The end-of-year dinner was held in the ballroom of a hotel in Ikoyi, and Ifeoluwa had taken real care over her outfit. Her husband’s company had had a strong year, and the managing director was going from table to table shaking hands. When he reached them, her husband stood up, beaming, and put an arm round her shoulders.
“Sir, this is my wife, Ifeoluwa.” Then, with a wink: “Please don’t ask her anything technical. She still calls me from the sitting room when the decoder changes channel by itself.”
The managing director laughed. The whole table laughed. Ifeoluwa smiled too, because what else could she do? Later, when someone asked why they had arrived late, her husband said, “Ah, you know women. If Jesus comes tonight, my wife will still be tying her gele.” More laughter. She smiled again.
What nobody at that table knew, because he never mentioned it, was that Ifeoluwa ran the pharmacy department of a large private hospital in Ikeja. She supervised fourteen staff, managed a budget larger than some of the departments in her husband’s company, and had been asked twice that year to train pharmacists from other hospitals. Earlier that week she had worked until midnight to resolve a supply crisis that could have left patients without critical medicines.
In the car on the way home, her husband said, “You were very quiet tonight.” She looked out of the window at the lights on the Falomo bridge and said nothing.
She told me about it some months later, and she was careful to be fair to him. “He is not a cruel man,” she said. “He does not beat me. At home, he is mostly kind. He provides for us. But when other people are there, he makes me small. It is always a joke, so if I complain, I am the one with no sense of humour.” She paused. “And when I disagree with him in front of his brothers, he tells me that the Bible says wives must submit.”
Then she said the sentence that has stayed with me. “I do not need him to praise me. I just need him to stop shrinking me.”
What honour means
The Bible’s language of honour carries real weight. The Hebrew word most often translated honour or glory is kabod, which comes from a root meaning heavy. To honour someone is to recognise their weight, to treat them as substantial and significant. In the New Testament the usual word is time, which means value or price. It is the word used when something is bought at a cost.
Put those two ideas together and you have a definition. To honour your spouse is to recognise and respond to the real weight and worth of the person God has given you. Honour does not create that worth. It acknowledges what is already there.
And what is there? Your husband or wife is a person made in the image of God. If they are a believer, they have been bought with the precious blood of Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit and adopted into God’s family. God has placed a weight on them that is not affected by how quickly they tie a gele or how well they understand a satellite decoder. When we treat our spouse as light, as someone who can be mocked, dismissed or made small, we contradict God’s own valuation.
Paul gives the church a striking instruction about honour:
Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good. Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another.
Punchline“Let love be without dissimulation.” Dissimulation is pretence, playing a part. Love that is genuine is not a performance. It is the same in private as in public.
“In honour preferring one another.” The phrase means something like outdo one another in showing honour, or lead the way in honouring one another. It turns honour into a kind of holy competition. Instead of competing to be honoured, believers compete to give honour away.
Paul wrote those words to a church, but they apply nowhere more directly than in a marriage. If a man is to honour his brothers and sisters in the congregation, how much more the woman he has promised to love as his own body? If a wife is to show honour to the believers she meets on Sunday, how much more to the husband she lives with all week?
Heirs together of the grace of life
Peter addresses husbands directly in one of the most important verses in the New Testament on this subject:
Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.
The word likewise connects this verse to what has come before. Peter has been writing to Christians living under authorities they did not choose: citizens under rulers, servants under masters, wives under husbands, some of whom were not believers. Throughout, he calls them to follow the example of Christ, who suffered without retaliating. Then he turns to husbands, the people in that society who held the most power at home, and tells them that they too must live according to a different pattern.
“Dwell with them according to knowledge.” A husband is to live with his wife with understanding. He is to know her, study her, pay attention to who she actually is. A man who has been married for ten years and still does not know what his wife does at work all day has not yet obeyed this verse.
“Giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel.” This phrase has been misunderstood in both directions. Some have taken it as a statement that women are inferior. Others have found it embarrassing and passed over it quickly. Interpreters understand the weakness in different ways. Many see a reference to average physical strength. Others point to the social and legal vulnerability of women in the ancient world, where a wife often had few rights and little protection. Either way, the conclusion Peter draws is the opposite of what a proud husband might expect. He does not say: she is weaker, so you may dominate her. He says that she is to be honoured all the more. Strength is given to protect, not to diminish.
“And as being heirs together of the grace of life.” This is the decisive phrase. Before God, husband and wife stand on exactly the same ground. They are co-heirs. They will inherit the same eternal life, receive the same grace and sit at the same table in the kingdom. Whatever differences there may be in their roles or strengths, there is no difference in their worth before God. A husband who treats his wife as a lesser person is treating a fellow heir of God’s grace with contempt.
“That your prayers be not hindered.” Peter does not let a husband separate his spiritual life from the way he treats his wife. A man may lead prayers at the vigil, preach on Sunday and fast every Wednesday, but if he dishonours his wife at home, something is obstructed between him and God. Our relationship with the Lord is never sealed off from our relationship with the people closest to us.
Peter’s word to wives earlier in the chapter includes a phrase that belongs beside this one. Holy women of old, he says, did well “and are not afraid with any amazement” (1 Peter 3:6). Whatever submission meant for these women, it was never meant to be lived in fear. A marriage where one spouse is constantly afraid of the other’s anger or mockery is not the marriage Peter describes.
How you speak to your spouse
Honour shows itself first in the way we speak to each other. Not only in what we say, but in tone, expression and the small sounds of impatience that a spouse learns to recognise across years of marriage.
The opposite of honour is contempt. Contempt is more than anger. Anger says, you have done something wrong. Contempt says, you are beneath me. It shows itself in sarcasm, rolling the eyes, mockery, sighing at everything the other person says, correcting them in front of others, and treating their opinions as not worth hearing. Jesus took contempt so seriously that He placed calling a brother Raca, an Aramaic word meaning something like empty-headed, under the danger of judgement (Matthew 5:22).
Scripture gives us a painful example of contempt in marriage. When the ark of the covenant was brought into Jerusalem, King David danced before the Lord with all his might. His wife Michal watched from a window, “and she despised him in her heart” (2 Samuel 6:16). When he came home to bless his household, the contempt came out in words:
Then David returned to bless his household. And Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, How glorious was the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself to day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself! And David said unto Michal, It was before the LORD , which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the LORD , over Israel: therefore will I play before the LORD . And I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight: and of the maidservants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honour.
“How glorious was the king of Israel to day.” Michal’s words drip with sarcasm. She does not simply disagree with how David worshipped. She mocks him, and she does it at the very moment he has come home to bless his family. David’s reply is sharp, and his own failures as a husband are well documented elsewhere. But the passage shows us how contempt grows. It began in the heart, as she looked through the window, and then it came out of the mouth. That is nearly always the order. We despise our spouse inwardly long before we mock them aloud.
Honour works in the same direction. It begins in the heart, with a decision to value the person God has given you, and then it shapes the voice. Paul closes his teaching on marriage in Ephesians 5 with a sentence addressed to both spouses: “let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband” (Ephesians 5:33). The word reverence there is a word of deep respect. A husband is called to love, a wife is called to respect, and in the whole flow of the chapter both are expressions of “submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (Ephesians 5:21).
Wives can dishonour their husbands with words as easily as husbands can. “A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones” (Proverbs 12:4). A wife who belittles her husband’s income, mocks his ambitions or compares him unfavourably with her friends’ husbands is putting rottenness into his bones. Honour runs both ways.
How you speak about your spouse
Honour is tested most of all when your spouse is not in the room, or when other people are. How do you speak about your husband to your sisters? How do you describe your wife to your colleagues at work, or your friends at the club? What do you post about each other online?
In many cultures, including our own, there is a long tradition of jokes at a spouse’s expense. Men joke about wives who spend money and talk too much. Women joke about husbands who cannot find anything in the house or who never listen. Much of this is light-hearted, and there is room in a healthy marriage for gentle teasing that both enjoy. But there is a line, and many of us cross it without noticing. When the joke always runs in one direction, when it targets something your spouse is sensitive about, when it is told in front of people whose respect matters to them, when they have asked you to stop, it is no longer teasing. It is a way of making someone small in public while keeping the option of saying, I was only joking.
Look at how Proverbs describes the public honour given to a godly wife:
Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also , and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all. Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD , she shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.
“Her husband also, and he praiseth her.” The husband in Proverbs 31 does not keep his admiration private. He speaks it. “Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.” And the chapter ends with the wish, “let her own works praise her in the gates.” The gates of an ancient city were where the elders sat, where business was done and where reputations were made. This woman’s work is to be recognised publicly.
Notice too what the chapter says earlier: “The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her” (Proverbs 31:11), and “She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life” (Proverbs 31:12). A husband should be able to trust that his wife will speak well of him and guard his reputation, just as she should be able to trust the same of him.
What would it have meant for Ifeoluwa if her husband had introduced her that night as the woman who runs the pharmacy at one of the busiest hospitals in Ikeja? It would have cost him nothing. It would have told everyone at that table who she was. And it would have told her that he knew.
NuggetHonour is tested when your spouse is not in the room, or when other people are. The way you speak about them in public tells everyone, including your spouse, what you really think they are worth.
Honour in private decisions
Honour is also expressed in the private decisions of marriage, the ones no outsider ever sees. The New Testament gives us a remarkable picture of this in the story of Joseph and Mary:
Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph her husband, being a just man , and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.
Consider Joseph’s situation. He was betrothed to Mary, which in that culture was a legally binding commitment that could only be ended by divorce. Then he learned that she was pregnant, and he knew the child was not his. As far as he could tell, he had been betrayed. The law gave him the right to make the matter public. Many men would have done so, partly to clear their own name.
But Matthew tells us that Joseph, “being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily.” Even when he believed he had been wronged, Joseph refused to expose Mary to public shame. He chose the path that protected her dignity, even at a cost to his own reputation. Then God intervened, and Joseph took Mary as his wife, with all the whispering that would follow them.
That is honour in private decisions. It means you do not humiliate your spouse even when they have failed you. You do not broadcast their weaknesses to your family. You do not use what they told you in confidence as ammunition in an argument. You do not make decisions that deeply affect them without involving them, as though their view did not matter.
Paul gives us a higher picture still. Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it, “That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing” (Ephesians 5:27). Christ’s goal for His bride is her glory. He does not expose her failures to the watching world. He covers, cleanses and beautifies, so that she can stand before Him radiant. A husband who loves like Christ is always working to present his wife in honour. And a wife who honours her husband guards his dignity in the same way, so that both of them are more glorious together than either would be alone.
When Scripture is misused to demand honour
There is a story at the beginning of the book of Esther that shows what happens when a husband demands honour instead of giving it. King Ahasuerus had been feasting for seven days:
On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with wine, he commanded Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha, and Abagtha, Zethar, and Carcas, the seven chamberlains that served in the presence of Ahasuerus the king, To bring Vashti the queen before the king with the crown royal, to shew the people and the princes her beauty: for she was fair to look on. But the queen Vashti refused to come at the king’s commandment by his chamberlains: therefore was the king very wroth, and his anger burned in him.
The king, drunk, wanted to display his wife’s beauty before a hall full of drunken men, the way he had been displaying his wealth all week. She was a possession to be shown off. Vashti refused. The king was furious, and his advisers were alarmed. If the queen could refuse her husband, they reasoned, every wife in the empire might follow her example. So a royal decree was issued and sent throughout the provinces declaring that “all the wives shall give to their husbands honour” (Esther 1:20), and “that every man should bear rule in his own house” (Esther 1:22).
The writer of Esther tells this story with evident irony. The most powerful man in the world has publicly humiliated his wife, and his response is to pass a law commanding wives everywhere to honour their husbands. You cannot legislate honour by decree, least of all after you have treated your wife as a trophy. The empire’s solution only exposes the emptiness of the king’s authority.
We should be careful that the same thing is not happening in Christian homes with a Bible in hand. Ephesians 5:22 says, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.” Some husbands quote that verse whenever their wife disagrees with them, as though it were a royal decree. But look at the passage again. Paul addresses wives directly, and invites them to offer something freely to the Lord. He never tells husbands to enforce it. When he turns to husbands, his instruction is entirely different: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). The husband’s assignment is love that gives itself away. Nowhere is he given the task of making his wife submit.
And the whole passage begins with “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (Ephesians 5:21). Whatever view Christians hold of headship, whether they understand it as a real responsibility to lead within equal worth or as a call to shared, mutual leadership, the shape of Christ’s headship is the cross. A husband who uses Scripture to silence his wife, to override her in front of others or to demand that she accept humiliation has taken the language of Christ’s love and turned it into a weapon. That is a serious misuse of God’s word.
The same is true in reverse. A wife who quotes Scripture to shame her husband, comparing him to the Proverbs 31 husband in front of others or using his spiritual failures to belittle him, has also missed the point. Scripture is given to form us, not to beat our spouses into shape.
Honour without fear
We must say clearly what honour is not. Honour does not mean accepting contempt, humiliation or control in silence. It does not require a wife to laugh along while she is mocked in public, or a husband to endure constant belittling at home. Contempt is sin. It should be named gently and honestly, and it should change.
Sometimes a spouse can do that alone, in a calm conversation at a good time: “When you joke about me in front of your colleagues, I feel humiliated. Please stop.” Sometimes it needs the help of a pastor or counsellor who can help both spouses see the pattern.
And sometimes what looks like contempt is part of something more dangerous. If humiliation is accompanied by threats, controlling every movement, isolation from friends and family, financial control, intimidation, sexual coercion or physical violence, it is abuse. Abuse is never a form of headship and is never to be endured in the name of submission. Peter told wives that they need not be “afraid with any amazement” (1 Peter 3:6), and no woman or man should live in fear of their spouse. If you are in that situation, please seek safety, and speak to someone you trust, a doctor, the police or a qualified domestic violence service. The God who calls us to honour one another does not call anyone to remain in danger.
Learning to honour
How do we grow in honour? It begins by seeing. Elkanah, the husband of Hannah, was a man in a complicated household, and his marriage was far from perfect. But Scripture records that he gave Hannah “a worthy portion; for he loved Hannah” (1 Samuel 1:5), and when she wept and would not eat, he noticed and asked, “Hannah, why weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved?” (1 Samuel 1:8). He did not fully understand her grief. But he saw it, and he gave her honour when another woman in the house was provoking her.
Honour grows when we pay attention to our spouse’s actual life. What does she do all day? What is he proud of? What are they carrying that nobody else sees? A spouse who is truly known can be truly honoured.
Honour grows when we speak it aloud. Tell your spouse what you admire in them. Tell other people too. Praise your wife in front of your children. Speak well of your husband to your mother. When your family criticise your spouse, defend them, even if you later discuss the issue in private.
Honour grows when we prefer one another, in Paul’s phrase. That means letting your spouse go first in small things, giving them the better seat, the last piece of chicken, the first opportunity to speak. It means making decisions together and treating their views as weighty.
And honour grows from the honour we have received. God has honoured us beyond anything we deserve. He has called us His children, made us heirs, clothed us in Christ’s righteousness and promised to present us faultless before His glory. People who know how much they have been honoured by God find it far easier to honour others.
PunchlineIfeoluwa’s husband did not change because she confronted him. Things shifted because of something he overheard.
A few months after that dinner, their thirteen-year-old son had friends round. Ifeoluwa’s husband was walking past the sitting room when he heard his son introduce his younger sister. “That is my sister. Don’t mind her, she cannot do anything right. If Jesus comes today, she will still be looking for her shoes.”
The boys laughed. The girl smiled, in exactly the way her mother smiled. He stood in the corridor and felt something cold go through him.
That night he asked his wife whether he talked about her like that. She said yes. She said it gently, and she listed some of the times. He did not defend himself. He said he was sorry, and the next day he apologised to his daughter too.
The real test came at his mother’s seventieth birthday thanksgiving a few weeks later. In front of the whole family, his brothers, his aunties and their pastor, he was asked to say a few words. He spoke about his mother. Then he turned to his wife.
“I want you all to know who my wife is,” he said. “Ifeoluwa runs the pharmacy at one of the biggest hospitals in Lagos. Last month she stayed up until midnight making sure patients would have their medicines. She trains other pharmacists. She has carried this family through things most of you do not know about. I have not said this enough, and I am saying it now. I am proud of her.”
The hall was quiet for a moment. Then one of the aunties began to clap, and everyone joined in. Ifeoluwa did not smile politely that time. She cried.
He had stopped shrinking her. He had begun to honour her, in the gates.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- How would your spouse describe the way you speak about them when they are not in the room, or when other people are present?
- Are there jokes or habits of speech in your marriage that make your spouse feel small? Have you ever asked them?
- What does it mean to you that you and your spouse are “heirs together of the grace of life”?
- In what private decisions could you show more honour to your spouse, as Joseph did for Mary?
- Have you ever used Scripture to demand honour or submission from your spouse, instead of offering love and honour yourself? How might you put that right?
This Week
This week, say three specific words of honour about your spouse to other people: one to your spouse directly, one to your children or your family, and one to a friend or colleague. Make each one concrete, naming something real about who your spouse is or what they have done. Then ask your spouse, gently, whether there is anything you say or do in public that makes them feel small, and listen to the answer without defending yourself.
A Prayer
Father, You have honoured me beyond anything I deserve. You have made me Your child and an heir of Your grace, and You see my worth when others do not. Forgive me for the times I have made my spouse small with my words, my jokes or my silence. Forgive me where I have used Your word to demand what I should have given freely. Teach me to see the weight and worth You have placed on the person You gave me. Let my words to them and about them build them up, in private and in public. Help us to prefer one another in honour, as heirs together of the grace of life. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.