Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth.
– Proverbs 5:18
Oh, this is a great simple verse to memorize not just for married people, but for every one of us who loves God and loves the picture of the gospel in marriage, that God has made possible through Jesus ever since the beginning of Genesis 2, and God bringing man and woman together as a picture ultimately of his love for the world through Christ’s love for the church.
Proverbs 5:18 is a calling to preserve the sanctity of marriage.
If we are married, we should want to experience the blessing that God has designed for marriage and the joy that God has designed for your wife or your husband, and for those who are single, don’t you want the gospel to be clear in pictures of healthy marriages that resound to God’s glory and are good for those husbands and wives in those marriages?
Yes. So memorize this verse. Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth, and let’s pray this continually over our marriages if we’re married and over others’ marriages, if we are single. So let’s just think about either our marriages right now or others’ marriages or both for that matter. As we pray according to Proverbs 5:18. Just think of married people, which may be you and it may be others that are coming to your mind. God, we pray this verse over marriages around us right now.
We pray for your blessing on those marriages, for fountains to be blessed and for joy that husbands and wives experience with each other. God, we pray for husbands to rejoice and the wife of their youth. We pray for wives to rejoice in their husbands. God, we pray for healthy marriages that exemplify illustrate in beautiful ways the picture you’ve designed for marriage of Jesus’s love for the church.
Proverbs 5:18 is a calling to reflect the gospel through marriage.
Lord, we pray for husbands to lay down their lives and sacrificial love for their wives. God, we pray for wives who love and respect their husbands in a way that illustrates the church’s love and honor for Jesus himself. Lord, we pray that the picture of the gospel would be clear in the marriages that we’re thinking about right now in our own marriages and others marriages around us. God, we pray for hurting marriages. We pray for restoration. We pray for your power to redeem those marriages.
Please, oh God, bring it about and grant the strength and wisdom for those husbands and wives to work toward that kind of restoration. God, we pray for their good and for your glory in marriage according to Proverbs 5:18. And God knowing this is a picture of the gospel… Bring to know Christ through gospel-centered marriages.
We pray for that and our lives around us. We pray for the spread of the gospel around the world… Through husbands and wives loving each other, caring for each other, laying down their lives for each other.
Prayer for the Ucayali-Yurua Asheninka People
God, we pray for people who’ve never heard the good news of the gospel at the center of marriage. God, for the, and I’m going to do my best to pronounce this people group. You know it, oh God, but for the Ucayali-Yurua Asheninka people of Brazil, of the Amazon. God please cause them to be reached with the good news of Jesus’s love to lay down his life for them to experience eternal life.
We pray for the power of the gospel to be portrayed in our marriages… In others’ marriages around us… Marriages around the world for your glory. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. One quick thought here. Maybe text somebody or send a message to somebody today that you prayed for their marriage. Just send an encouraging text. Just say, I’m thankful for your marriage and I’m praying for your marriage. And maybe even include Proverbs 5:18. Just a thought as we pray for people’s marriages to encourage them in their marriages.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
