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

by John Mark Comer

During this earthly pilgrimage our life cannot be free from temptation, for none of us comes to know ourselves except through the experience of temptation, nor can we be crowned until we have come through victorious, nor be victorious until we have been in battle, nor fight our battles unless we have an enemy and temptations to overcome. —Saint Augustine, AD 418

We are at war. Not with aliens from Mars, but with an enemy far more dangerous: lies. But unlike The War of the Worlds, our enemy isn’t the figment of an overactive imagination. In this case, there’s no hoax. Our enemy is real.

spiritual ancestors didn’t share our reticence with war imagery. They were far more adroit at naming the reality of spiritual conflict than we are today. 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.1

But hear me loud and clear: Our war against the three enemies of the soul is not a war of guns and bombs. It’s not against other people at all. It’s a war on lies. 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.

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.

Second, our place in culture is shifting from a place of honor to a place of shame.

Walk around the downtown core of any major American city, and just look at the buildings: carved into them is the language of Scripture. The Christian vision so penetrated our nation’s early imagination that it was literally chiseled into the stone of our earliest architecture. And while plenty of secular thought leaders gave shape to our nation as well, followers of Jesus were at the center of culture making. Many government leaders were Christians, most of the Ivy League started as pastoral training schools, and many intellectuals, s...

Most people today want nothing to do with faith in the public square. The church is seen as part of the problem, not the solution. What’s more, with the radical moral reversal around human sexuality, gender, and the life of the unborn, we now have the moral low ground in many people’s eyes; Jesus’s vision of human sexuality is perceived as immoral by a large swath of the population. In a shocking twist, we are no longer the nice middle-class citizens wearing their Sunday best; we are the James Deans, the 1960s counterculture, the ’80s Straight edge fringe.

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.

For now, let’s open with his provocative idea: 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.5

Three times Jesus called him “the prince of this world.”10 The word for “prince” is archōn in Greek, which was a political word in Jesus’s day, used for the highest-ranking Roman official in a city or region. Jesus was saying that this creature is the most powerful and influential creature in the world. In another story, when the devil claimed that “all the kingdoms of the world” were his to give away, Jesus didn’t disagree with him.11

sat on God’s divine council, a group of hand-selected spiritual beings whose job was to collaborate with God’s rule over the world.14 But he chose to rebel against God’s rule, to seize the world’s throne for himself, and to enlist as many creatures as possible in his violent insurgency.15 Some scholars argue that Eden was created in a war zone, as a beachhead for God’s kingdom.16 But when humans later joined in the devil’s rebellion, the earth fell under his dominion.17

The celebrated scholar Hannah Arendt, in her seminal 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, said, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between…true and false…no longer exist[s].”30

Banger

As the Quaker intellectual Elton Trueblood so eloquently said during his tenure at Stanford, “Faith…is not belief without proof, but trust without reservations.”52

Spiritual formation—the process by which we are formed from our spirits/inner persons to become like Jesus

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love…. So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. —Paul, in Galatians 5v13, 16–17

The slavery of freedom

Amazing title

And to clarify, Allen had been dating her mom for years and was her functional stepdad. This was decades before #metoo. Hollywood was still in its transgressive glory days, reveling in its carte blanche cultural permission to overstep nearly any sexual boundary and take the rest of the country along for the ride. Allen went on to date and then marry Soon-Yi. Isaacson’s interview of Allen reads like a case study in postmodern ethics. Isaacson, one of the best interviewers of our day, calmly but persistently probed Allen’s heart for some kind of regret, apology, or even moral uncertainty, but Allen simply refused to admit he’d done anything wrong. At the very end of the interview, Isaacson asked why he did it. Allen paused, then proffered his iconic line, “The heart wants what it wants.”2

We spent part 1 thinking about our first enemy, the devil, and how he traffics in deceptive ideas. Next up on the docket is the flesh. Remember, we said the devil’s primary stratagem is deceitful ideas that play to disordered desires. His lies aren’t random: “Elvis is alive and hiding in Mexico.” No, they play to some deep fissure in the human heart that is bent in the wrong direction: “Porn is a normal and healthy part of growing up, and sexual exploration is key to living a satisfying, happy life.”

Most ethicists define happiness as a kind of contentment, a soul-level satisfaction where you are grateful for what is rather than grasping for more, which means: happiness comes as the result of disciplined desire. In every area of life—from sex to diet to money—happiness, or the good life, is what happens after you discipline your desires. You have to curb some of your wants and cultivate others.

In his view, human beings were created in love and for love. So, we’re lovers first and thinkers second. We live primarily from desire, not our rational minds.

As another theologian, Cornelius Plantinga, observed, “In such a culture…the self exists to be explored, indulged, and expressed but not disciplined or restrained.”26

Let me say that again: our strongest desires are not actually our deepest desires.

This is exacerbated by a culture where the widespread wisdom of the day is to follow our desires, not crucify them. But in reality, “Be true to yourself” is some of the worst advice anybody could ever give you.

Honestly, sometimes I hesitate to even use the word slavery in my writing and teaching. But Jesus and the New Testament writers used it constantly. As the descendants of slaves, it was a provocative metaphor for them to employ. Yet they used it for a kind of spiritual slavery—to the devil or simply to one’s own flesh.

We become freer to love or more enslaved to our flesh with each choice. Have a look at this from Greg Boyd, educated at Princeton and Yale. His book Satan and the Problem of Evil is the best case I’ve ever read against the ever-popular “God is in control” mantra. In his section on philosophy he wrote this about spiritual formation:

First, fasting No practice of Jesus is more alien or neglected in the modern Western church than fasting. In the post-Enlightenment intellectual landscape, where human beings are viewed as res cogitans,17 or “thinking things,” the idea of drawing on the Spirit’s power not through your mind but through your stomach sounds absurd. Few followers of Jesus regularly fast anymore. And yet, until recent history, fasting was one of the core practices of the Way of Jesus. For hundreds of years, the church would fast twice a week: Wednesdays and Fridays. That was just what you did if you were a Christian. In the fourth century, when the church developed the practice of Lent, it was originally a fast similar to Islam’s Ramadan. As a lead-up to Easter, followers of Jesus would wake and go without food until sunset. For forty days. Every year.

This is why fasting—far from a medieval form of self-hate—when done rightly is a pathway to freedom. Fasting is practicing suffering; it’s teaching our bodies to suffer. Suffering is unavoidable in life; joy is not. In fasting we’re learning how to suffer with joy. What Scripture reading is to our fight with the devil (a way to fill our minds with truth to combat his lies), fasting is to our fight with the flesh (a way to starve our flesh and weaken its hold over us).

Wickedness is tied to woundedness. We all need healing. Much could be said about that. But still, through fasting, perhaps more than any other practice, the power of the Holy Spirit to break the chains of sin is released into our bodies themselves.

The ever-insightful David Foster Wallace, as he watched many of his secular friends age, noted, “This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values.”30

That time is past; we’ve now moved into a post-Christian culture. And Rieff’s key insight is that post-Christian culture is not the same thing as pre-Christian culture. Nobody has gone back to worshipping Odin or sacrificing their firstborn child to the forest spirits. Post-Christian culture is an attempt to move beyond the Christian vision while still retaining much of its scaffolding. It’s a reaction against Christianity—the West’s rebellious teenager moment. We’re the stereotypical adolescent, kicking against our parents’ authority and railing against all their flaws while still living in their house and eating all their food.

As Nathan Finochio, teaching pastor and lead singer of Le Voyageur, put it in an Instagram story, “Everything is ethical. Every millennial is ethical. The next generation will be painfully ethical. The one after that will embrace an ethical totalitarianism. This is what happens when people don’t have a purpose and their cultural framework is Christian. The end result isn’t the playful return to paganism; it’s the militant march to legalism.”

The cultural analyst Rod Dreher called the emerging culture of the West a “soft totalitarianism,” and wrote, “This totalitarianism won’t look like the USSR’s. It’s not establishing itself though ‘hard’ means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft forms. This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.”8

Everything starts with deceptive ideas, or lies we believe (put our trust in and live by) about reality—mental maps that come from the devil, not Jesus, and lead to death, not life. But deceptive ideas get as far as they do because they appeal to our disordered desires, or our flesh.

To become a creative minority, is not easy, because it involves maintaining strong links with the outside world while staying true to your faith, seeking not merely to keep the sacred flame burning but also to transform the larger society of which you are a part. This is, as Jews can testify, a demanding and risk-laden choice.29

Remember Ignatius’s definition of sin? “Unwillingness to trust that what God wants for me is only my deepest happiness.”