More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 3 - August 16, 2022
For centuries, teachers of the Way of Jesus used a paradigm that’s been lost in the modern era, that of “the three enemies of the soul.” The world. The flesh. And the devil.
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 C. S. Lewis wisely said, “There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”
Jesus sees our primary war against the devil as a fight to believe truth over lies.
Foreign correspondent David Patrikarakos, in his book War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, makes the case that wars are no longer about territory but about ideology. This is why America can’t win the war on terror. Jihad is an ideology. You can’t fight an ideology with a tank. In fact, when you attempt to, it’s often just gas on the fire.
Imposing whiteness on the world is rightly shunned. But to some, imposing westernness (especially Western ideas about sexuality or gender) on the world is not only okay; it’s virtuous.
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.”
Adam, by the way, isn’t a proper name in Hebrew; it’s the word for “human.”40 Neither is Eve; it means “life.”41 That’s why nobody else is named Adam or Eve in the Old Testament. This is a story about how “human” and “life” got into their present state.
Many intelligent and sophisticated people in our world simply do not want to be accountable to God or any kind of higher authority; instead, they want to be free to live as they please, with no guilty conscience from within or legal restraint from without.
Or in the words of Jesus in John 4, we need “Spirit” and “truth.”3 For years I puzzled over Jesus’s language, but I’ve come to realize these are the key to spiritual formation. To change, to grow, to break free of our flesh and become like Jesus, we need Spirit and truth. What is Spirit? Pentecostal scholar Gordon Fee defined Spirit as “God’s empowering presence.”4 It’s the animating energy we draw on through relationship to God. And truth, as we already covered, is reality. Or words that we can rely on to find meaning in our lives.
Another way to say this is we become like Jesus through relationships and reality.
I am saying that everything we allow into our minds has an effect on our souls, for good or for evil.
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.)
For the Scripture writers, anything that has control over you—be it an autocratic tyrant, a slave owner, a self-defeating behavior, or an addiction to drugs or alcohol or even your phone—is your master.
Another Oxford professor, C. S. Lewis, once said, “The main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in,” and warned of the danger of “coming to love the prison.”
The things we do, do something to us. They shape the people we become.
The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision, the more our heart softens—or better perhaps, becomes alive….
Every time you practice a habit of Jesus, your spirit (one way to think of your spirit is as your inner willpower muscle) gets a little stronger and your flesh (your inner animal) gets a little weaker.
Remember, the key to spiritual formation is to change what we can control (our habits) to influence what we can’t control (our flesh).
In summary: The devil’s deceitful ideas are not random; they appeal to our disordered desires, or what the New Testament writers call the flesh. The flesh is our animal side, the primal, instinctual drives of self-gratification and self-preservation. The solution is not to white-knuckle our way through but to live by the Spirit via practices that enable us to draw on the power of God to live in freedom.
In layperson’s terms, the world is what happens when a lot of people give in to their flesh and base, animalistic desires are normalized.
The temptation for us in the West is less to atheism and more to a DIY faith that’s a mix of the Way of Jesus, consumerism, secular sex ethics, and radical individualism.
In summary: The devil’s deceptive ideas get as far as they do because they appeal to our flesh’s animal cravings. But these in turn find a home in our bodies through the echo chamber of the world, which allows us to assuage any guilt or shame and live as we please. As a result, evil is often labeled good, and good, evil; and the soul and society devolve into a reign of anarchy via the loss of a moral and spiritual true north. In such an exilic moment, the church as a counter-anti-culture has the potential to not only survive but also flourish as a creative minority, loving the host culture
...more
Jesus put one evocative symbol at the center of apprenticeship to him—not a sword but a cross. The cross was a symbol of death. Jesus’s call to follow him was a call to die—if not literally in body, then at least figuratively in self-denial. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
To say yes to Jesus’s invitation is to say no to a thousand other things. As the monks used to say, “Every choice is a renunciation.”9 To say yes to Jesus is to say no to living by my own definition of good and evil, to spending my time and money however I want, to the hyperindividualism, antiauthoritarianism, and full-tilt hedonistic pursuit of our day. It’s a thousand tiny deaths that all lead up to one massive life. It’s not a futile grasping for control, but the freedom of yielding to Love. It’s saying to Jesus, Whatever, wherever, whenever, I’m yours.
For Jesus, you have two choices: Option A: you deny Jesus and follow your self. Put another way, you put desire on the throne of your life. You make getting what you want the ultimate authority and driving motivation for your life. Or option B: you deny your self and follow Jesus. Meaning, you crucify the desires of your flesh and tap into your deeper desires for God himself. The results? Losing your life. Or saving it. According to Jesus, those are your options.
Why is it we resist crucifying our desires? Why this gut-level, inner resistance to Jesus’s call? It’s not necessarily because we’re evil or even narcissistic; it’s because we’re scared. We’re scared of losing something we value, something we think (or feel) we need to live a happy life. Until we come to the place where we genuinely trust Jesus’s mental maps over our own intuition or feelings, and trust that God is a loving and wise Father with good intentions for our joy, death to self will remain an unwinnable war of attrition between the torn factions of our fragmented souls.
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. We will continue to think that we know better than God what will lead to our happiness. And we will chase the wind and reap the whirlwind.
