had never thought of before in regard to topics, not substance.With special thanks: • To my secretary, Susan Martinez, for bearing the load of another book deadline. Your love as a sister, faithfulness as a friend, and richness as a prayer partner can only be equaled by your effi ciency and dedication as my highly treasured and irreplaceable assistant. • To my prayer partners and fellow praying wives: Sally Anderson, Susan Martinez, Donna Summer, Katie Stewart, Roz Th ompson, and Jan Williamson, who have experienced along with me what gut-level, crying-out-to-God intercession for our husbands really means. The Power of a Praying Wife PDF Among other of Stormie’s bestselling books are her autobiography, "Stormie," plus "Just Enough Light For The Step I’m On," "Lord I Want To Be Whole," and "Praying God's Will For Your Life." Michael and Stormie have been married for 40 years and have two married children. Not only that, this book only applies to a very narrow sector of married women in the world. It may be applicable if you are young, healthy and not disabled, and affluent. Shallow. This could’ve been a great, deep book on prayer, but it was so shallow and poorly executed.