Wifely Extravagance Destroys Homes

Wifely Extravagance Destroys Homes

“Wifely thriftlessness and extravagance have destroyed the happiness of many a household and wrecked many a home. On the other hand, many a man owes his prosperity to his wife’s prudence and her wise administration of household affairs.” (JR Miller) In pondering this statement, I thought about all of the women who are marrying their husbands with a boatload of debt due to their college education. They failed to ever consider what a burden this would place upon their future husbands. Concerning college education, women must learn to count the cost and decide whether it will be worth saddling their husbands with debt. The answer is usually “no” unless they can do it without any debt.

If your goal in life is to be a wife and mother even from a young age, you need to consider this carefully and prepare for it. When I went to college, it was very inexpensive. I didn’t want to go but my dad wanted me to go and thankfully, I had no debt when I graduated. I was taught to always live below my means and I have always lived this way. I take seriously the admonition in the Word of God to “owe no many anything” (Romans 13:8).

Beginning a marriage with a ton of debt is Satan’s trap to keep women out of their homes and not having children. There are way too many young women who can’t be home with their children because they are paying off their college debt. This is preposterous! Their children need them home yet young women are forbidden from expressing the desire to be wives and mothers (even in the churches, sadly) when they are young, therefore, they fail to prepare for this. God’s will is for young women to marry, bear children, and guide the home (1 Timothy 5:14). Now, we have all of these children growing up without their mothers. Tragic.

We need to prepare our daughters for marriage way before they get married. We need to teach them to enjoy keeping clean and tidy homes. We need to let them see that this is the best job in the world since they won’t hear it anywhere else. They need to be taught to live simply and contentedly with what they have and within their husband’s income. They don’t need the latest fashions, expensive vacations, manicures, and spa days.  If you model contentment in your home to your daughters, they will pick up on it.

Oh, but many will tell me that there’s no way that a family can live on one income these days. Most likely, it’s because they didn’t plan on doing this early in life. One must be taught to live within one’s means and not get into debt with college and credit cards. It’s called saving up the money before you buy something. This is something our generation has completely lost. They falsely believe they NEED an iPhone, cable, and all of the other luxuries we have today. Yes, they are luxuries and they aren’t worth leaving your children in the care of others to raise.

With God all things are possible and he wants mothers to be home full time with their children. He has told us that women who aren’t keepers at home “blaspheme his word” and as godly women, we sure don’t want to do that! Here is how a mother of seven children stays home by working hard in her home:

 “I stay at home with seven children and counting and love, love, love it! I try every day to cook good meals on a small budget. It is a lot of work to be able to feed a large family without going overboard. Several years ago, I started making foods from scratch and shopping sales and really paying attention to processed food and what I was providing for my family. It has saved us so much money! My husband doesn’t make a lot but is happy when I have his lunch ready for him to take to work every morning. My homeschooled children cook with me every day and are healthy and satisfied. I freeze and can and do all that I can to make sure that we are doing the best with our food budget. My husband leaves every morning to make this money for us and I’m going do my best with it!”

Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathers by labor shall increase.
Proverbs 13:11

12 thoughts on “Wifely Extravagance Destroys Homes

  1. I agree, Lori! However, what if it is the husband that has accumulated all of the debt? My husband had a ton of credit card debt when we married, where I was debt-free, and it continues to worsen. I have tried to get rid of his credit cards but he keeps getting new ones. He is in charge of his credit card bills so I don’t see or pay the bills (I am a SAHM) but I know they are astronomical. I am just so worried that if something would happen to him, I would be stuck with this huge debt and no means to pay it off. He tells me not to worry about it, but I do know that we struggle financially every month. So I try to be as frugal as I can be, but I feel like maybe I should be doing more to control this problem??

  2. Prayer and fasting is a good place to start. Past that I watched a wonderful video series that may help. I watched the first one just by myself and then invited my husband to watch the first episode with me, he was hooked after that. I watched it on-line (which cost ~$100) but then we watched it together by happenstance elsewhere and I have since bought the DVD series on eBay for about $35.00. It has been worth every penny to get us on the same page. It is called Financial Freedom by Jim Sammons. The series is probably about 25 years old or so and it is just a man who lectures the whole time. But he is such a compelling and humble speaker as well as a real man’s man and humorous in a unique way that men really relate to him. He’s fantastic.

    This series really brought out the biblical way of viewing money that despite both my husband and I having grown up in the church as 3x/week attendees never learned. I cannot recommend it enough.

  3. Well said Lori! 🙂

    After high school I went to college, not being able to decide on a “major” because all I had ever dreamed of being was a wife and mother. I did a year of university, married my husband and then quit college to be a full time wife. I soon became pregnant. I have been a busy-at-home wife and mother ever since (over 17 years now)! 🙂 I know of so many women who have so many student loan debts to pay back….and thus have to put their children in daycare or with a babysitter all day to work to pay it back. 🙁 It saddens me greatly.

  4. I couldn’t agree with this more. My parents were a mess so most of what I learned was well into my 20’s and in many ways, too late. I always wanted 5 or 6 kids & dreamt of staying home to raise them. I taught pre-school through college and it was clear to me by age 17 that I didn’t want that for my kids. It broke my heart when kids cried when they left ME! I got married in my early 30’s, had one miscarriage, & have no children. When I did my first bible study of Proverbs 31, I remember writing down something like, “Why, oh why could my mom not have taught me all this when I was young?!”

    In my 50’s now, all I can be is a poster woman for what all moms should be teaching their daughters….and sons!

  5. It seems to be a trap that was set by Satan, Katy, that many women willingly fell into. What used to be affordable back in my day is no longer affordable at all!

  6. God can use you in a powerful way, Debby, to speak truth into the younger women’s lives around you! He uses our messes for our message and you can warn them not to make the same mistakes you made. I have regrets from things in my past because I had no older woman speaking truth into my life but I did know that all I ever wanted was to be a wife and mother so at least I was on the right track and was blessed to be married young and have children.

  7. Thanks for the teaching, Lori. I’ve been swamped with lots of company lately, and I haven’t had time to comment and say that as often as I’d like. I look forward to these encouraging posts. I do appreciate each one and read some of them aloud to my daughter. I especially liked the link to Michael Pearl ‘s website. He had great advice there!!

  8. I watched this play out with my inlaws. It was not college debt, it was caused be my mil’s passive aggressiveness. She would purposely overspend and waste money as a way of defying and getting back at her husband. She refused to clean the house because she knew it irritated her husband. He would become even more angry and rude. This went on for 50 yrs. She is now in financial ruin after his death. It turns out he spent most of their savings before he passed and left no pension for her at all. This sad story just shows the results of a rebellious wife. We are grateful that she is able to receive aid so that she cannot ruin us financially. She behaves like an overgrown child, so we have turned most of her care over to the care agency. So sad.

  9. This topic runs deeper and wider and longer than we might think:

    In 9/23/16 news: “An Indonesian minister has blamed women for the scourge of graft in the country, saying that men become corrupt due to the greed and materialistic nature of their wives.” This end times pursuit of the merchandise and wealth of the Great Whore – IDOLATRY — I suggest originates in women.

    WHY? Eve wanted wealth, to be like God, and destroyed herself and then took it to Adam. Scripture says Solomon’s wives corrupted him.

    Isaiah 32:9-11 “Rise up ye women who are at EASE; hear my voice, ye careless [complacent] daughters; give ear to my speech. Many days and years shall ye be troubled, ye careless women: for the vintage [goods] shall fail you…. Tremble, ye women that are at EASE; be troubled you careless ones: strip you and make you bare, and gird sackcloth…” [‘ease’ meaning “a haughty security” in Strong’s 7600H]

    Amos 6:1: “Woe to them that are at EASE.” Do you really want to pursue wealth and ease?

    Isaiah 3:16“The daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes…”

    I have noticed this in my own wife, an ongoing, usually subtle, heart desire for wealth and ease, despite usually following my model for frugality most of the time.

    The condition of the church is instigated by and noted in the behavior of women: Ezekiel 16:15-63: “deckest thy high places with divers colors, and played the harlot thereupon …thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters which thou hast borne …and sacrificed them to be devoured. Is this of thy whoredoms a small matter, that thou hast slain* My children …thou hath also built unto thee an eminent place and hast made thee a high place on every street …and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, …to provoke me to anger …thou wast unsatiable …[and] couldest not be satisfied …how weak is your heart? …seeing thou doest all these things, the work of an imperious whorish woman, in that you buildest thine eminent place in the head of every way …every street, and hast not been as an harlot, in that thou scornest hire, but as a wife that committeth adultery, which taketh strangers instead of her husband …[and] as is the mother, so is her daughter; thou art thy mother’s daughter that lotheth her husband and her children, and thou art the sister of thy sisters that lothed their husbands and their children …thou wast corrupted more than [Sodom] in all thy ways …and behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughter …and they were haughty …but thou has multiplied thine abominations more than they and hast justified all thy sisters in all thine abominations…” [*Is it mothers who slay their own children, by separating them from the hearts of their fathers, this ‘destroying of homes’? Mal 4:6?]

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