Dont give Satan a foothold..

This could become the first out of a series of thoughts that I have or articles I have read on this topic. I relate to this topic the most because I suffer from the onset of anger on a  daily basis, so I refer to the "we" below but in fact I talk about myself.."I"

As soon as the devil gets a foothold into our lives, our lives start changing for the worse.
It may seem gratifying at the beginning to do something that you know is not christian is not of Christ, but then its over. That temporary gratification leads to a whole future of suffering, pain, fear, anger and unhappiness.

But, we continue to do these things. We are human, we sin, we go against God, we "un-believe" for a short time or an instant, but that's all the devil needs to get his foot in the door in into your life.
Then he starts to cause a rift between you and God.

When the devil prompt you to do something, He puts thoughts in your mind like "Well, God isn't looking, do it quickly" or "Its only small, everyone does it, so what makes this time wrong?".
And then when you do it, he turns his back on you and convicts you of the same thought he just made you believe is right.

Anger..
Ephesians 4:26-27  In your anger do not sin^. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.

We don't have to be angry people to have a problem with anger. To me there is 2 different sides of anger. There is a common place anger. Maybe this would be anger that comes out of complaining, people cutting in front of you in traffic or set around our worldly culture. We complain because we cant afford the new TV set or that the shop has run out of milk or that we are putting on an extra 4 kilos. Anything that is out of our "made up" comfort circle,is something that we complain about. Sometimes we wallow in self pity because something didn't go our way and then we complain - another weak form of anger.

Sometimes we think that our anger gives us a higher status, a kind of "don't take nonsense" costume that we put on. But our complaining and aggressive attitude is more like that of satan than that of Gods image. satan believes that everything is about anger whereas God is slow to anger.
Anger often becomes a habit. After living a lifestyle involving anger, you have given the devil such a big foothold into your life that it becomes a common practise and OK.
But when we grow angry, we start losing belief in God. We lose belief in His goodness in promises in a situation, any situation. Anger arises from a failure to believe the truth, and belief that God owes me something: A better marriage, a better day at work or a car that doesn't break down all the time. The problem then is that anger becomes an idol in our life. It becomes a ruler of your life, something that takes over your life from under your feet and you obey it. We look at ourselves to try and sort out a situation by using anger.
This means that we are not obeying, trusting and looking at God for answers or help but instead we rely on the "flesh".

What about righteous anger. God got angry right...So why cant we?
Well Gods anger was good anger. It was for the better of His people. Gods anger inevitably led His people to His Son, Jesus Christ. His ultimate aim is to magnify the riches of His grace, love and patience.
His anger is purposeful. Without God being angry, His people would not have realised what He did for us at a later stage.

Satan wants us to believe that God is upset with us and  that we are less than acceptable to God and He uses this very successfully. This often causes us to be angry and trying to deal with our anger ourselves because we are made to think that  God doesn't want us anymore.
Any thoughts.

Blessings.