Welcome to the first post of the Stony Hill Baptist Church blog. The purpose of the blog is to encourage you in your Christian faith and perhaps even give you something to pass along for the encouragement of others.

In the early days of this blog you can expect a few words of encouragement from me, but mostly I will be passing along encouraging words I come across from other blogs. This may change over time, yet the goal is your personal spiritual encouragement more than me becoming a successful blogger.

Today, I want to pass along a word of encouragement about prayer, as it has been a recent point of emphasis in our church. This post is directed to husbands and comes from Jonathan Parnell at the Desiring God blog. He gives us 10 things to pray for your wife. if you go over to Parnell’s post you will also have access to a pdf version and a lock-screen version. I have been using the lock-screen version for a couple of months. It has been a good reminder of my duty to pray for my wife.

Here is the list:

1. God, be her God — her all-satisfying treasure and all. Make her jealous for your exclusive supremacy over all her affections (Psalm 73:24–25).
2. Increase her faith — give her a rock-solid confidence that your incomparable power is only always wielded for her absolute good in Christ (Romans 8:28–30).
3. Intensify her joy — a joy in you that abandons all to the riches of your grace in Jesus and that says firmly, clearly, gladly: “I’ll go anywhere and do anything if you are there” (Exodus 33:14–15).
4. Soften her heart — rescue her from cynicism and make her tender to your presence in the most complicated details of dirty diapers and a multitude of other needs you’ve called her to meet (Hebrews 1:3).
5. Make her cherish your church — build relationships into her life that challenge and encourage her to walk in step with the truth of the gospel, and cause her to love corporate gatherings, the Lord’s Table, and the everyday life of the body (Mark 3:35).
6. Give her wisdom — make her see dimensions of reality that I would overlook and accompany her vision with a gentle, quiet spirit that feels safe and celebrated (1 Peter 3:4).
7. Sustain her health — continue to speak your gift of health and keep us from presumption; it is by blood-bought grace (Psalm 139:14).
8. Multiply her influence — encourage and deepen the impact she has on our children. Give her sweet glimpses of it. Pour her out in love for our neighbors and spark creative ways to engage them for Jesus’s sake (John 12:24).
9. Make her hear your voice — to read the Bible and accept it as it really is, your word… your very word to her where she lives, full of grace and power and everything she needs pertaining to life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3).
10. Overcome her with Jesus — that she is united to him, that she is a new creature in him, that she is your daughter in him. . . No longer in Adam and dead to sin; now in Christ and alive to you, forever (Romans 6:11).