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

by John Mark Comer

But people regularly cite the Flynn effect as proof we’re getting smarter not just in some things but in everything. By this logic, people who believe in ancient ideas like the devil or, for that matter, Jesus himself are looked at with contempt and treated with the same intellectual incredulity as those who believe in trolls. Never

Our cumulative knowledge has grown by leaps and bounds, yes, especially around trolls and rock formations; but knowledge is not the same thing as intelligence, which is still not the same thing as wisdom.

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

And the best definition of reality I know is “what you run into when you’re wrong.” If you say, “I believe I can fly!” and you walk off the top of a ten-story building, reality is what you hit a few seconds later. Hence, the cliché “a dose of reality.” When we call something a lie, we mean it doesn’t correspond to reality.

The move of the Spirit is inward to conviction, not outward to critique. I’m not trying to critique the culture, much less control it; I’m trying to flourish a counterculture.

War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century,

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

“One of the biggest challenges we have to our democracy is the degree to which we don’t share a common baseline of facts.”11

Still, unlike the West’s popular definition of love as basically not disagreeing with people, Jesus disagreed with people constantly, in love.

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.

We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

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.”

What they mean by spirituality is usually that they practice yoga or they believe in wonder; it’s not the more classical definition of spiritual as in a relationship with a spiritual being. Secular society is an attempt to answer the first question of “who is God?” with a negative. “Who is God?” There is no God. God is just a myth from the premodern, prescientific age. And a dangerous one at that—the cause of tribalism and war. Now we know better.

Modern, secular society is the first to ever attempt to live as if there is no God. Which is a disaster waiting to happen, because the answers to the next two questions flow from the first. What we believe about the good life is based on what we think it means to be human, which in turn is based on what we believe about God.

Laurie Santos of Yale called this the G.I. Joe fallacy. Santos is a professor of psychology and cognitive science, and her basic point is that simply 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.

Why do we react with such emotional nausea to street preachers? Because it’s truth without spirit; it’s reality (kind of) without any kind of relational equity or loving presence.

The point isn’t that Eve was female and therefore easier to manipulate. It’s that she was alone and away from community, and when humans are isolated, we are all easier to fool.

“When Satan cannot make you bad, he makes you busy.”7

Speaks To us when alone

The prophet Habakkuk said God’s eyes are too pure to even look on evil,28 and yet we do it all the time for entertainment. We don’t even stop to consider this could be a ploy of the father of lies to wreak havoc in our lives. 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. If you don’t believe me, go do a little research on neurobiology, specifically how what we see affects our mirror neurons and how thoughts enter the mind, creating neural pathways in our brains, which create DNA proteins in our nervous systems, which are then disseminated throughout our bodies and become part of us and, some argue, are in turn passed on to our children in their genetic code.

This is why our entertainment choices, our reading habits, our screen time, and our news sources are all central to our spiritual formation into the image of Jesus. (Or our deformation into the image of the devil.)

All healthy, free people self-edit this inner mix of desires. The wise recognize that pleasure is not the same thing as happiness. Pleasure is about dopamine; happiness is about serotonin. Pleasure is about the next hit to feel good in the moment; happiness is about contentment over the long haul, a sense that my life is rich and satisfying as it is. Pleasure is about want; happiness is about freedom from want.

It’s not even bad to love sex. God himself created us as sexual beings and commanded us to “increase in number.”20 But when sex becomes a pseudogod that we look to for identity, for belonging in a community, or for life satisfaction, when it becomes a soteriology (a doctrine of salvation) as it is for so many in the West, that’s a disordered love. And it’s not just that it’s wrong in the moral sense; it’s that it can’t possibly satisfy the deeper ache of the soul for love, intimacy, acceptance, and generativity. After all, the body just wants an orgasm, but the soul wants more—communion and contribution.

Hamlet. The original version was “This above all: to thine own self be true.”21 Anybody remember who said that line? If not, don’t feel bad; I had to look it up. It was Polonius, the fool. It’s the fool who encourages us to live by the slogan “Be true to yourself,” and yet we mouth his mantra like it’s gospel. We just assume (remember, ideas are assumptions about reality) that the way to a happy, flourishing life is to follow our hearts, which we often misunderstand to be any authentic desire.

Modern authenticity encourages us to create our own beliefs and morality, the only rule being that they must resonate with who we feel we really are. The worst thing we can do is to conform to some moral code that is imposed on us from outside—by society, our parents, the church, or whoever else. It is deemed to be self-evident that any such imposition would undermine our unique identity…. The authentic self believes that personal meaning must be found within ourselves or must resonate with our one-of-a-kind personality.

our strongest desires are not actually our deepest desires.

I’m not saying that sexual or romantic desire is bad; it’s a beautiful, God-given joy. But love as defined by Jesus, Paul, and the New Testament is a very different phenomenon. The Greek word they used for love wasn’t eros (where we get the word erotic) but agape. Here’s my best shot at a definition of agape love: A compassionate commitment to delight in the soul of another and to will that person’s good ahead of your own, no matter the cost to yourself

Love is the desire not to take but to give. It’s the settled intention of the heart to promote good in the life of another. To see the beauty inherent in another soul and help them come to see it as well.

The problem with the “as long as it doesn’t harm anybody” rubric is it requires an agreed-upon definition of harm. Something that, in the secular, pluralistic world we inhabit, we don’t have. We no longer have a transcendent moral authority such as God or the Bible to appeal to. We don’t even have the Enlightenment idea of the laws of nature anymore. All we have is the self and the state. The problem is, all sorts of things are legal that do not lead to human flourishing.

This debate over harm is really a debate over ethics. To define an act as “love” or “hate” requires an agreed-upon definition of good and evil, which again, we don’t have. Since ethics have been individualized in the new religion of self, Harm with a capital H is difficult to define.

Satan and the Problem of Evil

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature…. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

Lewis: “It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

Neither should the body be indulged and catered to, because the more you pamper and submit to its desires, the more they grow into insatiable cravings. (A potato chip—or an orgasm—tends to make you want another one.) And that way lies being nothing more than an animal.10 Every time we sow to the flesh, we feed that animalistic part of us. As it grows, it takes more control over our freedom and attempts to eat us alive from the inside. This is why Peter, writing about “those who follow the corrupt desire of the flesh” said that, in time, they become like “unreasoning animals, creatures of instinct…and like animals they too will perish.”11 Harsh as his language sounds, he wasn’t being mean, just honest—and loving. The more people indulge their flesh, the more it takes over their whole beings and turns them into brutes, however socially sophisticated they may remain.

Freedom in modern Western use—the permission to do whatever we want Freedom in the New Testament—the power to want and do what is good

“Crowds lie. The more people, the less truth,” as Eugene Peterson put it.22 Crowds are often more foolish than wise.

“staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people.”

The old moral absolutes have been called into question. The new authority is, as we explored earlier, the authentic self, defined as desire and feelings.

Theo Hobson, in his book Reinventing Liberal Christianity, has this syllogism to sum up the three marks of modern moral revolution: What was universally condemned is now celebrated. What was universally celebrated is now condemned. Those who refuse to celebrate are condemned.

The Way of the Heart

“Our Mission and Model,” Praxis, https://praxislabs.org/​mission-and-model