Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies That Sabotage Your Peace

by John Mark Comer

Doctrine does matter—very much—but not to “pass the test” and get into heaven. It matters because we become like our vision of God. The goal of reading Scripture is not information but spiritual formation. To take on the “mind of Christ.”22 To actually think like Jesus thinks. To fill your mind with the thoughts of God so regularly and deeply that it literally rewires your brain, and from there, your whole person.

Willpower is at its best when it does what it can (direct my body into spiritual practices) so the Spirit’s power can do what willpower can’t (overcome the three enemies of the soul).

In a world where the body is “just meat,” sex is “just play for grown-ups,” and gender is “just plumbing,” we must choose to “offer [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God,” and to “not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed.”

Until we come to a place of deep trust that what God wants for us is only our deepest happiness and that what we actually want—the desire beneath all the other desires—is God himself, we will fight to control our lives.