The Blessing of Relational Conflict (Marriage as a Case Study)

God's redemptive work in our lives always takes place within relationships: first, with him (our adoption); second, with others (our sanctification). This is why our relationships (with people) do not belong to us; they belong to the Lord...God uses them to prepare a people for himself. These everyday relationships are essential to the plan of personal transformation ordained before the world began. God daily gives us opportunities to serve the troubled, angry, discouraged, defeated, confused, and blind. This is the way he works and he calls each of his children to be part of it.
This view of our relationships must transform the way we respond to one another. A tense discussion about disappointments in marriage is more than a time of searing honesty between a husband and a wife. God is at work, revealing both their hearts. He is using the relationship to transform them both. If the couple remembers this, they will respond to each other in ways remarkably different from their normal pattern. But if their only goal is their own personal happiness, each spouse will say, "I want my partner to see how unhappy I am and to try harder to make me happy." If they both have this goal, the conversation will be nothing more than a self-centered war for personal happiness. They may claim to love each other, but at the level of their hearts' desires, both wife and husband are committed only to getting what they want out of the other person.
If this conversation takes place betwen two people who want to be part of God's work of transformation (sanctification), things dramatically change. It begins with their "attitudes." When they think of each other only from a horizontal perspective, they are discouraged, hopeless, and cynical. After all, they have done everything they can think of to get the other person to shape up, but nothing has worked. But when they are aware that God is present with his own redemptive purpose, they have every reason for hope. Yes, they are at the end of themselves, but the Redeemer is active in all of his power and glory. He has been changing them and will continue to do so. There is every reason to believe that he is up to something good in this marital difficulty (Paul Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands, 123-24).