When you got married, you weren’t thinking much about conflict and arguing, were you? And yet, weeks, months, years on, disagreement has become a regular feature of your lives together, hasn’t it? How do you handle disagreement and conflict in your marriage? Do you honor each other and preserve your love and respect? Or, are you resentfully nurse wounds from what was said or done?
For some, those disagreements are worked out in a way that avoids deep frustration and destructive arguments but for many, giving in to emotions and harsh, angry, cutting words has brought a lot of pain and increasing coldness toward each other. Sin always produces the same thing destruction, distance from the one you love, and death by degrees in your relationship. Destructive arguments are serious business and they take a long time to heal.
Some couples just learn to skirt around difficult subjects and carry on with their day – like pretending a giant tree growing in the living room isn’t there. They deny reality but it’s less painful to ignore the issue and not talk about it.
For the biblical Christian, God has a far better way to deal with the common disagreements of marriage. You can grow and enjoy better communication in your marriage because handling conflict in your marriage is a skill that can be learned. Disagreeing doesn’t have to be (shouldn’t be!) destructive. This is the topic of the current episode of FAITHFUL LIFE podcast – How to have a good fight in a loving marriage. Lisa and I talk candidly about how we work out conflict in our marriage. Click the link to listen and find a better way to disagree with the one you love!
Matt Jacobson is a biblical marriage coach, founder of FaithfulMan.com a biblical marriage, parenting, and discipleship ministry providing written and audio teaching, as well as couples marriage coaching. He is also the creator of FREEDOM Course, an 8 session class, including a workbook, where he teaches men the biblical path to finding total victory from pornography and sexual sin. He is the co-host (with his wife, Lisa) of Faithful Life Podcast and is author of the bestseller, 100 Ways to Love Your Wife. Matt is pastor of Cline Falls Bible Fellowship and is married to Lisa, founder of Club31Women.com (they have 8 kids!).