Pleasing God, Not Grieving the Holy Spirit

UV 4237/10000 Pleasing God, Not Grieving the Holy Spirit And do not give the devil an opportunity ( to lead you into sin by holding a grudge, or nurturing anger, or harbouring resentment, or cultivating bitterness. Ephesians 4 v 27 We are situated on the earth, the footstool of worship of God. Hence, the enemy, the devil is always trying to kick the footstool away by gaining a foothold in our minds, our lives. The uni-verse shows how the foothold progresses or deteriorate from a merely holding a grudge or cause for grievance against someone for a wrong done to one to growing anger, then, it becomes deep -seated resentment and finally the festering wound of bitterness in our hearts. When our hearts become bitter, we cannot be fruitful for the Lord. We will grieve the Holy Spirit by our attitudes, words and actions driven by such bitterness. The Holy Spirit aids and helps us in the internal spiritual warfare with our old selves and to be overcomers and victorious like Christ. We need to get rid of all negativities in us and nurture, harbour and cultivate positive attitudes towards God, people, believers, authorities, all creatures and nature. In order to do so, we need to renew our minds continually in Christ, to have His mind or attitudes, to be renewed in the spirit of God and of the word of God. When we fail to do so, we grieve or hurt the super sensitive Holy Spirit who dwells in us from the time we made a commitment to Christ as a mark of our redemption. Paul gives us a practical way to deal with anger. He says we can have righteous anger like Jesus but it should not get the better of us or control us. We need to cease to be angry by sunset, implying carry no trace of anger or cause of anger into the next day or even into sleep that night. We need to start each day with a clean slate with no carry over of anger, resentment, bitterness from our past. Since we are forgiven freely, we too ought to forgive freely those who err against us. Our positive attitudes are our armour and our negative attitudes are the weapons that harm us. Hence, we need to put on the former and keep putting off or taking off the latter. The devil is very fond of the space between our two ears and evil is his byproduct. Hence, we need to avoid both the devil and evil thoughts, words and deeds. But, the supernatural or spiritual also abhors a vacuum just like nature. Hence, even as we get rid of the negative factors, thoughts, words, actions, reactions, habits, attitudes in our lives, we need to quickly fill or replace it with the positive, the wholesome, the beneficial both for us and others.