What Do I Do When My Worthless Husband Won't Lead? The Selfish Pig

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The Gospel of Salvation and Final Judgment

Welcome to Bible Bashed, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask. Listen and enjoy this installment of Iron Sharpening Iron as Pastor Tim answers your sincere questions.

Here's Pastor Tim.

A Selfish Husband Who Refuses to Lead

On this episode of Iron Sharpening Iron, we will be answering the question, what do I do if my worthless husband won't lead? And the situation we have in mind in particular is the situation where a woman is married to what might be described as a selfish pig.

Now the selfish pig is the type of guy who essentially will show a woman little to no interest as it relates to most areas of life, and so he doesn't seem to take a whole lot of initiative. Maybe he goes to work.

I mean, there are different types of men who fall under this category. I mean, maybe he's the type of man who goes to work, but then after work he is engaged in whatever kind of entertainment that he wants to be engaged in or whatever interest that he wants to be engaged in.

And he seems to be the kind of guy who's constantly busy pursuing his own interest, leaving a wife and a mother to basically fend for themselves and take care of themselves. But then he might be the kind of guy who then expects intimacy from his wife whenever he's ready for it, at any time that he's ready for it, even times which are fundamentally inconvenient to her, showing little to no sympathy about the kind of situations that she finds herself in, showing her little to no intention in general as it relates to life in general.

But then basically a woman in that kind of situation might look at this kind of guy and say, hey, fundamentally he's in it for himself. He only cares about me. He only appreciates me when he wants something from me.

But other than that, he basically doesn't really take much of an interest. He doesn't show much initiative, and it seems like he's providing little to no leadership in her life except perhaps the kind of leadership that's fundamentally going to benefit him.

So he might be the kind of guy who spends thousands of dollars on his toys and makes me scrimp and scrape as it relates to taking care of the things that our family actually needs. He might be filled with double standards to where functionally he has certain expectations of me, but then he wants me to be the one who takes all the risk, who makes all the sacrifices.

And then fundamentally he's going to always be the one who gets exactly what he wants whenever he wants it. And the only kind of attention he's going to show me or the only kind of leadership or direction he's going to show me is going to be times where it obviously benefits him.

And then he'll have the audacity to wield submission and obedience as clubs over a woman's head to basically make all the sacrifices, to be the one who is functionally doing all of the hard things. Basically she's the only one who seems to be accountable to anything the Bible says, but whenever it comes to him he has some convenient excuse why he doesn't have to do anything that she might desire him to do or expect him to do.

And so many women throughout history, and particularly just thinking in terms of recent history, many women have found themselves in this kind of situation where they're married to a passive male who seems to be fundamentally not the type of male like the brute who basically goes to work and is working himself exhausted to where he basically has nothing else to give.

And that's just the situation he might happen to be in. The selfish pig is the kind of person who may or may not have a job. Most often, I mean there's plenty of guys who have jobs, who work their jobs, are faithful at their jobs, but then when it comes to family life or functionally they've checked out and they're pursuing their own agenda and then they only come to the wife when they want something.

And so in a past generation this might look like a man who works a normal job, comes home, sits on the couch and watches TV the rest of the night, the kind of man who's like, keep the children quiet, no one talk to me, leave me alone, I'm watching the game, that kind of thing, who basically doesn't want to be bothered, who doesn't want any interaction, who basically just takes up space in the house.

He may expect the wife to cook for him, to clean for him, to always be sexually ready for him. He might be that kind of man, particularly in a past generation, but then he provides a little no tangible leadership.

Now with the rise of millennials this might be the video game playing guy who comes home and puts on his headset and checks out and he's doing his gaming thing while after work and everyone else is just left, the wife is just left to manage a bunch of unruly kids while functionally this husband ignores her.

But then whenever he wants something from her he's going to come and ask her and expect her to be available to him. So there might be that kind of husband or it could just be the kind of husband who's just off pursuing his own hobbies or his own interests.

He's the kind of guy who's always hanging out with his friend and always having his guy time and always pursuing activities and interests that he has, but then he'll provide little to no help when his wife actually needs it.

He'll provide little to no help when his wife actually needs it, but then he'll always expect her to be there and ready to talk whenever he's ready to talk or ready to be intimate whenever he's ready to be intimate.

What does a woman do in that kind of situation? What should she do? Now one of the things to realize is that whenever you're talking about a male using his authority to fundamentally pursue his own self-centered agenda, one of the things that we instinctively feel in those kind of situations is we instinctively feel intuitively that an abuse of authority seems to be a much more heinous kind of crime than the rejection of authority.

And so there's a moral intuition essentially to say that with great power comes great responsibility. And we typically view the kind of guy who's abusing his authority in this way to fundamentally be an agenda that pursues selfishness.

This is the kind of guy who fundamentally we typically do not have a whole lot of good words for. So how do we counsel a woman in this kind of situation? Well one of the things to realize is that if this is the exact situation that you find yourself in, there's nothing that's more frustrating particularly to loved ones of individuals who are in this kind of situation than to look on the outside and to see a loved one in a situation where they're functionally in a one-sided relationship.

A relationship that's only about the one person. There's very little in life that can be more frustrating or where you can extend as much sympathy towards as those kind of situations. And when you see something like that it really is discouraging to watch and it really does leave you with a lot of frustration just to look at it on the outside.

So how do you deal with it? Well I think in general one of the things to realize is that marriage, without denying the reality that these relationships exist, and I think that there are plenty of relationships that actually function in this sort of way, without doing that one of the things to realize though is that there's always a temptation for both parties in a marriage to essentially look at the other person as if they're fundamentally selfish or to basically overlook all the areas of self-centeredness which are in your own heart and then hyper fixate on the areas of selfishness in the other person.

And so one of the things that happens is that marriage is this arrangement that God has put us in that is fundamentally meant to expose selfishness, but part of the way it exposes selfishness is that because we're sinners and we don't often see ourselves very clearly, one of the things that we might find is that we might fixate on the selfishness of another person to the neglect of our own because we actually see their selfishness much easier than we see our own.

So one of the things to realize is that to put a husband and you put a wife together under one roof, both of them are selfish. And so if marriage is going to reveal anything about the nature of yourself, if there's going to be anything that you learn, I mean one of the primary things I've learned in marriage is that I'm much more selfish than I realize.

And so if marriage is meant to be the kind of thing that exposes your own selfishness, but then once you add kids, then the more kids you add, the more of your own selfishness it exposes as well. And the reason why that's the case is because when you're single, one of the things that happens is you can spend all of your time doing basically whatever you want to do without any restraint.

So when you add a spouse into that kind of arrangement, immediately what happens is there is this significant demand on your time that you've just taken upon yourself in getting married. Now marriage is a blessing and marriage is the grace of life, but if you come into marriage as a selfish person, one of the things you're going to find is this person that you're married to is going to stand in the way of your selfish desires at many different points.

And the reason why is because when you get married, two people come together in the form of relationship, both having different desires about how you spend your time, about what you do, about how you maintain a home, about the food that you eat, the entertainment that you pursue, the godly activities that you pursue.

One of the things that you realize when you get married is all of a sudden instead of having one opinion about every subject, you have two opinions about every subject that you're going to have to figure out what to do with.

But then when you add kids, one of the things that obviously happens then is that you add another person into the mix who's demanding more of your time. And so the more and more kids you add, the more you realize that there's all of these demands on your time.

And if you're not the kind of person who is looking to give themselves up for the sake of others, but is the kind of person who's trying to selfishly hold on to your own time at all costs, then one of the things that you realize is that marriage is going to either push you out, it's going to work that selfishness, and children are going to work that selfishness out of you to where it becomes the refinery that makes you more and more selfless.

Or you're just going to double down on that and get frustrated and annoyed and irritated and bothered and upset with everyone around you because they're standing in the way of what you want fundamentally.

So one of the things to realize is that marriage is meant to be this arrangement you find yourself in that's going to expose your own selfishness. And then it's much easier to see the selfishness in someone else than it is to see your own selfishness.

That's just the way it works. That's just how reality works. And so as you think about marriage, I can't tell you how many times that I've looked at some of the things that my spouse has done and thought, well, that is just so self-centered.

Only to be totally blind about the own selfishness that I have that works itself out in different ways. And so different families kind of train each other in different forms of selfishness, and that's the way it works.

So my family, growing up, trained me in different forms of selfishness. So my family trained me in certain forms of selfishness that we thought were fine and that we were scandalized by other forms of selfishness that we see.

And so part of what happened is we embraced and accepted in our family certain forms of selfishness as being okay. But then we rejected other forms of selfishness that we thought were outside the pale.

But then often what happens in marriage is you can marry someone who's very different than you, had very different upbringing than you, and their own family had different forms of selfishness that they sanctified in certain forms of selfishness that they rejected.

So I can just give you a personal example as it relates to my own marriage as far as that goes. And so one of the things, I was raised to be somewhat cheap, okay? So when you have individuals who come over to your house, because I was raised to be somewhat cheap, one of the things that would happen in that kind of arrangement is that there's, when I think about hospitality and having people over, one of the things that that cheapness translated into my own self is that I try to cut corners at all costs and basically scrimp and scrape.

And so with birthday parties and with hospitality, I translated this being somewhat cheap kind of form of self-centeredness, I translated that into areas of gifts or hospitality. But then one of the things that we were raised as, as a family, is we were raised to definitely be on time wherever you go.

And so we were trained to be very other-centered as it related to timeliness. But then we also were trained, it was a mixed bag with my parents, I won't tell you who was which, but we had some cheap tendencies, frugal tendencies that I turned into being cheap.

And then we had some timeliness. But then on my wife's end of things, she was raised to just, you killed a fatted calf no matter if you had the money or not. That's what you do when you celebrate things.

Everything needs to be a huge celebration. When you have people over, you need to have way more money than not. So she wasn't trained with the same kind of penny-pinching impulse that I was trained with.

But then she wasn't necessarily trained to value timeliness as much as I was trained to value timeliness. So then I can look at my wife and I can say, okay, when I see the lack of respect for timeliness in comparison to my own self, I can say, man, that's just really selfish, that's really self-centered, man.

But then she can look at me with my penny-pinching traits that are good for saving money and getting ahead and everything else. Then she can look at that as just like, I'm miserly and stingy and I'm really, really selfish.

So both of us are looking at each other as entirely selfish early on in our marriage. But then we're totally blind to the areas of selfishness that we actually need to grow in as well. The point there of this kind of thought process is to say that you can be hypersensitive to certain forms of selfishness and be totally oblivious to other forms of selfishness, such that your overall perspective of this person could basically be just to look at them and say, hey, you're selfish.

So early on in my marriage, I'm thinking, well, my wife's selfish. And early on in our marriage, she's looking at me and saying, man, he's really selfish. And then we're both looking at each other as just selfish, selfish, selfish, not seeing how we're different.

And we have different temptations and we have different impulses. And maybe this isn't selfishness that we're seeing, but maybe what we're seeing is, hey, that's a good frugal impulse on the one hand.

And then that's a good hospitality impulse on the other hand. And that's a good, let's be on time impulse on the one hand. And then that's a, hey, let's not hyper stress out and make everything just a big rushed mess where everyone's stressed out on the other hand.

And so there are so all I'm trying to say is that people can misread the person that they're married to. And the only way to factor in to account for that sort of thing in the course of relationship is to be the kind of person who's saying, Lord, you know what my spouse is doing right now feels very selfish.

They feel like they're just very selfish. I see all these areas that they're very selfish. And what I need you to do is help me to be sensitive to my own areas of selfishness. And so the kind of thing you might pray at that point is you might say, Lord, help me to magnify the selfishness in my own heart.

Help me to think the best of my spouse and put their actions in the best possible light. Don't put the worst possible interpretation on them, but think the best about them. And then help me to see areas of selflessness in this other person that I might be tempted to ignore.

So help me. And part of how you can do that is you can be praying, Lord, help me to see evidence. Like I just I look at my spouse and I just say, man, they are so selfish. And I just it's you know, it's it's frustrating.

It's infuriating. I don't know what to do with it. They're just so selfish. What you might pray at that point is, Lord, if if there's evidence to the contrary, help me to see it. And when I do see it, help me to thank them for it immediately.

Help me to be encouraging. Help me to encourage the areas of selflessness I see more than I criticize the areas of selfishness I see. Help me to be the kind of person who sees evidence of grace in their life and evidence that you're at work in their life and evidence of really sacrificial selflessness over there.

And help me to fixate on those and help those be much more important than the than the failures that I see. And help me to be praying for them with the failures that I see as well. So so what I'm trying to say, though, is that that is the basic stance that a person might have in that kind of impulse.

And it might be that in a lot of situations where you feel like you're married to the selfish pig. If you would just be intentionally prank, help me to see the good. Help me to see the good and fixate on the good and praise the good and help me to see all the area.

Whenever whenever you're tempted to think, man, they're so selfish, then you should be praying that moment. Lord, help me to see my own selfishness, because I'm sure that is there, too. So and you might find that in the same situation, there's what you're actually seeing is a conflict of values.

And it might be that there's elements that you need to change, too. So that would be the basic first kind of step to this sort of situation is to make sure that you're doing what I'm talking about. And ruling out that ruling out just the basic realities of two people getting married, living with each other.

That that functionally like it could be that you're misreading a situation in a pretty remarkable way. Now, at the same time, I mean, there really is the reality that you can you know, you might be able to do all that.

And you know, and I would say that, like, spend a few years doing that and looking for it and praying for it and asking God to see it before you conclude you're just married to the selfish jerk. I would say spend years trying to grow and stretch yourself and everything else before you jump to that conclusion.

But then, you know, if a few years in and you've been doing that and you've been praying and you've been on your knees and you've been asking the Lord, can you please help me to see the good? Help me to see the good.

Help me to see the good. Help me to put this in the best possible light. And it really just is that you're just married to that pigheaded jerk. And they do exist. And that's it just is, you know, a fundamentally self-centered person who's in it for himself.

And, you know, there's very little to no evidence of selflessness in anything that they're doing. Then, you know what? I mean, I think in that kind of situation, everyone can sympathize with that kind of thing.

And everyone can understand that there are people like that in the world that do exist. And in that kind of situation, I mean, I think one of the things that you really do have to come to is you have to then you have to be looking at the scriptures that say it's more blessed to give than to receive.

And if your enemy hungers, feed him. And if he thirsts, give him drink. For in so doing, you'll reap coals of fire upon his head. You know, the greatest among you is going to be a servant, you know, and the first among you is going to be a slave.

And Jesus didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. And so what you have to do is you have to realize that there is going to be rewards in heaven for the type of person who is in an one-sided relationship.

There are going to be rewards in heaven that are going to actually come to individuals who are mistreated. You know, the Bible says, blessed are you when you're maligned and persecuted and despitefully used.

Like there are blessings that come from being the one picture of God in the midst of a very self-centered relationship. There are those kind of blessings. And one of the things that you want to do is you want to joyfully embrace that.

And the only way you can do that is if ultimately you're living for God and you're not just living for the here and now. And one of the things that that's going to do is that's going to expose all the idols in your heart.

So you might be in a situation where you're genuinely being mistreated and you have a selfish pig who's basically just in it for himself. And you're genuinely being mistreated, but there still could be idols that are going to be exposed in your heart.

Like in order to be okay, I need to have someone who loves me and values me and cherishes me. What do I want that I'm not getting in this situation? I want to be loved. I want to be cherished. I want to be mistreated.

And if I don't get that, if I'm not loved the way I want to be loved, then functionally I'm going to give up and I'm going to quit. And so am I in this relationship just giving to get? Like I'll be nice to you if you're nice to me.

I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. Or am I in this kind of relationship trying to be Jesus to a hard and stubborn heart? Do I realize it's more blessed to give than receive? Am I trying to be a servant?

Am I trying to be a slave? Am I trying to be those things? And so I think there are lessons that you can learn even when you're being abused. And these are the type of lessons that are going to actually refine your character.

But then I wouldn't suggest that fundamentally a woman in that situation simply be a doormat or simply never point out that there is a one-sided dynamic to this relationship. So I think you ought to go out of your way to, in a respectful tone of voice and in a respectful way, call, rebuke your pig-headed husband for what he's doing.

And one of the easiest ways to do that, I think, is to try to start by asking questions. And so here would be what I would recommend. Instead of just like you see your husband do something that's selfish, then you scream and you say, How dare you do this again?

And you're just so selfish. What you should do in those moments is just to say, Hey, can you explain why you did that? I really want to understand why you did that because it doesn't make any sense to me.

So I've asked you multiple times that when you come home, you don't just throw your clothes all over the floor, but then you keep on doing that. You don't seem to care. Why did you do that this time? Is there something that I'm missing?

And so I think trying to figure out how to just ask questions and then ask questions and actually be able to hear the answer. So when you see something that's monstrously selfish, go in there first asking the question, Why did you do that?

What did that mean? When you said that, why did you do that? I'm trying to understand. So you went home from work, you got home from work, and then you've sat there on a couch and you watch TV for five hours and then you haven't talked to me all day.

And then you then it makes sense to come and ask me for intimacy later after I've been dealing with the kids all day long and everything else. How does that make sense? What are you thinking? What is your thought process with all that?

I would ask those questions. I would confront your husband. If he's given bad answers to those things, I would confront him. I would do so in a respectful way. There's no virtue in just being a doormat.

But then at the same time, if you're married to the kind of guy who's just going to be petty and childish and selfish and just going to harden his heart and just going to get angry and get upset. Obviously, you should be going to a faithful member of a church who's going to have pastors in your life who you can come to if your husband refuses to interact with that.

Confront him about that. There's a church discipline process you can follow to help you refine some of these things. And there's counselors that you should be getting at your church. So you should be going to a church that's going to shepherd you and have a church discipline process to help you navigate through these things.

But then assuming that you're dealing with just a self-centered, selfish pig husband who's just going to do whatever he's going to do and isn't really accountable to any church anymore. And you're just on your own as far as all those things go.

Well, then at that point, you're in win-em-over-without-a-word territory when they observe your chase and respectful behavior. If you've exhausted any attempt to rebuke and if you've exhausted any attempt to talk about it and try to understand and request that he get help, at a certain point, you're in win-em-over-without-a-word kind of territory.

And just know that there's a lot of women who enter into that kind of territory. And they say, hey, I tried that for a week and then it didn't work. Or I tried that for a month and it didn't work. Or I tried that for two months and it didn't work.

And so now I'm just exasperated and at my wits' end. And there's examples in church history like Augustine's mother, Monica, who spent years and years and years praying for a stubborn and unrepentant husband and self-centered husband.

And one of the things to realize is if that's you, hey, your rewards in heaven will be great. Your rewards in heaven will be great to be a faithful light in the midst of a one-sided and self-centered relationship.

And you're never more like Christ when you're fundamentally mistreated for righteousness' sake. So as you think about living with the selfish pig, one of the most encouraging things to realize is that there's nothing that that selfish man can do to stop you from being faithful.

Rebuking a Selfish Husband Without Becoming a Doormat

Now, as with all of these scenarios that we've walked through, being married to the brute, being married to the limp-wristed beta, being married to the conquered coward, being married to the weary warrior, or being married to essentially this last category that we have been talking about, this category of the selfish pig.

One of the things to realize is that most relationships are not going to fall neatly into one of these categories. But hopefully these kind of categories can give you certain postures or certain principles that can make sense of a lot of different marriages.

And so most marriages are not just a clear cut. There's very few marriages that are going to neatly fall in these kind of categories in the exact kind of way, but they do represent tendencies. And so every marriage is going to be a complicated mess of probably of some faithfulness and some unfaithfulness on both people's part.

And it'll be a good mix of both. But hopefully this has been helpful to try to get you to think through how to navigate some of these things.

This has been another installment of Iron Sharpening Iron. As always, if you would like to have your question included in one of these midweek episodes, email us at biblebashedpodcast at gmail .com. Don't forget to subscribe and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Gab.

Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.