Titus 2:3 states: “[Older women] are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children….” This article offers biblical encouragement for women from a personal and practical standpoint.
Two major assaults on Christian marriages are ongoing. One is described in the Bible: the curse given to Eve in Genesis 3:16. The other is the result of this curse: the ruler of this world is working hard to deceive us, to spoil God’s ways, and lead us away from our Savior.
The good news is that Jesus can nullify parts of the curse in us and also that He overcame the world. This means that the closer we stay to God’s ideas of marriage, the more we will experience His intended blessings. And the more we keep Him the center of our marriages, the more we can avoid pitfalls.
Part One: God’s Design— and the Distortion of It
Genesis 3:16: To the woman God said: I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, but he shall rule over you.1
In eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, Eve’s great mistake was her desire to be like God and to place her will above His revelation. Her relationship to her husband was devastated by her desire for independence. What would have been freedom under sinless headship of her husband would now become tainted with her resentment and his desire to domineer. Many of us live according to these sin-cursed ways because we do not realize that we were redeemed from them by the suffering and death of Jesus.
But there are still the desires that are baked into us as women, and there is also the devil who is always telling us the same lie: we should not listen to God. That is what causes many girls to make mistakes that have consequences for the rest of their lives.
It regularly starts with the desire to get married for the wrong reasons. For example, just wanting a beautiful wedding day with the beautiful dress and flowers and attention. Or wanting to escape a bad situation at home. Or having unrealistic dreams about being married. Or wanting badly to become a mother and have children. In some cases, women are in such a hurry for all these things that they’re willing to take a non-Christian as their spouse. Yet all these mistakes make for a bad start of a covenantal marriage that is supposed to last a lifetime. In God’s grace, none of it needs to lead to divorce; if one or both spouses pursue Him, God is able to heal anything in a marriage relationship that honors Him. Yet it plants weeds that will be difficult to eradicate in marriage.
My personal mistake was that I was too much of a dreamer. I thought marriage consisted of being with my best friend, a perfect man who would be interested in everything that concerned me and would be there for me at all times. God waited until I had grown up (which was at age 30) before He thought it wise to send a man into my life. Fortunately, as we were both believers, God sustained our marriage until death did us part.
2 Corinthians 6:14-16: Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God.
Why is this so important? Because God’s purpose with marriage is bringing and showing the good news of Jesus our Savior to the world. The family is the cornerstone of society and that’s exactly why the world, in step with the devil, puts in so much effort to destroy it.
When there are children to raise, it is important that both parents are believers so they are being raised in the fear of the Lord. Children receive the Christian worldview from their parents. While ordinarily sons are to look at their father’s faith, Timothy’s mother and grandmother were praised by Paul for their sincere faith and raising Timothy in the Scriptures from infancy (2 Tim. 1:5).
Of course, every marriage is different and every man and woman have a fallen nature, so therefore God has made provisions for mistakes that are made and that are impossible to work out. In Matthew 19:8 and Mark 10:5, Jesus says that divorce was permitted under certain circumstances “because of your hardness of heart.” Paul elaborates on separation and singleness in 1 Corinthians 7 and ends up wishing that everybody would just be unmarried like him, which is a great encouragement for single people.
When you marry another believer, the two of you will always have the great, supernatural Counselor, whom you can consult on every occasion and in every decision that you have to make. God is the only one who can really change a heart and you can trust Him with your heart, too.
Ephesians 4:32: Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
One way I think I can help other women love their husbands as commanded in Titus 2 is to share my own mistakes in hopes that they might avoid them. Here is an example that happened a lot. Something would come up that I found difficult to deal with. So I would ask my husband for support or advice (after all, we’re a team, right?). He would forget about it or be off to work and I’d be on my own (or so I thought) and everything worked out okay after all. But I would be very disappointed in my husband. When I tried to tell him, he would say: “You are always so angry!” And that would make me angry. After repeating this scenario many times, I became resentful, though I claimed I was just “losing my love” for him. After 25 years of things like this, resentment had settled in the dark basement of my soul as bitterness. I prefer not to go down into the basement of my soul, and I can pretend it doesn’t exist, but of course it’s still there— even after ten years of widowhood it comes to the surface in dreams or other unexpected occasions.
What went wrong? Several things. I frequently went to my husband first whenever I had a problem whereas I should have gone to God first and prayed! Not doing that deprived me of God’s ordinary way of providing help—or even supernatural help. It’s still one of the biggest mistakes that even Christian women make.
Every time it ended well, I should have given God the credit instead of myself, but my focus was usually on my husband instead of God. I’d say to myself: “I made it in spite of my husband.” When this happened, I missed yet another chance of all the fruits of the Spirit by letting resentment live in my heart. Resentment builds up and can easily turn into bitterness. Hebrews 12:15 warns: “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no ‘root of bitterness’ springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.” Note that he calls it a root because it goes down into the dark and defiles. It is so much better to keep your soul whole and not have a dark part in it. God wants us to be whole, so let His light shine in your soul, in every nook and cranny.
Was our marriage doomed because of this? Not at all! We were both sincere believers and had a lot of growing to do, both in our faith and in relation to each other. We had the same end goal for our marriage, which was raising our sons in the fear of the Lord. Even when we disagreed on issues, having the same worldview and goal solved so many of our problems. And over the years we both learned some lessons.
We all are fallen and make mistakes. But when we have God first in every aspect of our lives, including in the intimate relationship of marriage, we can avoid many pitfalls and produce more fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control [Gal. 5:22–23]).
Genesis 1:28: And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
This mandate is reiterated to Noah and his family in Genesis 9:1 and becomes more difficult because of the fear that all living things now have for humans.
From the context of the mandate to be fruitful and multiply, we can see that this is not about having as many children as possible. In order to be able to do the other things and to raise our children correctly in the fear of the Lord, we need to be realistic and realize we are people living after the Fall, with our flesh still being fragile and living in the world where sadness is rampant.
Wanting children and to be a mother should never be the main motivation to get married. You don’t know God’s plan and you don’t know if children are part of it. Pray hard and be honest with yourself and to God, and you will have no regrets later.
Jesus said to His disciples: “I chose you, and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you” (John 15:16). We who are His disciples are also to be fruitful and multiply spiritually, as well as physically. Then, in the age to come, “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord” (Isa. 11:9), and the barren woman will have more children than the married one, says the Lord (Isa. 54:1).
Part Two: The World’s Lies About Women and Marriage
We all live in the world and are daily confronted with the lies and attacks that are made on Christians and the sacred institution of marriage. These are some of the world’s favorite ideas that they want to push on you.
• You’re objectified because you’re just a cog in the evolution, just a mass of cells or an evolved animal. Of course you can “marry” anyone or anything you like.
• You can only love if you love yourself first
• You should do only what feels good in marriage
• You may pick your own gender and marry any other gender
• Men, as in males, are worthless in general and certainly as leaders in the family
• Women should never submit to their husband
• Morality is so out of fashion; just do what feels good to you
• Traditions are to be abolished: being a housewife or a stay-at-home mom is so extreme!
Note how all of these are twisting and perverting good mandates given by God. As the world is working on a “civilization” where God is excluded, I want to tell the following factual incident as a sample of how fast things can change if we are not alert.
In February 2026, the present CIA director retracted a number of biased intelligence products which included an October 6, 2021 Intelligence Assessment titled, “Women Advancing White Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist Radicalization and Recruitment.”
The summary warned that women are “emerging as key players” in the white extremist movement, taking on diverse roles to advance (among other things) “traditional motherhood.” The report red-flagged organizations that “lauded motherhood and homemaking as women’s most important responsibility.” They even came up with a sinister new acronym, REMVE. It stands for: “Racial or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism.” Note the words “violent” and the “extremism.”
The actual violent conduct flagged in the report was as follows: lauding motherhood, homemaking, making cooking videos, discussing organic food, producing online content about traditional family roles, and “subtle narratives” about Western civilization. By slapping the label “violent” on a report that only identified conduct of speech and beliefs, the CIA transformed thought crimes into a key that opened the door to domestic surveillance of stay-at-home moms and homeschoolers.
Thankfully this report is retracted in the US, but something similar was just implemented in Canada. This is how God sees it as described in Isaiah 5:20–21, and what should motivate us as Christian women to stand our ground: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight!”
The world is very serious in its efforts to dismantle God’s design for marriage. “Don’t be deceived,” as Jesus warned many times. There’s still time for the women in the church, the (grand)mothers and teachers, to teach the younger women God’s intentions with the marriage that He created. Good books are available as well as many articles online and messages on YouTube. But your favorite go-to Counselor should always be God and His Book, the Bible. This article is meant to encourage you to take God’s words very seriously, to stand in the ongoing spiritual warfare, and to trust our Savior who died for us and redeemed us and is able to restore and bless us beyond our imagination.
1. In 2016, the ESV revised the phrase “for your husband” (from 2001) to “contrary to your husband.” The 2025 edition restored the earlier translation, “for your husband,” a translation also found in other translations, including the CSB, NASB, NIV, and NKJV.
Annemarieke Ryskamp was born and raised in the Netherlands. She has a MA in Dutch literature and she likes to write to the glory of God. She is a member of Dutton United Reformed Church in West Michigan.