God knows your potential and how you can achieve it

God knows how good you could be. He knows how you can become that way, and he knows why becoming that way would be worthwhile, correctly understanding the benefit that your achieved potential would render to yourself and others. He also knows everything needed to persuade you to walk in that way.

You don’t know your true potential any more than a slab of stone imagines the kind of statue it could be. The sculptor alone knows the stone’s potential, which combines the raw qualities of the rock with the skill of the sculptor. Similarly, God’s assessment of your potential lies far beyond who you are now. He can hone you into what has the greatest value, which is likely to be different both than what you would consider possible, and what you would consider valuable.

God knows your potential and how to achieve it because he already has done the same himself.¹ Because he has already acquired the perfect character, God’s appraisal of value is denominated exclusively in terms of similarity to himself. A person’s value consists of how much like him they have become:

Serve me by following me. My servants will do, think, and feel as they believe I would in all things, according to their present understanding. A man’s value in the eyes of the Father is accounted by how much like me he is. (John 12:26, Author’s Reflection)

The potential of man is to acquire God’s happiness through the acquisition of God’s character. The more you get to know God, the greater your idea of your own potential will become.²

God has an ideal character, but it is not easy to discover or emulate

God’s character qualities are those with the greatest worth. God’s character consists of all qualities that an ideal person would have. If we accept the idea that God is the happiest of all beings, and we seek greater happiness, honesty requires us to learn to think, feel, and act as he does.

Choosing to acquire the character qualities of God is a challenge because you don’t know them, and even when they are shown to you, you will find them less attractive the further you are from them.

Your present idea of God is very far from the whole truth. Because God is unique, nothing less than him can adequately and fully describe who he is. It is so difficult to convey how God is that it is not a stretch to characterize the whole purpose of creation as being for this end. The staggering scale and magnificence of the universe attests to the difficulty of the puzzle of conveying more of God’s character to mankind. The only way to learn more about God is to first live up to all you presently know. As you learn more about God’s character and live up to everything you learn, he will show you more about himself.³

The character qualities of God are not found attractive to those to whom they are revealed. The natural man has an embedded preference for things that are less than what is best. When improvements are revealed to the natural man, the natural reaction is to see them as bitter, not sweet. Invitations to improve will either be seen as requiring the loss of what seems more valuable—and therefore, as something other than improvement.

Everything God is, desires, and does leads to something better.⁴ However, it will only seem that way to you to the extent that you have and exercise faith—the ability to honestly perceive, reason about, decide, and act on what is logically best. Anything you are required to set aside in your path to become more like God is either something you don’t really have, can’t presently have, can’t enduringly keep, or wouldn’t want if you knew better.

Only the character qualities of God endure eternally against every opposition.⁵ Only God’s character qualities will yield the greatest joy over the greatest extent of time. Any degree of difference from God guarantees eventual disillusionment. What lies outside of how he is cannot remain.⁶ What lies outside of how he is will eventually either succumb to the need for change or face annihilation.⁷