Chase The Kangaroo

What Live No Lies reveals about erosion, comfort, and quiet agreement

”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

I didn’t finish Live No Lies feeling corrected.
I finished it feeling exposed.

Not because John Mark Comer told me something new, but because he named something I had stopped guarding.

That difference matters.

I didn’t assume neutrality. I was lulled into it.

Little by little, without any clear moment of surrender, I grew accustomed to what once would have unsettled me. The pace of media. The constant inputs. The background noise of outrage, desire, anxiety, and convenience. None of it felt dramatic enough to resist. None of it felt dangerous enough to confront. It just felt normal.

And that’s the point.

Formation doesn’t announce itself

Comer’s central framework is tidy. Almost deceptively so.

Lies lead to disordered desires.
Disordered desires harden into destructive habits.

It’s clean. It’s direct. And it lands because it doesn’t start with behavior. It starts with agreement.

That’s where the book pressed closest for me.

I’ve spent enough time thinking about formation to know that we are always being shaped. What I hadn’t reckoned with was how often I had stopped questioning the stories I was absorbing, the assumptions I was entertaining, the small internal concessions I was making in the name of comfort, efficiency, or staying informed.

I didn’t adopt lies outright. I stopped objecting to them.

Occupation by consent

One of the most unsettling ideas in the book is the language of war. Not the loud, cinematic version, but the sober one.

The soul is contested ground.
The world, the flesh, and the devil are not metaphors.

If that’s true, then distraction is not neutral. Comfort is not harmless. And media is not just a tool. It is formative.

Occupation does not always come by force. More often, it arrives by familiarity.

You don’t notice the erosion because nothing feels taken from you all at once. Attention is surrendered in minutes. Convictions soften through repetition. Resistance fades because everything still works. Life still functions. You still mean well.

But good intentions, left unexamined, lose ground.

The lie beneath the habit

What Live No Lies does well is refuse to let habits take the blame alone.

Scrolling is not the issue.
Consumption is not the core problem.
Neither is technology.

The deeper question is simpler and harder.

What have I come to believe about comfort, fulfillment, identity, and control that makes these habits feel inevitable?

That question turns the light inward. It did for me.

Not toward shame, but toward responsibility.

Formation is not something that happens to us. It happens with our permission, even when that permission is passive, distracted, or half-conscious.

A quiet warning worth heeding

This is not a book that shouts. It doesn’t need to.

Its warning is quiet, which makes it more dangerous to ignore.

If your inner life feels fragmented.
If your practices don’t match your professed values.
If your good intentions keep losing to familiar patterns.

This book will help you understand why.

Not by blaming the culture alone, but by asking where you’ve made peace with what you once resisted.

That is not an accusation. It’s an invitation.

To reclaim attention.
To question agreements.
To remember that erosion is reversible, but only once it’s named.

Live No Lies is worth reading now, while the ground can still be taken back.