Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
According to scripture, anything that has control over a person is their master. By that definition, a huge part of Western society is enslaved – people compulsively chase after their desires, looking for freedom and happiness in the wrong places. 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.” Humans are driven by desire. All of us are filled with primal, animalistic instincts for self-gratification. What this means is that repeated actions can add up over time. In some cases, that’s a positive thing: a skill can be acquired more easily, and a good habit can become engrained. But there are plenty of bad habits too, like addictions. And repeated bad actions can lead to an escalation of poor behavior.
Jesus highlights the extent of the devil’s power, to all the kingdoms of this world, not just a particular locality. Amid the revolution, the questions nobody seems to even be asking are, Is this making us better people? More loving people? Or even happier people? Are we thriving in a way we weren’t prior to our ‘liberation’?” (p. 28) After leading our church through five years of spiritual formation initiatives and seeing the impact, I wanted to help other churches discover a similar path of apprenticing under Jesus. In 2021, with the blessing of the church, I stepped away from my role as pastor to launch Practicing the Way, a nonprofit designed to create simple, beautiful formation resources for church communities around the world. I think this is part of his appeal, though many folks probably underestimate just how much existing wisdom he is drawing from in the wealth of quotations and references he provides every few sentences. The guy understands our current moment and how we got here, and has a kaleidoscope of perspectives to have us consider when thinking through the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Review
As we’ve seen, Christians living in a post-Christian society have to navigate a world where immoral ideas, desires, and behavior are normalized. The Bible makes it clear that for Jesus, the devil was real – so Christians should be willing to keep an open mind. And if the devil’s real, that means he’s the one manipulating and deceiving people and making them miserable. As a pastor, the author is convinced that the key to survival is a combination of spiritual practices as an individual, combined with participation in the church community. Although Christians are living in difficult times of war, there is reason to be optimistic. They have everything they need to surmount their enormous challenges and live a life of happiness and freedom through God. Final Summary
Above all, the devil is the father of lies (John 8:44). This is his natural language. This is how he holds sway over all of mankind. He not only has the ability to control the thinking of individuals via false ideas, he has even been able to dictate how human thought generally has developed over its history. Great book! John Mark Comer has an ability to explain old, complex theories in simple language, and apply them to our current ‘cultural moment’.Live No Lies (2021) is a survival guide for Christians living in troubled times. It analyzes the main challenges facing Christians today, including lies from the devil and the influences of Western secular society, which are often incompatible with religious values. It also offers spiritual practices for Christians to adopt and suggests some possible ways for churches to adapt to post-Christian culture. Who is it for? But while it may sound strange, it’s actually perfectly normal to feel battered and bruised, given the world we live in today. There’s a war going on – a war for the soul. i thoroughly enjoyed this. i love the premise of Comer reminding us of the call of our Lord to come and die, and then to live. also, he has a great reading voice. i put down some quotes below that i just don’t want to forget :) The solutions to all this that Comer puts forward are obvious: confessing the truth of scripture and being led by the Spirit. Basically this amounts to practising the spiritual disciplines. He admits that what he is writing about is not that new, but it is a vital message then needs reinforcing again and again. Well-respected psychologist and researcher Dr. Erich Fromm lived through both world wars and lost his Jewish faith on the other side of that trauma. After researching Nazism for years, he came to the conclusion that no one starts out evil;12 instead, people become evil “slowly over time through a long series of choices.”13 His book The Heart of Man, which is an exploration of evil and the human condition, is worth quoting at length: 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…. Each step in life which increases my self-confidence, my integrity, my courage, my conviction also increases my capacity to choose the desirable alternative, until eventually it becomes more difficult for me to choose the undesirable rather than the desirable action. On the other hand, each act of surrender and cowardice weakens me, opens the path for more acts of surrender, and eventually freedom is lost. Between the extreme when I can no longer do a wrong act and the extreme when I have lost my freedom to right action, there are innumerable degrees of freedom of choice…. Most people fail in the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot lead a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide.14”
It was helpful to remember that I am not his target audience; I believe the Bible to be literally true, yes even Genesis and Hell, though wildly unpopular in today’s culture. I have chosen to believe that the best way to honor God is to believe Him literally. Yet, I am one fundamentalist who does not want to be angry. My heart too is broken by the effects of sin on our society. I really appreciated his review of the effects of the sex revolution and his strong case against abortion. I also agree with his assessment of street preaching. Most people who become followers of Christ are influenced by someone they love and trust, not a random person yelling about hell through a megaphone. So all that to say, JMC appears to me to love people well. I really admire that and want to grow in that area. The battle is not just out there in the surrounding culture, with its secularism and alternative faith systems. It is an internal fight. There is a war going on for our souls, and within our souls, and the main weapons against us are lies. Eventually, if we believe such lies we will live them, hence the title. In the eighteenth century, a series of suicides across Europe was blamed on a book – The Sorrows of Young Werther. This tragic novel by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ends with the protagonist’s suicide, and it seems that some impressionable readers were inspired to copy his example. In this provocative and practical book, bestselling author John Mark Comer combines cultural analysis with spiritual formation. He identifies the role lies play in our spiritual deformation and lays out a strategic plan to overcome them. The process of becoming a good Christian is a kind of practice or exercise. Through adopting positive habits, a Christian can build the strength of their spirit – essentially their willpower muscle. The stronger a person’s willpower, the easier it is to overcome their primitive desires.Having previously reviewed ' The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry' by this author, I was keen to see what his latest book had to offer, and I was not disappointed. How not to lose your soul The reality is, most of us are just too busy to live an emotionally healthy and spirituality vibrant life. Hurry is incompatible with the way of Jesus. The love, joy, and peace that form the nucleus of Jesus’ kingdom are all impossible in a life of speed. We must, as Willard went on to say, “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry.”
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