What we refer to as our character is the sum of the qualities describing how we are. Your character has been around much longer than you probably realize. Your character qualities are part of your spirit, and your spirit existed before you were born.1 In this life, your character continues wherever it left off before you were born.
Character qualities develop long before an individual encounters a situation where they are externally demonstrated. Your character can change, but it is heavily influenced by what it was before. What a person thinks, feels, and does issues from deep within them,2 according to a character that has been established through every previous thing they did, said, thought, and felt. Your life to this point provides a long list of demonstrations of who you really are. Each day of a person’s life is a demonstration of the running effects of their character, with the long-term effects of their long-term character prominently featuring in things big and small. Just as an apple with a rotten core will disintegrate from the inside out, a person with a rotten heart will give and experience corruption in all that they do. Meanwhile, a noble person will exude nobility in all they do and incline all around them toward greater nobility. An organized person will have an organized life, a hectic person will have a hectic life, an ambitious person will have a life full of accomplishment, a virtuous person will have a virtuous life, and so on. The constant expression of character traits coalesce into ever more noticeable arcs in life. While God’s provision for faith dampens the immediate consequences of choices, the cumulative outcomes of a person’s life overcome this obfuscation, more clearly demonstrating their character traits.
You can learn to see the clues that you create daily that indicate the content of your character. Your interactions with the world are a much clearer indication of how you actually are than what you think or how you feel about yourself.3
Footnotes
- 1. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5, NKJV) ↩
- 2. And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man. (Mark 7:20-23) ↩
- 3. A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things. (Matthew 12:35) ↩