The Devil is vicious, but he's not victorious.

If the enemy can isolate us, he can influence us. And his favorite entry point of all is through our disappointments

In the quiet, unexpressed, unwrestled-through disappointments, Satan is handcrafting his most damning weapons against us and those we love. It's his subtle seduction to get us alone with our thoughts so he can slip in whispers that will develop our disappointments into destructive choices.

The devil turns powerless when our minds turn to our all-powerful God.

But I remembered Ephesians 6:12, and it seemed to fit: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. (1 PETER 2:11)

The Devil is powerful, but he's also predictable. We are told in 1 John 2:16 the exact three ways he's going to come after us. "For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father, but from the world.

In God's economy, people don't stand on opposing sides of the conflict scale. People stand on one side and Satan stands on the other. When we dump hurt into one another's lives, we aren't leveling the conflict scale. We are just weighing down the people side of the scale and elevating the Satan side of the scale. Satan loves it when we do his work for him by dumping on each other.

Fear isn't something you can sweep up into a pile and discard. It isn't physical. It hovers and haunts us in the spiritual realm. It attacks us in the unseen.

God has given me power over my food. I hold the power -- not the food. If I'm not supposed to eat it, I won't put it in my mouth.

If I'm in a situation where the temptation is overwhelming, I will have to choose to either remove the temptation or remove myself from the situation.

Compromise built upon compromise equals failure. Instead, resisting temptation allowed promise upon promise to be built up in my heart, and that creates empowerment.