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

“We make our decisions, and then our decisions make us. In the beginning we have a choice, but eventually, we have a character.”

“Therefore, we must run every habit, every thought, every relationship-everything-through this simple grid:Does this sow my flesh or my spirit?Will this make me more enslaved or more free?More beastly or more human?”

“We prefer to think of ourselves as rational individualists rather than the emotional, relational, and easily manipulated social creatures we actually are.”

“The late Dr. Larry Hurtado, historian of early Christianity, in his wildly celebrated book Destroyer of the Gods, told the story of how a tiny Jewish sect of Jesus followers overcame the bastion of paganism and won over the Roman Empire in only a few centuries. His thesis was that it wasn’t the church’s relevance or relatability to the culture but its difference and distinctness that made it compelling to so many. The church was marked by five distinctive features, all of which made it stand out against the backdrop of the empire: The church was multiracial and multiethnic, with a high value for diversity, equity, and inclusion. The church was spread across socioeconomic lines as well, and there was a high value for caring for the poor; those with extra were expected to share with those with less. It was staunch in its active resistance to infanticide and abortion. It was resolute in its vision of marriage and sexuality as between one man and one woman for life. It was nonviolent, both on a personal level and a political level.”

“Working theory of the devil’s strategy: deceitful ideas that play to disordered desires that are normalized in a sinful society Working theory of the law of returns applied to spiritual formation: sow a thought, reap an action; sow action, reap another action; sow some actions, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny, either in slavery to the flesh or freedom in the Spirit.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Human beings simply can’t live without loving relationships and meaning to both our suffering and our existence as a whole. Jesus comes to offer both.”

“Anxious to avoid a repeat of history, Edmund Burke laid out the logic behind the American architecture in a letter from 1791:"Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites [read: flesh]... Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."Because freedom without self-mastery is a disaster waiting to happen. Saint Augustine said it well: "Free choice is sufficient for evil, but hardly for good.”

“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.”

“Followers of Jesus need to come back to the reality that baptism is their primary pledge of allegiance,40 contempt has zero place in the heart of those who claim to apprentice under Jesus, and the litmus test of our faith is the degree to which we love our enemy.”

“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.”

“With every decision we make to complain, criticize, play the victim, focus on the negative, and so on, we become more and more the kind of person who is by nature negative, grouchy, unhappy, and unpleasant to be around, until eventually we lose the very capacity to live happily, gratefully, and full of wonder at our lives in God’s good world.”

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

“For millennia, followers of Jesus have immersed their minds in Scripture, not just to gather data, memorize factoids, and get the right answers on a theology test. Doctrine does matter—very much—but not to “pass the test” and get into heaven. It matters because we become like our vision of God. The goal of reading Scripture is not information but spiritual formation. To take on the “mind of Christ.”22 To actually think like Jesus thinks. To fill your mind with the thoughts of God so regularly and deeply that it literally rewires your brain, and from there, your whole person.”

“In the beginning we have a choice, but eventually, we have a character.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“Your body is a gift, as is pleasure in the right time and place and way. But your body, like the rest of your soul, has been corrupted by sin. As a result, your body often works against you in your fight with the flesh, via your sex drive, fight-or-flight system, or survival instincts. Fasting is a way to turn your body into an ally in your fight with the flesh rather than an adversary.”

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

“the key to spiritual formation is to change what we can control (our habits) to influence what we can’t control (our flesh).”

“To have faith in something is simply to live as if it’s true.”

“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”

“The poet Mary Oliver once said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”