God designed marriage as a way to refine us, to help us clearly see our own hearts. We need our spouses to hold us accountable, and we need them to confront us with the truth about what's in our hearts. Without that exhortation, we will not grow in the ways He calls us to grow.

God designed marriage as a way to refine us, to sanctify us, to help us grow in His image. He knows the deceptive nature of our hearts won’t allow us to do that on our own, so He created marriage as a way to reveal our sin to us.

God never looks at us and tells us we’ve been struggling too long with the same sin; He never throws His hands up because we’re struggling with a temptation that He thinks we should just get over; He never says that one sin is too great to forgive.

Reliving hurtful moments brings us to a dangerous state of mind, and opens up an opportunity for the enemy to attack. Sins we have moved past or hurts we have forgiven suddenly become larger than life again, and we can develop a victim mentality focusing on all the things that have gone wrong.

The fight for God-honoring Marriage is a life-long battle. As a younger couple, you may look at more mature marriages and think they have “arrived”; that they are somehow closer to perfection, but you would be wrong. They still struggle with the flesh every moment of every day just like you do—the only difference is they know how to put on their battle gear.

It is only to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ that we can begin to release the past and find a way to live in the present. There is a grace available to you that frees you from living in the past.

God is working on all those who believe at a different rate. If your spouse is a believer, you can bet that God is working on their hearts to reveal their sin to them, and He is using the very incident that caused you pain to do it.