Handling Conflict to Achieve Oneness in Marriage

We have been looking at marriage the way God designed it, because marriage was His idea, and we are not free to pick and choose which parts of His Word we will listen to. So far we have seen that marriage is a binding commitment, not a feeling or a two-year contract, much like the way God binds Himself to us. We have seen that self-centeredness is the cancer that quietly eats marriages alive, and that the real purpose of marriage is friendship, a deep oneness that grows as two people look toward the same horizon together rather than simply staring at each other.

Today I want to deal with something intensely practical that still shocks a surprising number of believers, and it shows up not only in marriage but in any covenant relationship, including churches and fellowships. That thing is conflict.

Why Conflict Throws Us Off Balance

Conflict in marriage catches many of us completely off guard. We think, How can this person say they love me, how can they be a child of God, and still treat me this way? But we forget that most of the commands in the New Testament were written to Christians: do not envy one another, do not quarrel, do not be malicious. None of those warnings would be necessary if believers were not capable of exactly those things.

What helped me most as a young man was reading widely about marriage. One book left a permanent mark on me: an intimate look at the marriages of great Christian leaders. In it I saw how hard marriage could be, and how beautiful it became when people got it right. Martin Luther first married partly to defy the celibacy rules of his day, not out of romance, and yet over time that marriage became a genuinely great one. John Wesley, who preached to more people than almost anyone in history, had a home life that was miserable. Both were mighty men of God, but one handled conflict at home far better than the other, and so achieved a oneness with his wife the other never knew. As one man of God in that book put it, since a wife is a husband's nearest neighbor, she should be his deepest love and his dearest friend.

The First Reason Conflict Destroys Marriages: Naivety

The first reason conflict does more damage than it should is simple naivety, the quiet assumption that God is a kind of magician. Because we are Christians, we imagine everything should automatically go smoothly, that God will mystically handle it all while we sail through. Nothing could be further from the truth, and here is what that thinking forgets: we have an enemy.

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.

1 Peter 5:8

We are not people who see a demon behind every bush, but Scripture also warns us not to be ignorant of the enemy's schemes, lest he gain an advantage over us. The devil is out to steal, kill, and destroy, and he will target your marriage no matter how anointed you are. Remember, God gave Israel the Promised Land, but there were still giants in it, and they had to fight to possess what God had already given. The promises of God are given to us, as Paul told Timothy, so that we may wage a good warfare, fighting for our healing, our peace, and yes, our marriages.

This is where some people misunderstand grace. Because we preach grace here, they assume we are preaching laziness or a license to sin. Not at all. The truth is that many of us will be swimming in God's grace and still stay defeated, because grace is received through faith, and a faith that never acts is dead. Grace says you can have what you do not deserve, not because you fasted or prayed or earned it. But if you never spend time with God, never engage your faith, you keep yourself from enjoying what grace has already made available. It is like this: I may have committed to love my wife forever, but if she is always at work, always away, always with everyone but me, all my love is fully available to her by covenant, yet she will never actually experience it.

The Second Reason: We Misread the Source

The second reason conflict destabilizes us is that we fail to understand where it actually comes from. Scripture is blunt about the source.

Only by pride cometh contention: but with the well advised is wisdom.

Proverbs 13:10

What is pride? It is self-centeredness, being so full of yourself, your interests, your desires, your wishes, that you make yourself the center of the world. And the Bible says that wherever there is contention, no matter how humble you believe you are, pride is present. If there were no pride in either party, there could be no conflict at all. So the next time you clash with your spouse, or with anyone, remember this: you have been proud. I can say with confidence, only by pride comes contention.

This matters because strife left unchecked spreads like water once the dam is breached, and Scripture says that where envy and strife exist, there is confusion and every evil work. We open the door to real destruction when we let pride and conflict fester in our homes. James asks it plainly: What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something and you don't get it. The bottom line in nearly every conflict, at home, at church, at the office, is selfishness. Always.

First Way to Handle Conflict: Aim Your Anger Correctly

So how do we handle conflict in a way that actually produces oneness? First, be angry, but not at your spouse. Be angry at the enemy who wants to destroy your home. James tells us to submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee. We must stay constantly aware that it is the devil, not your husband or wife, who is your enemy.

Here is one of the enemy's favorite tricks: he gets you to demonize the human being in front of you. He is mean. She is wicked. His whole family is against you. His mother must be behind it. Do not be fooled into fighting the wrong battle. Keep your focus on the real enemy, and come against him with the word of God's grace rather than turning your weapons on the person you promised to love.

Second Way: Truly Leave So You Can Cleave

Second, give your marriage the priority it deserves. The Bible says a person leaves father and mother so they can cleave to their spouse. One of the main reasons we have conflict is that we never truly leave. Some of us still rely on friends, family, and background to tell us how to relate to our husband or wife. Nothing troubles me more than a spouse who takes marriage complaints to their friends and lets those friends coach them on how to treat the person they married. On what basis should an outsider decide how you live with your own spouse?

This is something I settled with my wife very early. I told her plainly, If you have a problem, it is with me, not with my relatives, not with where I come from, not with my parents. It is with me. Early in our marriage, people even came to her with warnings shaped entirely by tribe and background, predicting how a man from my culture would surely behave. It upset me deeply, but honestly, it revealed far more about those people than about either of us. When you come into marriage, everything except what the Bible commands is negotiable, and you have to make up your mind to leave it all behind and cleave to your spouse.

Leaving also means leaving behind how your mother treated your father, or how your uncle treated his wife. Some people are competing with a man they have never even met. Years ago you watched an uncle mistreat and insult his wife, and you resolved that no man would ever treat you that way. Then you marry a wonderful man, and without knowing it, he is now on trial to prove he is different from an uncle he has never met. When he speaks, you snap, Don't talk to me like that, not because anything was wrong with what he said, but because it reminded you of how your uncle spoke to his wife. But this man is not your uncle. What is the problem? You have not left. You have carried your relatives, the very ones you resent, straight into your marriage.

Third Way: See Yourself and Your Spouse as Gifts

Third, learn to see yourself as a gift to your spouse and your spouse as a gift to you. God placed you in that marriage so He could show His love to someone through you, and so you could experience His love through someone. Until you truly see yourself as God's gift to your spouse, you will never handle their pride and self-centeredness well when it surfaces. So say it: I am a gift to my spouse, and my spouse is God's gift to me. You are the one meant to keep loving them and standing beside them when they are weakest and most vulnerable.

I love my wife, and one reason is that she has stayed by me no matter how difficult I may have been. She has seen me at my most vulnerable and never used it against me. Even in our worst stretches, when we have barely spoken for days, she will still come and simply say, Your food is ready. What has helped her most, I believe, is that she has learned to see herself as a gift from God to me.

But your spouse is also a gift to you, sometimes a gift that reveals the sin and pride still living in you, showing you that you are not as holy as you imagined and that you genuinely need God's help. When you see it this way, you develop the heart of a servant. You learn to offer criticism without crushing the other person. The tongue can be a weapon that destroys, so be tender when you speak. Do not say things like, You are useless, I don't even know what I saw in you, you never get anything right. That is not correction; that is judging and condemning a person made in God's image.

And you must learn to receive criticism without being crushed by it. When your spouse says something harsh, you can hold it loosely, because honestly, apart from Christ, none of us has much to boast about; in our own flesh dwells no good thing. So you can say, I do need God's help. I am a work in progress, and I will do better next time. Seeing yourself and your spouse this way makes forgiveness far easier, and forgiveness is the one thing every long and happy marriage cannot do without. Forgive easily and forgive quickly. And where do we find the power to forgive? In the fact that we ourselves have been so fully forgiven.

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.

Ephesians 4:32