Live No Lies

Have you ever wondered why you feel a constant inner conflict—between what you know to be good and the subtle pull toward everything that isn't? In Live No Lies, John Mark Comer argues that much of this tension comes from a spiritual war raging both inside you and around you. But this isn't a war of guns and bombs—it's a war on lies. Comer contends that the three enemies of the soul—the world, the flesh, and the devil—conspire through deceitful ideas that appeal to disordered desires and become normalized in society. This ancient framework, revived for the modern age, explains why so many of us feel emotionally anxious, morally confused, and spiritually defeated.

Comer begins by reframing what it means to follow Jesus today—not as a passive lifestyle but as active resistance against falsehood. He proposes that every generation faces its own version of the same underlying battle: truth versus lies. The devil, he writes, is not a mythic creature with horns but an intelligent, invisible being whose greatest trick is convincing us he doesn't exist. His weapon? Lies. Not just spoken lies, but imaginative ideas that distort reality and derail human flourishing. The author invites readers to step into spiritual formation as a kind of warfare—a process of replacing lies with truth and rewiring the mind to live in peace.

The Battle Begins in the Mind

Comer draws on the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus, who taught that demons attack through logismoi—wrong thoughts that infiltrate the mind. For both Evagrius and Comer, the fight for truth is fought not outside the self but within it. Lies—like "I am unlovable" or "God doesn’t care"—shape how we live and who we become. Victory comes when we learn to recognize these distortions and respond with truth, just as Jesus countered the devil in the wilderness using Scripture. By filling our minds with the truth of God’s Word and the presence of the Spirit, we reclaim our mental territory.

The Three Enemies of the Soul

The book’s central argument revolves around the ancient framework of the three enemies of the soul: the devil (who lies), the flesh (which desires), and the world (which normalizes those desires). While these categories might sound archaic, Comer carefully modernizes them. He explains that the devil’s strategy uses deceitful ideas, the flesh’s weakness responds with disordered desires, and the world’s influence amplifies those desires until sin feels normal. Together, these form a narrative of human and cultural deformation.

Truth as Reality

For Comer, truth isn’t abstract—it’s reality, “what you run into when you’re wrong.” Lies, on the other hand, are unreality—mental maps that don’t correspond to how life actually works. When we live according to false maps, we suffer not because God is cruel but because reality does not bend to our illusions. In this way, believing truth means aligning yourself with the grain of the universe, the same principle theologian Dallas Willard described as “living in congruence with reality.” The truth will indeed set you free—but not until it’s finished with you.

Why This Matters Now

Comer situates this spiritual battle within today’s cultural moment, which he calls “digital Babylon.” In our screens and feeds, ideology, anxiety, and deception dominate. From political propaganda to self-help slogans, we face what he calls a “dirty war” of misinformation. The greatest danger isn’t physical violence but moral confusion—a generation unable to distinguish true from false, good from evil. Amid this chaos, Comer calls you back to ancient practices: prayer, silence, fasting, confession, and community. These are not mere rituals but counter-strategies that open your soul to the Spirit’s power.

Ultimately, Live No Lies is a manifesto for spiritual resistance. It teaches that the way to stand firm in a world of falsehood is to root your entire being in reality as revealed by Jesus—the Truth incarnate. The goal isn’t perfection or moral superiority but freedom: the ability to live at peace with God, others, and yourself.

Comer opens his exploration of evil with the devil, the ancient “father of lies.” He reexamines the familiar biblical figure through a modern lens. Instead of a cartoonish villain, the devil represents a real intelligence bent on deception. In Jesus’s words, “When he lies, he speaks his native language.” The devil’s means is falsehood, his end is destruction, and his battleground is the human mind. The author compares this strategy to Russian dezinformatsiya—propaganda designed to exhaust critical thinking and annihilate truth.

Ideas as Mental Maps

Every person, Comer writes, navigates life through mental maps—sets of ideas we trust to correspond with reality. If our maps are true, we find peace; if they’re false, we end up lost. Lies distort our moral and emotional navigation. The devil’s brilliance lies in offering ideas that feel right but lead away from truth. These range from cultural patterns (“love equals desire”) to personal distortions (“I’ll never be enough”). The result is not just moral confusion but spiritual captivity.

Lies Become Lives

Drawing on psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, Comer shows how believing lies transforms not only how you think but who you become. He illustrates this with examples: a worker who believes “I’m only as good as my performance,” a child who internalizes “I’m worthless.” Over time, unreality takes root, forming neural pathways that shape character. Even modern neuroscience, such as Jeffrey Schwartz’s work on You Are Not Your Brain, supports this idea—our attention rewires our identity.

Weaponized Words

Comer warns that ideas can be weaponized. Nazi Germany, sexual ideologies, and modern digital propaganda prove that lies can enslave entire societies. Philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that the ideal subject of totalitarianism is not the fanatic but the person for whom truth and falsehood no longer matter. Winston Churchill predicted a future of “empires of the mind,” where wars are fought with ideology instead of bombs. That future, Comer insists, is now.

Faith as Knowledge of Reality

Finally, Comer reframes faith not as blind belief but as trust based on knowledge. Following Dallas Willard’s philosophy, he argues that truth is knowable—Jesus came to testify to reality itself. To live by faith is to practice fidelity to this reality. Discipleship, then, is intellectual and existential warfare: replacing misleading mental maps with Jesus’s maps to a life that actually works.

Comer moves next to the second enemy—the flesh. This isn’t just the body; it’s the set of primal instincts for self-gratification and survival that resist spiritual growth. Drawing on Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Comer contrasts the “desires of the flesh” with “life by the Spirit.” In a culture that equates freedom with doing whatever you want, he contends that true freedom is found not in indulgence but in mastery over the self.

Freedom and Slavery Reversed

According to Comer, modern liberty is a paradox. What we call freedom—unrestrained choice—often leads to slavery. Addiction, anxiety, and compulsive consumption reveal how we become “slaves to whatever has mastered us.” He quotes Edmund Burke’s 1791 insight: “Men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Conversely, choosing limits out of love leads to liberation. True freedom, Comer insists, is the power to choose what is good, not just permission to choose at all.

Desire and Discipline

Comer uses vivid analogies from parenting and habit formation to explain the interplay between willpower and Spirit-power. The flesh thrives when fed; it dies when starved. Practices such as fasting and confession are tools for this mortification—the deliberate dying of self-centered impulses. He compares the process to training: fasting teaches your body to suffer with joy and to no longer panic when denied its cravings.

The Role of Guilt

In a surprising section, Comer rehabilitates guilt. Western culture equates guilt with shame and avoids both, yet guilt, he explains, is moral pain—a healthy signal that something needs healing. Like parental correction that restores a child to love, guilt can guide you back to wholeness. Shame says, “I am bad”; guilt says, “What I did was bad.” The Spirit uses guilt to convict and restore, never to condemn.

Living by the Spirit

Ultimately, willpower alone cannot overcome the flesh; only the Spirit’s empowering presence can. Comer quotes researcher Leslie Jamison and psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz to show that transformation requires a “power beyond willpower.” Spiritual disciplines—such as fasting, confession, and Sabbath—create space for that higher power to work. “Willpower directs the body into spiritual practices,” Comer says, “so the Spirit can do what willpower can’t.”

Comer reimagines spiritual disciplines as acts of warfare. Drawing on Paul’s injunction to “stand firm,” he explains how Jesus fought temptation not with aggression but with truth and the Spirit. In the wilderness, Jesus combined silence, solitude, fasting, and Scripture to expose lies and stay rooted in reality. Comer calls this model your battle plan for the digital age: to resist isolation and noise with Spirit and truth.

Silence and Solitude

In quiet prayer, the illusions of your “false self” are revealed. Henri Nouwen described solitude as “the furnace of transformation.” Comer urges readers to see it not as escape but as confrontation—the arena where you distinguish God’s voice from the devil’s. Distraction and hurry, he warns, are modern tools of isolation. When Satan cannot make you bad, he makes you busy.

Scripture as Countertalk

Comer revisits Evagrius’s method of antirrhesis—countertalking with Scripture. By naming demonic thoughts and replying with biblical truth, you rewire your brain around reality. Quoting neuroscientist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, he explains how redirected attention literally reshapes neural pathways. The goal is not information but transformation: to think Scripture, not just think about it.

Curating Your Inputs

Finally, Comer reclaims an old wisdom: “Garbage in, garbage out.” What you give your mind to, you become. He laments that most Christians spend thousands of hours immersed in digital content but only minutes in Christ-centered reflection. The solution isn’t withdrawal but discernment—editing your stream and filling your attention with what is true, lovely, and pure. “Attention,” he quotes poet Mary Oliver, “is the beginning of devotion.”

The third enemy, the world, represents what happens when collective sin becomes culture. Comer defines it as “a system of ideas, values, and practices institutionalized in a culture corrupted by rebellion against God and the redefinition of good and evil.” In simple terms, the world is what occurs when flesh goes viral.

From Culture to Anti-Culture

Citing sociologist Philip Rieff, Comer argues that the West no longer cultivates order but anti-culture—deconstructing moral wisdom handed down for generations. Practices once radical in Jesus’s time (monogamy, humility, nonviolence) became traditional because they worked. Today, those traditions are dismissed, and chaos reigns. Freedom has turned into aimless autonomy.

The Lust of the Flesh, Eyes, and Pride of Life

Comer reminds readers that John identified three arena temptations centuries ago: lust of the flesh (pleasure), lust of the eyes (greed), and pride of life (power). These same dynamics appear in the garden and in Jesus’s desert temptation—humans perpetually choosing self over God. Yet culture now celebrates what Scripture warns against: selfish ambition, sexual indulgence, and pride disguised as authenticity.

Ideology and Idolatry

Comer warns that ideology—the secular moral religion of our time—is the new idolatry. Both Left and Right turn politics into worship, dividing society and substituting moral outrage for transformation. He calls for allegiance not to partisan identity but to baptism: our primary loyalty to Jesus and his kingdom of love. The only true resistance to the world’s pattern is to be transformed by the renewing of the mind.

In the epilogue, Comer returns to Jesus’s revolutionary call: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross.” In a culture obsessed with self-fulfillment, Jesus offers self-denial—not as punishment but as the path to happiness. Quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he writes, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” This death is not merely physical; it’s the daily crucifixion of the self—the axis of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The Cross as Transformation

Comer insists that Jesus didn’t just die for us but showed us how to die. To “come and die” means surrendering autonomy and trusting that God wants our deepest joy, not deprivation. Drawing on Ignatius’s definition of sin—“unwillingness to trust that what God wants for me is only my deepest happiness”—Comer reframes spiritual warfare as radical trust. When you believe this, death to self becomes entry into life.

Calculating the Cost

Bonhoeffer spoke of “the cost of discipleship,” but Comer adds the cost of nondiscipleship. To refuse Jesus’s path costs far more—peace, joy, and purpose. Obedience may demand sacrifice, but sin demands slavery. Jesus’s binary—lose your life or save it—invites a sober evaluation: temporary pleasure or eternal freedom?

Trust as the Ultimate Battle

For Comer, all spiritual warfare boils down to trust. The devil attacks your confidence in God’s goodness. To win, you must surrender—not give up, but yield fully to God. Faith, he explains, isn’t belief without proof but trust without reservations. Only then can you live no lies and step into the kingdom where truth and love reign together.