Discovering and correcting the limits of your model of Christ

Live up to what you presently know to discover what lies beyond it

You don’t know how the Father would actually live in your place, but your estimate of how he would grow in breadth, depth, and accuracy as you live up to your best present belief.

While you cannot receive the blessings of being like Jesus beyond the extent to which you are like him, you can be free from the moral punishment of sin by living up to how you currently believe him to be. The gospel provides a way for you to be forgiven for the inadequacies and errors of your model of how God is as long as you live according to how you understand him to be, try your hardest to learn more about him, and respond correctly to invitations to improve it.

Those who know something about God cannot sin by following their idea of what he would do in their place. Doing what you sincerely believe is right will always bring you closer to God, no matter how wrong you actually are.¹

You can and should confidently live as you believe Jesus would in your place. However, the confidence you have in what you presently understand does not excuse you for ignoring the evidence that something better is needed or rejecting potentially better ideas or actions when they are presented to you.

You should desire to know more about God all of the time,² but you should never be worried about what you can’t yet see or understand.³ God precisely orders reality to provide the ideal circumstances to all people at all times in order to provide the greatest opportunity for all to come to him as much as they are willing to.⁴

A detailed model of Christ is needed to more fully understand and address the differences between you and him

By arranging your present understanding of Jesus into a model of his character, you will more readily recognize opportunities to do what Jesus would in your place and notice areas where you need to learn more in order to know what he would do in your place.

While most people are simple enough that a lightweight model can accurately represent most of what there is to know about them, the Lord is the most sophisticated and deep individual who ever lived. Simple people can be accurately represented with simple rules like “Karen likes flowers” or “Bob doesn’t eat pork.” God is not simple. In order to adequately describe God, a much more sophisticated model is required.

The book Joy on Purpose provides a framework called the Life Plan that can be used to describe a person’s character in any level of detail desired. That framework consists of purpose, qualities, values, beliefs, goals, and tasks. Your purpose describes why you are. Your qualities describe how you are. Your values define what is important. Your beliefs provide a mapping between your purpose, qualities, and values to how you apply them to your actions. Your goals describe what you want. Your tasks describe what you do to accomplish those goals. If you knew someone well enough to write a specific enough Life Plan to adequately describe their purpose, qualities, values, beliefs, goals, and tasks, you could accurately predict what they would do and why they would do it in any situation.

The Lord’s goals and tasks are, ultimately, what you are after. These represent the application of his character to the choices you make in how you spend your time each day and why you do so. As you more fully and accurately ascertain the other portions of the Lord’s Life Plan, your idea of his goals and tasks will become more complete and correct.

Because there is more to know about God than any other person, his Life Plan is longer and more detailed than anyone else’s. While his purpose is discussed in part in this book, more can and will be said about it, and his qualities,⁵ values,⁶ and beliefs⁷ require their own volumes to even begin to address. However, even an initial attempt at formulating his Life Plan will result in substantial progress in understanding what he is like and becoming like him versus the unintentional and disorganized effort made by most Christians. For now, all of these categories in your version of the Lord’s Life Plan can be initially populated with what you presently know.

Train your model by learning about and explaining the past

You have to know and be like the Lord in order to have greater experiences with him. This means that much of the initial design of your model will rely on observations of God made by those who know him better than you. While you can use third party observations about God to formulate your initial ideas about God, you will have to test and refine them through your own experiences. You have to search out, collate, and think about the stories about God that you’ve read or heard from others. You have to make hypotheses about the character of God, test them, and pay attention to the results. Building a model of God’s character through observations of others is like reverse engineering a computer program. Everything you know about what the program does is based on your interactions with the effects of the code, and not the code itself. To learn everything needed to recode your own version of the program, you’d have to use the program a lot—not just for a long time, but also in many situations, including in uncommon situations, and so it is with building your model of God.

The bulk of your model of God will at first be based on what you can learn about him from the scriptures. Over time, your own personal experiences with him will grow to be significant and frequent enough that they will amplify the content and value of what you can extract from the scriptures while also providing a rich data source of their own.

Your first objective in modeling how the Lord would live in your place is figuring out how to explain how he lived in his own time and place. It’s quite difficult to accurately estimate what Jesus would do in your place if you aren’t even aware of what he did in his time.⁸

A sample of the Lord’s thoughts, feelings, and actions across a variety of situations and through time is provided in the scriptures. Every story about God provides a data point that you can include in training your model. Because God does not change, we can build an estimation of his character through producing a model that fits all of the examples provided.⁹

The scriptures are a raw material, and while some verses have immense stand-alone application, the best results only occur through significant, intentional processing over time. For best results, the principles present in the scriptures need to be extracted and applied to the specific situations in which you find yourself.¹⁰ It is not easy to extract lessons about the character of Christ from the scriptures, but it is the most valuable way they can be used and the reason for which they were provided. You will extract a greater volume of information at higher accuracy from the scriptures over time as you do your best to understand and apply what they teach you about the Lord while remaining open-minded.

The process of improving your model of Christ

Discovering someone’s character requires more time and effort as their sophistication increases. As the most sophisticated being, God’s character is significantly more difficult to comprehend than anyone else’s. One way of measuring how well you know someone is counting how often you have to ask them what they think about something. The better you know someone, the more accurately you can anticipate their thoughts, feelings, and actions in and about any given situation. The more you know God’s character, the more clearly you will know his will without the need for immediate and new revelation. The more you do not know God’s will, the more depth or breadth you need in your model of Jesus. Your model of Christ will not be complete until it includes, explains, and predicts all observations possible in life—all of creation and every circumstance.

Improving your model of Christ is described in the scriptures as “proving what is good” or “laying hold of every good thing.”¹¹ It is a process of learning everything you can, applying it every way you know, and assessing the results. It is a never-ending search for improvement.

The completeness and correctness of your model of the Lord’s character will increase line upon line through the following cycle:¹²

• You apply observations of God to your model by hypothesizing about or adjusting descriptions of his character.
• You test the model and gain new observations about God by living it.
• You repeat the process.

Incrementally, you better understand what God would do in your place, why he would do it, what he would not do, and why he would not do it. Over time and through experience, you can increase the coherence, sharpen the accuracy, widen the breadth, and deepen the depth of your model.

Increasing the coherence of your model of Christ

The coherence of your model is a question of how consistent and complete it is. Increasing the coherence of your model will require behavior that directly contradicts the training of most religious people. Religious people tend to develop a strong tendency to turn away from any apparent inconsistencies or contradictions they might find in scripture. This tendency is so strong that, for many, they don’t even notice themselves doing it. They are taught that questioning their current beliefs is a sign of a lack of faith, when the reality is quite the opposite.

Apparent inconsistencies or contradictions are invitations to discover and correct limits in your beliefs. A considerable portion of the length and significance of the Lord’s teaching in the gospels was given in response to clarifying questions asked to him. And yet, on so many occasions, Jesus’ contemporaries failed to ask him about things he said or did that they were unsure about or perplexed by.¹³ It’s sad to think of how much more we might have if they had the faith to ask him.

You ought to vigorously pester God with sincere questions whenever you encounter anything in scripture or life that:

• You do not understand.
• You could not explain to another, including those with very different intellectual capabilities or experiential backgrounds.
• Seems like something God would not do.
• Seems to be anything but the greatest possible expression of perfect love.

For example, most Christians struggle to reconcile God’s qualities of justice and mercy. Can you explain how he resolves the conflict between them? As another related example, the Christian world struggles to reconcile the God of the Old Testament and God of the New; can you reconcile the two without violating the principle that God doesn’t change?¹⁴

Instead of avoiding apparent inconsistencies and contradictions, you should seek them out! Not only will you vastly improve the accuracy and extent of your beliefs, you will also increase your confidence in them and your ability to convincingly explain them to those who do not have the faith that you have exercised by searching out and addressing apparent inconsistencies and contradictions.

Increasing the accuracy of your model of Christ

The accuracy of your model of God is a measure of the similarity between what you believe he would think, feel, and do, and how he would actually think, feel, and do.

The accuracy of your model of God is measured by how frequently you are proven incorrect in your beliefs about God, and by how much it matters. Error in more important things will matter more than equal error in less important things.¹⁵ Error in your model can be revealed by new things you learn about God, negative outcomes you face as a result of following your present ideas about him,¹⁶ and sufficient arguments about him provided by those who know him better than you.

Every time you are surprised by someone you thought you knew, you reveal the limits of your model of their character. Each time someone surprises you in what they do, why they do it, and how they

feel in doing so, it indicates a new way you can increase your familiarity with them. Even when you know a person very well, and even when that person isn’t very deep, you can still be surprised when their behavior in some new or even familiar situation strongly deviates from your well-informed expectation. You can accurately predict the thoughts, feelings, and actions of normal people after getting to know them very little. Accurately predicting God requires knowing him very well. Until then, he will continuously surprise you. The apostles spent three years with the Lord, and yet they were frequently surprised by his behavior.¹⁷

God corrects our errors by precept and experience. He exposes us to people who know better than we do as long as such people exist, and when we refuse them or surpass them, sends us experiences that expose us to the consequences of our inadequate beliefs in order to motivate us to search for and empower us to identify them.

Your understanding of God’s character is not static. It can and should improve over time. You must come to believe the being, no matter the particulars. All disciples of Christ believe that God is the epitome of good, that all he does is the best that can be done, that he knows everything, that he loves you more than you love yourself, and that every aspect of your life is precisely oriented toward your greatest benefit. However, your belief of how these qualities translate into specific actions can and should change in significant ways over time. Don’t be surprised when your previously held beliefs are proven to be false. Constraining improvements of your model of Christ’s character to what you already believe about him will significantly limit what the Lord can teach you about himself. The more tenaciously you cling to contradicted beliefs, the more your future mistakes will resemble those you’ve made in the past.

Some are driven in their unwillingness to change their beliefs by the misguided idea that clinging to refuted beliefs about God is a measure of your fidelity to him. True trust in God lies in how he actually is, not in the limited particulars of your estimate of how you thought he was. The key goal in this process is to develop you to the point where you achieve maximal teachability while preserving maximal trust in God. A willingness to let go of what you previously believed about him is not just a part of exercising trust in God, but a non-negotiable piece of building greater trust in him. Those who trust God the most are the most willing to change their minds when he corrects them.¹⁸ You have arrived at this goal when you reach the point where God can easily and instantly modify your views of reality, good, evil, and himself without negatively affecting your absolute reliance upon and trust in him.

The need to remain pliable in response to God’s ongoing instruction is not an excuse for irregular obedience to how you believe God to be. You have to develop a model of God’s character and steadfastly follow it, even while being completely pliable to correction of that model at all times and in all places. When you fail to advance your model, or fail to update your life in response to those updates, you deviate from the ideal given your present understanding; you cease to optimally advance towards God, as far as you know him; you fail to precisely reflect your sincere understanding of how he is given your present understanding, you fail to walk in the experiences he has ordained to render to you the greatest blessing and fullest future improvement, and you fail to demonstrate him to others as far as you are able.

Increasing the depth of your model of Christ

The depth of your knowledge of God is a measure of how much of what there is to know about him is known to you. How detailed is your knowledge of God? Can you describe him with the same level of detail as your earthly father?

It is fairly straightforward to draw a list of God’s character qualities from the scriptures. However, as long as your understanding of the application and interaction of these qualities remains simplistic, being able to list them won’t help you predict how God thinks, feels, or acts. A deeper understanding of what God’s qualities mean is needed to predict his behavior, particularly in how they are practically applied. God is the deepest of all beings.¹⁹ A complex being like God cannot be accurately described in simple terms. The simpler your model of God is, the more frequently it will be incorrect.

In order to add detail to your model of God, you have to observe and think about life in higher detail. Low awareness people can be accurately predicted without much consideration of their circumstance because very little of what they do depends on the details of their situation. God’s behavior is optimized across all of reality. He is aware of everything, and accurately predicting what he thinks, feels, and does in a given situation requires knowing a lot about the situation.

The more details with which you fit your model, the more correct that model will be. When thinking, studying, and asking about how God would behave in a given situation, use as much detail as you can. You need to know not just what he would do, think, or feel in general, but in a given situation. You need to know not just what he would do, think, or feel, but what he would not do, think, or feel, and why. For example, when you read that he did a certain thing in the scriptures, ask what about that specific situation made his action the best it could be. Enumerate other options he had and figure out why their long-term net benefit was less than what he chose. Every additional detail you learn in seeking God’s will provides you with a clue to improve your model.

Increasing the breadth of your model of Christ

The breadth of your knowledge of God is a measure of how many situations in which you have an idea of how he would be. Most Christians incorrectly think that the Lord only cares about certain portions of their lives. Do you think that the Father only cared about what Jesus did in certain portions of his life? Or, as Jesus said, did he

always do what pleased the Father?²⁰ Though the segment a Christian thinks God cares about varies according to their denomination, nearly every Christian thinks the gospel is a list of rules, beyond which God has no opinion whatsoever. The truth is that every second of your life effects your situation here and hereafter. The example of Jesus wasn’t given just so you knew how to act at church. You should know how the Lord would think, feel, and act in every situation. Learn what God would do when your tire goes flat on your way to work, or you get Lyme’s disease, or your young child is scared. The problem is that nearly all Christians either don’t understand how to model Jesus’ character, don’t care to do the work required to do so or—unfortunately—quite enjoy the off-books areas of life given to them through their limited application of the Lord’s example.

To know God requires knowing how Jesus would think, feel, and act at all times and in all places, not just in the circumstances described by the rules taught by your church,²¹ and not just in situations described in the scriptures. God is bigger than any box into which man tries to stuff him. He cannot be contained in any building, day of the week, volume of books, or list of topics. Those who seek to limit the domain of God or who only look for him at certain times or certain places will forever limit how much of him they find. He is in and through all things, and you must look for him in and through all things if you ever hope to see more of him than you have while only looking for him in specific places or at specific times.

God’s wisdom touches every possible circumstance.²² There isn't anything that God can’t improve. There is no thing, no circumstance, no time or place where more information about or from God would not make it immeasurably better.²³ All things different from God are less and worse than God and therefore would be greater and better by becoming more like him. God not only has something to say about all things at all times,²⁴ but he has something better to say about all things at all times.²⁵ The will of God is to make all things in earth just as they are in heaven.²⁶ Jesus Christ is the great high priest,²⁷ and he stands ready to improve everything²⁸ that can be contemplated, done, or experienced up to and including making it just like it is in heaven.²⁹ When properly understood and lived, the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively brings divine joy and meaning into even the most mundane elements of life. You don’t walk with God by avoiding normal life, but by bringing his glory into normal life through learning and living as he would in each aspect of it. Learning and living as Jesus would even in the most mundane-seeming situations provide you with the blessings of being in God’s presence even amidst the most temporal of situations and demonstrate his glory to those who would not observe it in a religious setting.

Limits in your breadth of knowledge of God become apparent whenever you find yourself in a situation where you don’t know what Jesus would think, feel, or do. The disciples showed the limit in the breadth of their knowledge of Jesus when he slept through a storm at sea so violent that they expected it would kill them.³⁰ When he raised a dead girl back to life, “...they were astonished with a great astonishment.” (Mark 5:42) When Jesus walked on the water, “...they were sore amazed in themselves beyond measure, and wondered.” (Mark 6:51)

In order to expand the breadth of your model of Christ, identify situations where your current model does not provide sufficient information to know God’s will. “Search in the light of Christ” (see Moroni 7:19) by thinking,³¹ studying the scriptures,³² praying,³³ and asking those whom you have reason to believe might know God better than you. Each observation you make through seeking God’s will in a new situation provides you with a clue to improve your model. The more examples across which you fit your model, the more correct that model will be.

Measuring and increasing the confidence of your model

Do you have an idea of the confidence in each of your ideas about Jesus? You need confidence in your model of how Jesus is in order to follow his example in spite of any opposition. The confidence you have in your model of Jesus will affect the power you have with God.³⁴ God’s power comes through faith,³⁵ and your faith in him increases with your confidence in your beliefs about him. You can only have as much faith as you have confidence in your idea of what God would do in your place. In order to have greater power with God and learn more about him, you will have to develop a greater sense of your confidence levels in your beliefs about him, yourself, others, and the world.

What is the confidence threshold required for faith? It isn’t certainty, but it takes much more than a guess. For any idea, how thoroughly have you sought out more information?³⁶ What are your reasons to believe, and what are your reasons to doubt? You should hold and act on any belief for which your reasons to believe are greater than your reasons to doubt.

How would you measure confidence? Belief and doubt should both be based on reason, not feelings. Strong belief in something without strong reasons is not faith; it is delusion. Strong doubt in something without strong reasons is not skepticism, it is unbelief.

How would you increase confidence? You gain confidence through observation, reasoning, and experimentation, and the greatest confidence cannot exist without all three. You can’t have confidence beyond your willingness to test your ideas, evaluate alternatives, and go with what works the best.

Recognize situations where you have more or less confidence than your evidence suggests is reasonable. In situations where you are overconfident, adopt more humility by arguing less often or intensely with and listening more honestly to those with whom you disagree, and spend more time searching for better ideas or evidence. In situations where you are underconfident, adopt more courage and consistency in acting and speaking according to what you believe.³⁷