During many services and talks recently, Meg and I have recommended a book by John Mark Comer called Live No Lies.
John Mark Comer encourages readers to recognise and resist the three enemies that undermine their joy. The devil, the flesh, and the world. The book is a call to spiritual vigilance against the lies we often believe, reminding us that the path to a fulfilling life lies in truth, freedom, and a sincere focus on Christ.
The book gives an excellent critique of our current culture and offers a brilliant (and ancient) way to live in the fullness that Jesus had for us by the power of the Holy Spirit.
We highly recommend getting a copy to read and digest slowly. Below, you will find a few of Mark's highlights from the book. Let us know your thoughts and how you implement this into your Christian life.
Mark and Meg Searle
Senior Pastors at West Wilts Vineyard
Selected quotes as highlighted by Mark
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. Loc 192
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”?” Loc 592
while #metoo was dominating headlines, the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy—a story about male sexual domination—was becoming the highest-selling book series of the decade Loc 624
You simply cannot beat reality at its own game. As the philosopher H. H. Farmer put it, “When you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.” Loc 670
As the West secularized, the locus points of authority moved from God, Scripture, and the church to the Enlightenment-based triad of science, research, and the university. This new seat of secular authority then redefined what can be known (things like mathematics and biology and not things like right, wrong, and God). In doing so, it conveniently moved subjects like religion and ethics into the domain of belief, by which most people mean opinion, feeling, or just wishful thinking.As the world globalized and we became more aware of other religious worldviews, Westerners began to view religion as just a collection of opinions for private, therapeutic purposes, not as the type of thing that can be known. Some, following postmodernists like Foucault, went so far as to claim that knowledge—or even truth itself—is a form of oppression. Loc 771
They viewed them as reality. This is one of the starkest differences between the gospel of Jesus and other major world religions; more than any other form of spirituality, the New Testament is based on events in history. The Bible is full of times, dates, names, places. The four Gospels aren’t mythology but history. The Scripture writers constantly advocated for a faith that isn’t opposed to knowledge but based on knowledge. Jesus defined eternal life as a form of knowledge: “This is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” Loc 800
The question isn’t, Do you have faith? But who or what do you have faith in? Loc 810
One way to think about temptation is to see all temptation as the appeal to believe a lie, to believe an illusion about reality. - Loc 973
Let’s talk for a minute about spiritual formation. If you’re new to that language, all I mean by spiritual formation is the process by which we are formed in our spirits, or inner persons, into the image of Jesus. Or conversely, deformed into the image of the devil. Loc 1167
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. Loc 1365
The key is not just to think about Scripture, but to think Scripture. Loc 1371
Happiness has become about feeling good, not being good. The good life has become about getting what we want, not becoming the kind of people who want truly good things. Loc 1687