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

by John Mark Comer

And the problem is less that we tell lies and more that we live them; we let false narratives about reality into our bodies, and they wreak havoc in our souls.

That’s the goal of this book: to unmask the face of our enemies and develop a strategy to fight back.

While the church is not an ethnic minority (and it’s important for me to clarify that), we are what sociologists call a cognitive minority. Meaning, as followers of Jesus, our worldview and value system and practices and social norms are increasingly at sharp odds with those of our host culture. We face constant pressure, from both the Left and the Right, to assimilate and follow the crowd.

The writer Walter Brueggemann defined exile as “the experience of knowing that one is an alien, and perhaps even in a hostile environment where the dominant values run counter to one’s own.”

“sense of exile, or alienation, may result for the individual who is marginalised, cast adrift, by the inability or unwillingness to conform to the tyranny of majority opinion.”

This is a fine example of what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,”21 the innate human bias to think we’re smarter than people who came before us and therefore new ideas are naturally better or more truthful than old ones.

our fight with the devil is first and foremost a fight to take back control of our minds from their captivity to lies and liberate them with the weapon of truth.

as it is in heaven,” the devil’s is “On earth as it is in hell.”

But ironically, in Jesus’s most in-depth teaching on the devil in all four Gospels, he doesn’t mention any of it. There’s no demon in his teaching, no illness, no tragedy. Instead, it is an intellectual debate with the thought leaders of his day about truth and lies.

Jesus sees our primary war against the devil as a fight to believe truth over lies.

Here’s the problem: our capacity to hold unreality in our minds is our genius, but it’s also our Achilles’s heel. Because not only can we imagine unreality, but we can also come to believe in it. We can put our faith in ideas that are untrue or, worse, that are lies.

When we believe truth—that is, ideas that correspond to reality—we show up to reality in such a way that we flourish and thrive. We show up to our bodies, to our sexuality, to our interpersonal relationships, and, above all, to God himself in a way that is congruent with the Creator’s wisdom and good intentions for his creation. As a result, we tend to be happy. But when we believe lies—ideas that are not congruent with the reality of God’s wise and loving design—and then, tragically, open our bodies to those lies and let them into our muscle memories, we allow an ideological cancer to infect our souls. We live at odds with reality, and as a result we struggle to thrive.

But while I applaud our generation’s advocacy for equality and human dignity, the problem with this interpretation of the data points of science and history is acute: overall, it does not correspond to reality, and reality does not conform itself to our desires, feelings, or incorrect thinking. Therefore, it does not lead to health and happiness. Nor can it. Ever.

My point is this: lies distort our souls and drive us into ruin.

The best definition I know of ideology is when you take a part of the truth and make it the whole. In doing so, you imprison your own mind and heart in lies that drive you to anger and anxiety. It promises freedom but produces the opposite. It does not expand and liberate the soul but shrinks and enslaves it.

The illusions we cling to become part of our identity and, with it, our security. They make us feel safe even as they imprison us in fear. Ripping them out of the humus of our soul can be excruciating. As David Foster Wallace put it, “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”34 It’s only in coming face to face with reality as it actually is before God that we find peace.

Lies, that come in the form of deceptive ideas, are the devil’s primary method of enslaving human beings and entire human societies in a vicious cycle of ruin that leads us further and further east of Eden.

My point is this: we’ve been taught—and at times, the church has aided and abetted secularism here—that religious ideas like good, evil, and God can’t be known; they can only be taken on faith. But for Jesus and the writers of Scripture, faith is based on knowledge. It’s a kind of deep trust in God that is grounded in reality.

We think of faith as something for religious people, but all of us live by faith. To have faith in something is simply to live as if it’s true. It means to put your trust in something or someone and remain loyal to it. The question isn’t, Do you have faith? But who or what do you have faith in?

All religions are not the same. Yes, they agree on many things, and we should pay close attention to those common denominators, as they are likely signposts to reality. But they also differ wildly on many points.47 To claim otherwise is to dishonor them and the cultures they were born in, practicing a form of Western supremacy that is simply the millennial update of old-school European imperialism.

but this is exactly my point: the overused blind-men-and-the-elephant metaphor assumes that we’re all blind.

“Faith…is not belief without proof, but trust without reservations.”52

In a biblical theology of spiritual war, the devil has already been defeated by Jesus on the cross.

For Jesus and the early teachers of his way, deception was a major issue.28 And yet we rarely hear warnings like these today except from hard-core fundamentalists, who seldom engage the lies in a calm, rational way and expose them as unreality but instead shout into a bullhorn in rhetoric laced with contempt, rather than compassion.

You do see Jesus say hard things on a regular basis—uncomfortable things, unpopular things, the kinds of things that eventually got him killed. But most of the time, his tone was tender and wise.

To get us to choose evil, our enemy has to fool us into walking down a path other than the one Jesus laid down for us, thinking it will lead us to happiness. His primary way of doing this is through illusion.

Here it is again: the devil’s primary stratagem to drive the soul and society into ruin is deceptive ideas that play to disordered desires, which are normalized in a sinful society.

The reason the devil’s dezinformatsiya campaign is so wildly successful, even when faced with the counterfacts of reality, is that it plays to what the New Testament writers called our flesh.

You see, nobody sins out of duty or discipline. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Ahh, it’s Tuesday, 7:00 a.m.—time to look at porn. I don’t really want to, but it’s just the right thing to do.

We sin because we believe a lie about what will make us happy.

Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, is credited with defining sin as “unwillingness to trust that what God wants for me is only my deepest happiness.”

sin sabotages our capacity for happiness by appealing to our God-given desire for happiness via deceptive ideas.

God’s not as good or as wise as he claims to be. He’s holding out on you. If you seize autonomy from God and do your own thing with me, you’ll be better off.38 This is the lie underneath all other lies.

the Genesis 3 lie is the paradigmatic lie behind all lies. The deception (or really temptation) is and has always been twofold: (1) to seize autonomy from God and (2) to redefine good and evil based on the voice in our heads and the inclination of our hearts, rather than trust in the loving word of God.

This idea—that knowing is half the battle—is a very recent, very Western idea. It comes out of a Cartesian worldview that sees humans as rational “brains on legs” rather than the ancient, more holistic view of humans as desire-based creatures. And we like this idea because (1) it allows us to justify emotional and desire-based decisions under the guise of rationality and (2) it doesn’t require much from us.

knowing something is not enough to change. Change is hard. Knowing something is important, but it’s not half the battle. It’s more like 10 or 20 percent of the battle.2

For ideas, good or bad, to reshape our lives, they have to get into our hearts—the deep centers of our beings that integrate our thoughts, emotions, and desires—and from there into our bodies, our muscle memory. Or in more Christian language, into our souls.

spiritual formation is the process by which we are formed in our spirits, or inner persons, into the image of Jesus. Or conversely, deformed into the image of the devil.

Another way to say this is we become like Jesus through relationships and reality.

So, we need both Spirit and truth—both the relational presence of Jesus and his community and the meaning-giving truth of our Rabbi’s mental maps.

Now we come to a key point: It’s by Spirit and truth that we’re transformed into the image of Jesus, but the reciprocal is also true. It’s by isolation and lies that we’re deformed into the image of the devil.

I could tell you countless stories of people who have walked into sin or even walked away from God, and it always starts with drifting away from community with other solid followers of Jesus.

But there are two anchor practices for our fight with the devil that Jesus put on display in the desert.

1. Quiet Prayer 2. Scripture

It’s in quiet prayer that the devil’s lies—“the illusions of the false self”—are exposed and brought out into the open.

How does Jesus fight the devil’s lies? By turning to Scripture. Three times the devil tempts Jesus with a lie; three times Jesus quotes scriptures in reply. But please listen carefully: this is not the Christian version of a magic incantation. A quote from Scripture doesn’t just make the devil fly away. In fact, in the story, the devil quotes Scripture back with great alacrity.

You fight the devil’s lies by simply choosing to not think about them. But as we all know, you can’t think about nothing. So you give your mind something else to think about: Scripture. You replace the devil’s lies with God’s truth. You cut new neural pathways that eventually take root in the neurobiology of your body itself. You become what you give your mind to.

This simple practice has transformed my mind and, with it, my life. I was so impacted by reading Evagrius’s take on the story of Jesus in the wilderness that I made my own monastic handbook for combating demons. Don’t worry; this one won’t see publication. It’s not for others; it’s for me. I spent months writing down in my journal every thought or emotion that came into my conscious awareness. I identified repeating thoughts that were lies from the devil. Then I asked the Spirit to bring to mind a specific scripture to combat each lie. Sometimes a scripture would come immediately to mind; other times, I had to wait on God for days or weeks for just the right verse. Once I had it, I wrote it down beneath the lie,

As we first turned away from God in our thoughts, so it is in our thoughts that the first movements toward the renovation of the heart occur. Thoughts are the place where we can and must begin to change.

And while I’m not saying we need to boycott Hollywood, I am saying that everything we allow into our minds has an effect on our souls, for good or for evil.

My point is this: many of us spend hours every day filling our minds with lies, cutting off our minds from God’s Spirit and truth, and only a few minutes each morning, if that, filling our minds with truth and resting in the Spirit, or presence, of our Father.