Learning and Living the Character of Christ

Learning and Living the Character of Christ

Continuously one with God through obedience to how we imagine him to be, as our belief yields to firsthand experience with him, until we become a perfected man, filled with the complete character of Christ. (Ephesians 4:13, Author’s Reflection)

I will incline my desires and actions devoutly towards my understanding of how you are as a heavenly king; ever-increasing in my perception of the holiness of your character and ever-growing towards you as you reveal more of yourself to me. Your truth and your loving kindness give us every reason to seek and emulate you. You have developed your character beyond anyone else and your instructions are the most effective path to become more like you. (Psalm 138:2, Author’s Reflection)

Introduction

The apostle Paul often spoke of knowledge of the Lord as a mystery. Why is the character of God not widely known and so infrequently lived, even among Christians? Perhaps the answer to both questions lies in the true motives of many of those who practice Christianity. How many people seek Jesus in order to better learn and live his will, and how many are merely seeking for ways to inject his power and peace into what they want instead? How many people are seeking Jesus to find better ways of being, and how many are merely seeking for a way to feel better about how they already are? It is hard to find God when you are searching for something else.

The purpose of this book is to provide powerful truths that enable you to learn more about Jesus and become more like him than you otherwise could. There is no topic of greater importance in the gospel of Jesus Christ than the character of Christ. The content of the Lord’s character defines the nature of God, the means of salvation, the quality of eternal life, the power of God, and the reasons why all people should seek to become as he is. The purpose of creation is to provide a means for each person to perceive, value, acquire, and share more of God’s attributes. The acquisition of the attributes of God is the key to greater and longer-lasting joy in and after this life. You learn more about God as you live up to what you already know.

If you are already religious, the arguments and scriptures presented in this book will help you see the limits of your present beliefs and offer more effective alternatives in your quest to draw nearer to God. If you are not yet religious, you will find the description of the gospel as provided in this book to make a lot more sense than the versions you have heard before. In any case, this book will empower you to radically increase the progress you can make towards greater and longer-lasting joy in your life through augmenting your ability to learn about and live like Jesus.

Chapter One introduces the gospel as a process of learning about and becoming more like God, framing this process as living up to what you know about Jesus in order to learn more about him.

Chapter Two makes the case that everything good comes from becoming more like God, and that the more like him you become, the greater your joy, peace, and power will be.

Chapter Three explains salvation and eternal life, showing that both are obtained through learning about and living like Jesus Christ.

Chapter Four presents the power of God as a function of learning about and living like Jesus, describing how God’s power and authority come from his character and can’t exist outside of his purpose.

Chapter Five describes how Jesus learned what the Father was like during his life and presents that process as the example we are to follow. Chapter Six defines justification and sanctification, explaining justification as the decision to submit fully to God as you presently understand him, and sanctification as the process of learning more about Jesus while remaining reconciled to him.

Chapter Seven frames God’s commandments as instructions for building a model of his character and following it in your own life.

Chapter Eight makes the case that you can actually live up to your understanding of how Jesus is, and that you must do so in order to receive forgiveness of your sins and enjoy freedom from guilt.

Chapter Nine presents the definition of submission to God, showing how rare it is to find a Christian who has actually fully adopted the purpose of God.

Chapter Ten delineates what you must do to be born again, what it consists of, and why it is desirable.

Chapter Eleven presents the qualifications for, purpose of, source of, and effects of baptism.

Chapter Twelve makes the case that you know less about God than you think, that you can know much more, and why you should strive to do so.

Chapter Thirteen describes a list of significant barriers that prevent you from learning more about God and what you can do to overcome them.

Chapter Fourteen explores the need to update, extend, and correct your model of the character of Jesus Christ as you learn more about him.

Chapter Fifteen analyzes the important distinction between commandments in the form of rules, principles, and character, making the case that you cannot really know the Lord until you know and live his character.

Chapter Sixteen shows the difference in conditions and outcomes between the different relationships God has with his servants, friends, and sons.

Chapter Seventeen explores the scriptural idioms of the face and presence of God as metaphors for teaching the importance and process of adopting his purpose.

Chapter Eighteen defines the scriptural idiom of “the words of eternal life” so as to show why they should be sought for, where they are found, and how they are obtained.

Chapter Nineteen elucidates how names and titles work in God’s kingdom, what the name of Christ is, how you take it upon yourself, and why you should.

Chapter Twenty extends application of the idea of the name of Christ by defining the scriptural idioms that use it, including “calling upon the name of God,” “swearing by the name of God,” and “believing on the name of God.”

Chapter Twenty One lists some of the many scriptural metaphors of justification and sanctification as horizontal and vertical objects, including the two pieces of the cross, the judgment bar of God, the rod of iron, and the carrying bars of the Ark of the Covenant.

Chapter Twenty Two explores the scriptural metaphor of clothing as an application of the themes of justification and sanctification.

Along with verses from the Bible, this book cites from other sources which are not universally accepted as scripture by all Christians. It is acknowledged that these verses will not be recognized as authoritative by most. It is hoped, however, that their use will support the fact that these ideas were not plucked out of thin air, and that the reader will open-mindedly consider their content even if they are unfamiliar with or unconvinced by their source.

For those curious about the sources cited, brief summaries are listed below.

The Book of Mormon is a record of several peoples led from the Old World to the Americas in ancient times. The book records God’s dealings with them from 2200 BC to 421 AD, at which time their record was buried by the commandment of God in order to protect it during an all-encompassing civil war destroying their society. In 1827, God directed a man named Joseph Smith to the record and inspired him to translate it into English. Though the Book of Mormon is considered scripture by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Mormon churches, those who find value in it are no more compelled to subscribe to a particular church than those who believe in the Bible are compelled to be Catholic.

The Doctrine and Covenants is a record of the dealings of God with Joseph Smith and his followers during his life. While much of the book consists of text of questionable value to those in different times and circumstances than its authors, the book contains many valuable expositions of gospel principles in unrivaled clarity and content.

The Books of Moses and Abraham are accounts by each author reproduced through revelation to Joseph Smith.

Several books originally included in the King James and earlier Bibles but later removed by most Protestant denominations are cited here where the ideas therein are expressed more clearly than can be found elsewhere.

You become more like God by living as you believe him to be

Character is a word used more frequently than it is understood. Your character is what you do, why you do it, and how you feel about it. Your character is the composite of qualities that describe how and why you will think, feel, and act, under what circumstances.

Your character consists of the aspects of yourself that are your choice. Your character can be thought of as what distinguishes you from someone else in all the ways you could choose to be the same.

To understand and, ultimately, improve your character, you’ll have to be more careful and correct in the boundaries you place between what you can and can’t control than many modern people are. Every attribute you could change through choice forms a part of your character. Very few attributes are completely beyond the reach of your choices.

In addition to conflating personal qualities that can and can’t be changed, many people conflate who they are with what they have. Who you are is not defined by what you have. Who you are is completely transferable to any situation, with or without any of your things. Your family, your looks, your health, your friends, your reputation, your money, your career, and your hobbies do not define your character. In fact, your character could be defined as what would remain if everything external in your life were taken away, or even if life itself was taken away. Under this consideration, few people have very much character at all, and what they do have isn’t very good.

You get to choose what your character is. Your choices determine who you are. The choices you make determine your character, not the other way around. You can shape your character like a sculptor shapes clay. Your decisions from one moment to the next are what shape the trajectory of your character.

Character is cumulative and malleable. Character is built or destroyed through successive decisions. Every single thing you do matters. Your character is the summation of all the choices you have made in life to this point. Your character is the trend line of the quality of decisions you make in life. Good choices strengthen and improve your character. Character improvement takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of consistency. Poor choices weaken and degrade your character. Character degradation happens in an instant, is the easiest path, and takes only momentary weakness. Character is not something you can pick up when it is convenient and set down when it is not. Character takes a lifetime to build and a moment to destroy. While one good choice will not demonstrate good character, one terrible choice can demonstrate poor character. Even when you immediately repent, it takes time to demonstrate that you would not make the same poor choice if given another chance.

Whether you use this life to improve or degrade your character, and by how much, is up to you. Character is not something fixed from birth. No matter how your character is now, what it becomes is completely up to you. You can gain or remove anything you choose about what you do, why you do it, and how you feel about it. Who are you? Who do you want to be? What is the difference? No matter the size of the gap between who you are and who you want to be, it is just comprised of one thing: your own choices. As soon as you realize that your choices determine who you are, you can instantly shift who you are by making different decisions. You can design and adopt a completely different character by thinking about how you want to be and choosing according to how that person would.

Living according to the character of Jesus is not the same as reproducing his circumstances. When Jesus said that we should be as he is, he did not mean that we should time travel back 2,000 years, learn Aramaic, adopt ancient clothes, be raised as a Jew, or be crucified by them.

Character is not circumstantial. It is not defined by your surroundings, resources, advantages, or disadvantages, but rather by how you respond to what you can change. You can’t accurately predict how Jesus would live in your place without separating what you can and can’t change. The differences between you and God that lie outside of your control don’t excuse you from changing what lies within your control. The differences between you and God that you can control are limited to the differences in the choices you make when facing the same situation.

How Jesus would live in your situation, subject to your circumstances, is not the same as how he would live in his own. You have a host of advantages he did not have, including internet, hot showers, antibiotics, flushing toilets, clean water, abundant food, cars, and advanced language. He also had a host of advantages you do not have, including greater knowledge, wisdom, and power. In order to know how Jesus would live in your place, you have to adapt his example to the different circumstances you live in.

Jesus knows all things, and you do not. But what would he think, feel, and do if all he knew was what you presently know? He would do the best he could with what he knew, including doing all he could to learn more. Go and live likewise.

Jesus has power to do mighty miracles, and you do not. But what would he think, feel, and do if he didn’t have power to do mighty miracles? He would implement God’s will to the full extent of the power he had. Go and live likewise.

Notice that true limitations are never questions of choice. Suppose you believe that Jesus would always tell the truth. You cannot excuse yourself for doing anything less, because while you can’t decide to have perfect wisdom or miraculous power, you can decide to be honest.

Life presents an unending flow of situations which provide you opportunities to establish, develop, reinforce, or degrade your character. How you respond to life’s endless stream of situational stimuli will show who you are and determine who you become. Over time, your decisions will always close or extend the gap between you and God.

In every moment, you are choosing what your character will become through the decisions you make: what you do, why you do it, and how you feel about it. Can you make your very next decision exactly as Jesus would in your place? If not, can you make your next decision exactly as you sincerely believe Jesus would in your place? If not, can you at least indicate how you sincerely believe Jesus would make that decision? If you don’t know, could you find out?

The purpose of life is to provide all with the opportunity to make their character more like God’s through learning more about what he is like and living as he would. To know someone’s character perfectly is to be able to perfectly predict how they will act, why, and how they feel about it in any situation. You don’t know enough about God to accurately anticipate how he would act, why, and how he would feel in any situation. However, you do have an idea of these things and the ability to seek to learn more to increase the breadth, depth, and accuracy of that idea. As you make decisions as you believe Jesus would in your place, you will learn more about how he would actually live in your place.

No person can go in one step from how they are to how God is, and everyone seems to naturally know that well enough to balk at anyone who suggests that they can be perfect. You can’t be exactly as God is right now. You do not know what God knows, desire what he desires, or desire it as much as he does. In fact, you are so far from how he actually is that you can’t know how far you actually are. And yet, Jesus said very clearly: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) The key to this seeming contradiction lies in the idea that God’s definition of perfect is very different from how we use the word. In the ancient languages, perfect was not the description of an outcome so much as a process; a process that maximally flows and grows to the intended end. To be perfect in Christ is to progress as quickly as possible in your understanding of how he is by living exactly as you believe he would in your place given how you presently understand him to be.

While it is not possible to become how God actually is in a single step, the path towards him is composed of a long series of steps, each of which requires us to be exactly like him, so far as we presently perceive him to be. To be perfectly aligned with your present understanding of God, you have to forsake all things you believe he wouldn’t do in your place while unfailingly doing all things you believe he would do in your place.

Many erroneously consider submission to God as the process. Getting to know God is a process, but obedience is not. The gospel consists of events and processes. It is important to correctly recognize which is which. While learning more about God is a process, obeying him is a choice. Learning more about him is a process, but deciding to submit to him is an event. This event is called repentance. It entails forsaking everything you know of that is contrary to God, and embracing all things that align with him, with the understanding that he will incrementally teach you more and different information than your present understanding of him.

Progress towards God is not all at once with regard to the perfection of God, but it must be all at once with regard to how you understand the perfection of God to be. Our progress towards how God actually is always incremental, but our progress towards how we presently perceive God to be never is. You can’t give your whole soul to God in installments. You can’t sacrifice yourself completely a little at a time. You can’t work yourself up to loving God above all else. You either do or you don’t, and until you do, you don’t.

What is the intended outcome of Christianity? How are adherents to the faith meant to be different as a result of their faith? If the fruit of Christianity is to sometimes do something marginally better than you otherwise would, then it provides no benefit over what many nonChristians already enjoy. Christianity is meant to be so much more than this. Christianity, properly lived, provides the means for a person to continuously become more like Jesus Christ.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is a mechanism to learn what he does, why he does it, and how he does it. The word “gospel” comes from two Old English words meaning “good” and “story.” These two words brilliantly encapsulate what the gospel is: what is good, how to do good, and why to do good. The “good story” is how Jesus is, how and why he became how he is, and how and why we are to become like him.

Common Christianity has lost the fact that the gospel is a mechanism to effect change in us. The gospel enables us to become and remain reconciled to how God would act in our place as we continue increasing in our understanding of how he is. To be a real Christian is to be a disciple of Christ—to learn and live according to how Jesus would in your place.

For far too many, the gospel is a list of things you do or don’t do. Most Christians place their focus on the presence or absence of specific outward actions. While such a low-information representation of the gospel may yield outcomes that are preferable to nothing at all, it is nonetheless woefully inadequate to yield anything near what God intends. The vast difference between the fruits of common Christianity and the historical gospel, as recorded in scripture, continually demonstrate this.

Christianity is not just about going to church. There will always be more Pharisees to fill the seats in church than there are disciples to fulfill the purpose of church. Church is meant to be a means to demonstrate how God is and persuade others to be like him.

Religious rites are not the gospel. They are invitations to become more like Christ, not magical spells that provide you with the blessings of being like him without requiring you to actually become that way. They are symbols demonstrating the requirements and the path to becoming as Christ is.

The gospel is not merely about studying the scriptures. God has enough scribes ready to recite his word, but very few disciples willing to live it. Christianity is not just about what you think about God, but principally how much you know about and act like him.

Disciples of Christ strive to become as much like Jesus as they can be, not as little like Jesus as they can get away with. While many professed Christians use their religion as an excuse for why they don’t have to actually be like Jesus, real Christians find in their religion all the power needed to live as he would in their place and every necessary reason to desire to do so.

Becoming like God is the point and intent of the gospel. The gospel is about who you are and who you become, not just what you do. Jesus Christ is not just a static set of words, actions, or even ideas, and —neither is his gospel. Rather, the gospel of Jesus Christ is a process a process that increases your understanding of who, what, and why Jesus Christ is. We are meant to be like Jesus. The Lord plainly taught that it is his desire and intent that we be like him: to feel how he feels, to think how he thinks, and to do what he does.

The gospel is the solution to the otherwise impossible puzzle of conveying the character of God: What is God like, why should we be the same way, and how do we accomplish it? The breadth and depth of differences between us and God present myriad obstacles that inhibit him from more fully revealing himself to us. In our default state, we are not like God, we do not know what God is like, we would not like him very much if we did, we do not know how to get to know him, and we would not want to even if we did. It is only through the mercy and merits of Christ that this can be accomplished.

The gospel consists of the instruction and persuasive reasons necessary to learn and live the character of God. The gospel of Jesus Christ conveys the content of his character and adequate reasons to adopt it. The gospel is a means of improving our beliefs, feelings, and actions through the incremental revelation of the character of Christ, which provides us a model of how he is and sufficient reasons to make the necessary changes to become that way ourselves. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the process by which God shows you more of how he is while providing you the opportunity, reasons, and capability to become the same way yourself. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a mechanism which yields greater access to, perception of, and acquisition of the character of God by his children. Every facet of the gospel yields greater understanding of how God is, facilitates our becoming more like him in some way, and enables us to help others do the same. By learning and living the gospel, we learn more about how he is and become that way ourselves.

The doctrine of completely emulating Jesus is very difficult for people to hear and believe. When Jesus had performed a cascade of public miracles, he accumulated many who were excited to hear his teachings. He quickly repelled them by teaching them that they must be like him in order to come to the Father.

Modern readers assume that those who heard this sermon had difficulty with it because of the imagery of eating the Lord’s flesh and drinking his blood, but it was actually because the Jews who heard him knew what he meant by this. Like many today, they believed that living their outward rules, showing up to religious events, and participating in religious rites entitled them to God’s blessings, but Jesus taught that they actually had to become like God. Like most Christians today, they were not interested in changing their desires or giving up the wicked things outside of the defined rules of their faith that they knew were wrong.

Some erroneously think that believing that a person can become like God somehow degrades God. Those who contend that a man could never be like God think they are making a statement about the baseness of human nature, not realizing they are simultaneously minimizing the power of God, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and the efficacy of his gospel. The assertion that God is mighty enough to enable man to become more like him is not blasphemous—it is quite the opposite. It doesn’t demean God to believe that he has the power to make us more like he is. It actually glorifies him!

Any increase in goodness in any person can only be from the Father through Christ. As such, any increase in goodness in any person glorifies rather than blasphemes God. God does not lose goodness when more of his goodness is adopted by his children.

To believe that God is mighty enough to make it possible for anyone to choose to be more like him than they are is to believe he is much more powerful than most Christians believe. Given the utter default depravity of mankind, the willingness and ability of God to provide all things necessary to lead any who will follow him to become like him is the greatest possible testament to his power and goodness.

Belief in the divine potential of man is not a statement of the goodness of man, who is fallen, but a statement of the goodness of God, who in his endless mercy and tremendous power finds a way to make holy that which was once unclean. Do not repeat the mistake of Peter in calling unclean what God has cleaned in his own precious blood.

It is not heresy to believe that we can become like God is. Those who deny that we can become like God directly contradict what Jesus taught and demonstrated. Remember, those who killed Jesus accused him of blasphemy for teaching that a person was capable of obtaining the character of the Father.

People fight the idea that we can grow towards God in order to gratify their pride, not because it denigrates God. Those who fight the idea that we can become like God pretend that they are protecting God’s reputation, but they are actually motivated by a desire to protect their own. God being willing to exalt sinners magnifies his glory, but also removes the self-righteousness of those who refuse his gift. Those who continue to sin willfully even though they profess to believe in Jesus are indicted by the idea that their continued sin is due to their own rejection of God and not God’s inability to make them holy.

God’s glory is not limited to God; it can be experienced by and obtained by those who know him, as far as they do. God’s glory comes from what he does, why he does it, and how he does it. So does yours. The only way to gain more of God’s glory is to learn more of what he does, why he does it, and how he does it, and to do the same.

All of God’s creations can experience and possess some measure of his glory. Of all God’s creations, only humankind possesses a form capable of coming up to the understanding and implementation of how he is. Man was not created to be a lesser example of something sort of like God, but to actually become like him. We are not types and shadows of God, but “made in his image,” or made in the likeness of God, with the same potential he has. To be made in the image of God means that a path from how we are to how he is exists. God is the demonstration of our ultimate divine potential. Human potential is denominated in God’s actuality. Our potential is defined by how God is, not how we presently are. He cannot reveal anything about himself to us without simultaneously giving us power to believe, do, and become more than we would have before.

Every aspect of our being is susceptible to improvement toward how God is in that aspect. Improvement is the root mechanism of all miracles in the body, advancement in the mind, and accomplishment in the world. Everything about us tends toward God if we but believe it is possible.

As you learn more about and live more like Jesus, you will increasingly glorify him by demonstrating his goodness more fully to others. To glorify God is to make the divine qualities or their effects more apparent or to bestow them upon someone or something more fully. You cannot glorify God except through thinking, feeling, and acting more like him, or helping others to do the same. Nothing glorifies God more than a person who becomes like him.

God’s glory is demonstrated by men who rise up to become more like him. Jesus lived so fully in emulation of the Father that he said if people knew him, they knew the Father. He commanded us to live in the same way! Jesus said that while he remained on earth, he was the light of the world, but after he was gone, his disciples would be the light of the world. He charges us to be as he would be in our place, to demonstrate to others what he would do if he were here. None of us are interchangeable with Jesus, but all of us can live so that we become indistinguishable from him to those who are less like him than us.

It is not sinful to strive to be like God—it is the very purpose of God, the reason for which he gave himself for us, and a necessary prerequisite for others to learn more about him than they presently know.

God’s character maximizes enduring happiness

Most people would agree that they desire joy, but few intentionally seek it, as demonstrated by the distance between what people say makes them happy and how they actually live. Those who honestly and diligently seek for joy will traverse a path where they actually live according to what they believe will produce it. As they do so, they will learn more accurate appraisals of what options are available in life, what they cost, and what benefit they provide. The path to greater joy begins broad and narrows as the limits of present beliefs are discovered and better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting are discovered and implemented.

All good things come from God, and all good things lead to God. All paths of improvement lead closer to God. Anyone who seeks to improve themselves will become more like God as they do so, even if they do not believe in God or understand what he is like.

Anyone who seeks improvement in life will find greater joy. However, there are barriers to how much joy can be found and how long it can be retained without learning and living correct beliefs about God.

There are limits to how much you can learn about God or live like him without believing that he exists and possessing correct ideas about his character. The more you improve your character, the more you will adopt the character of Christ, and the more you adopt the character of Christ, the more you will improve your character. The character of God does not exist outside of God, and the greatest joy does not exist outside of his character. Anyone who seeks improvement will eventually need to believe that God is real, learn what he is like, and begin to live like him in order to continue progressing.

The more you learn about reality and about the optimal path to obtain the greatest joy within it, the more you will learn about God, because he has already discovered this path and lives this way.

Conversely, the more you learn about God, the more you will learn about the optimal path to the greatest joy given reality.

God’s measure of the worth of things is based on a complete and correct understanding of what other options exist and the true longterm costs and benefits of those options. God knows the value of all things, he knows everything that could happen, he knows every available option, and his character is the best possible way he could be in order to yield the greatest possible joy.

All things do not have the same potential to provide joy. As you reach for and obtain what has and provides greater joy, you will learn more about how God is and become more like him. All things in creation can be arranged in a hierarchical network according to the joy they possess and provide. Those things closest to and most like God provide the greatest potential for joy. The greatest joy is available in God himself: in being with him and being like him. From that apex flows all cascading intensities of joy.

You should choose to be like God if you want what is best for yourself, others, and the world. To turn towards God is to turn towards what is best. To turn towards what is best is to turn towards God. To turn away from God is to turn away from what is best. To turn away from what is best is to turn away from God. Anything that seems better than following God is a mirage that will evaporate over time, usually replaced by something much worse than expected. To be different from God in any way is to experience less joy than you otherwise could. All sin reduces to the lie that you can find greater happiness in thinking, feeling, or acting contrary to how God would in your place. To the extent that your path deviates from what God would think, feel, or do in your place, you will deviate from the good you could otherwise be, give, and receive, and the happiness you could experience in the process. The path to the greatest good, and therefore the greatest happiness, is to learn everything you can about God, and to live everything you learn.

Guilt comes through willingly doing less than what you believe is best. If you feel guilty here and now, you will feel guilty forever. You can enjoy deep peace from and confidence with God through maintaining “a clear conscience before God,” as many of his servants have (see Mosiah 2:27).

Contentment comes through living the best you know how. If you reconcile your life to the best you know, you will feel freedom from guilt and enjoy peace of conscience. The more accurate your understanding of the ideal character, and the more fully you live up to the same, the more it will take to overcome your peace, and the more content and confident you will be.

The character of Christ is the ideal character. The fullness of the peace that is available in living as you believe the Lord would is beyond the ability of anything in this world to overcome. If you actively consider God’s character and will at all times, only doing what makes rational sense for the greatest long-term benefit, you will walk with a peace unknown by anyone who does anything less.

The gospel is a process by which you receive more and better blessings from God by becoming more like him. Too many Christians seek the blessings of righteousness without seeking to be righteous. The gospel is not a cheat code to get more than you deserve in or after this life. Rather, it is an instruction manual on how to become better so that you deserve better than you presently do.

God’s blessings are often coveted without consideration of God’s character. Goodness and enduring happiness are completely intertwined. The more like God you become, the more of his blessings you will enjoy. The way to obtain God’s blessings is to join him where he is.

You become one with God by becoming like he is, not by getting him to inject his blessings into a life nothing like what he would live. The angel of God’s presence accompanied Israel because they were walking towards where he wanted them to be, not because he was going towards where they wanted to be. He was with them because they were following him, not because they had succeeded in getting him to follow them.

By nature, humans are miserable. The nature of God is the nature of happiness, because God is happier than any person. Adopting his nature will lead to greater happiness than any other path. The path to happiness is to learn and live the character of Christ. You cannot have greater or longer-lasting joy without learning more than you presently know about God.

To obtain the most intense joy, we must discover and emulate how God is. Similitude to God and joy are inescapably coupled. Because similarity to God comes by degrees, joy does as well. The more like God you become, the more intense the joy you will experience.

The path to experiencing more intense joy is the path of learning what God knows, doing what he does, and wanting what he wants. To the degree that you learn about and live like Jesus, you will find that the degree of happiness you find and keep in life will increase.

Obtaining and living God’s character is not just a duty or debt, but the path to the greatest possible outcomes. The best outcomes available to you are found and obtained through living as Jesus would in your place. We obtain more of God’s outcomes by learning and living more of God’s character. To the extent we learn about and apply his character, we become like he is, both in quality and in outcome. As you become more like God, you will encounter greater joy as what is less like God is replaced by what is more like God. As you think, feel, and act as you sincerely believe Jesus would in your place, you are on the path to becoming the greatest person you can be and experiencing the greatest joy you can ever have.

The purpose of life is to have greater eternal joy by becoming more like God. The more you know about and live like Jesus, the more joy you will have, and the longer it will last.

A great deal of perceived happiness is fleeting, as it is based on an erroneous understanding of reality and limited experience with it.

The breadth, depth, and intensity of reality is vast and virtually unknown to most.

Apparent happiness can rot the instant it is exposed to information that erodes the assumptions and presumptions it is based on. Apparent happiness can disappear in a moment when we.

Learn of the existence of something better than what we have. Learn that the cost of what we seek or have is much greater than we thought. Learn that the benefit of what we seek or have is much less than we thought. Learn that the value of what we have or seek does not endure for as long as we had hoped.

This loss of perceived value is an unavoidable part of the purpose of life, for how else would we gain the motivation necessary to seek something better or experience greater joy than we would otherwise have when we find it? God’s intent is not that we endlessly churn over lost joy, but that we are able to increasingly approach greater joy that is longer lasting than what we had before, eventually obtaining maximal joy that can endure all circumstances here and hereafter.

God has the greatest enduring joy. If you desire greater lasting joy, you will find it by discovering and assimilating more of God’s character.

You will have greater enduring joy through doing what God would do in your place than anything else.

God’s knowledge of all things past, present, and future uniquely positions him to know what is of greatest lasting worth. God’s happiness is not based on ignorance. God knows “things as they really are, and... things as they really will be.” (Jacob 4:13) He lives according to his knowledge, which yields “a never-ending state of happiness.” (Mosiah 2:41)

God’s character is the optimized path to the greatest enduring happiness given reality. God’s character is not just different, it is better. In fact, it is the best. God’s knowledge, beliefs, and desires are all optimally tuned to yield the greatest joy for himself and all others across the duration of eternity. There is no other set of traits that will yield greater joy for longer across the duration of eternity.

What provides the greatest lasting joy is not obvious. Gaining a more correct idea of the options available and a more accurate estimate of the lasting value each provides is an important part of the purpose of life. God’s character is optimal, tested, and proven. You will never devise a better way to be than how God already is. As you learn and live more like God, you will gain a more correct idea of the choices available to you in life and which of them provide the greatest lasting worth.

Happiness is commonly denominated in circumstances beyond the control of the individual. As such, when those circumstances change unfavorably, the individual’s happiness is vanquished. Any joy that comes through external circumstances can only endure as long as your external circumstances don’t change.

Happiness that lies beyond external reduction comes from internal refinement. Enduring increases in happiness come through improvements to your character. There is no way to obtain greater and longer-lasting joy except through improving your character. As you improve who you are, you increase the proportion of your happiness that comes internally from what you do for the world rather than the external portion that comes from what you receive from the world. While this doesn’t mean you cease receiving good through and from external sources, it does mean that you increase your supply of joy that cannot be taken away by external changes because it is generated from within. Any person who can obtain and maintain a fullness of joy in spite of external circumstances will be immeasurably happier than anyone whose happiness comes because of external circumstances.

The happiness found in God cannot be diminished by what lies outside of the control of the individual, and as such, is the only kind that endures all things. There is no external circumstance that can generate the kind of joy that internal alignment with God can. Meanwhile, the greatest external sources of joy are only available to those who align their character with God, and to the extent they do. For example, when Jesus appeared to his followers on the American continent after his resurrection, he described feeling a fullness of joy that could not have been experienced except through his having perfectly lived as the Father would have during his mortal life.

As one learns more about and lives more like Jesus, the depth of joy experienced and its independence from external circumstances increases. The Lord has overcome all things. An important part of this accomplishment is that he has attained joy that is beyond the power of anyone else to remove without his consent. Although the poor choices of his children cause God tremendous sorrow, no one can overcome his joy.

Happiness is a subjective construct. It comes from your sense of perceived value in what you are, have, experience, and give. The enduring nature of the Lord’s happiness comes from how he is and what he values. As you learn to value the character of God above all else, you will increasingly feel joy from your similarity to him, no matter the cost of achieving it, and no matter what others do or don’t do because of it.

God intends for us to have joy here, not just hereafter. This life is an opportunity for us to learn and live what is necessary to be happy forever. Life features a myriad of challenges that are useful to help us see aspects of who we are that are inadequate to yield eternal happiness. Unfortunately, most people manage to cope with the parts of reality that they do not like or cannot handle by ignoring or escaping from them. This human tendency pervades common Christianity, where the desire to avoid reality dominates the willingness to overcome it. It is easy to ignore aspects of your life that rob you of joy through using synthetic sources of pleasure: drugs, entertainment, work, exercise, social activities, and relationships, but they will not help you become a better person or any happier hereafter. Whatever has power to make you miserable here will also have power to make you miserable hereafter, and while you can make use of dishonest distractions here, none of them will work there. This life is given as an opportunity to learn and live principles that will bring you greater joy forever. Any principles that have the power to bring you joy after this life will also bring you joy in this life.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a means or reason to ignore or avoid problems, but a means and reason to overcome them. The Lord overcame all things, and it is only through learning and living his character that you can do the same. The mechanism for joy hereafter is learning and living the character of God while you are here. To the extent you seek happiness that can endure any circumstance in life, you seek the character of Christ, and to the extent you obtain the character of Christ, you will find happiness that can endure any circumstance in life.

As you learn and live the character of Christ, you will experience an increasing intensity and duration of joy here and now. You will find yourself overcoming more of the things that take away your joy and obtaining more of the things that provide it. Those who learn more about Jesus and live more like him will find that increasingly greater opposition is required to disrupt their joy and that they are able to hold onto greater joy for longer.

Growing more like Jesus does not mean that life’s trials will stop flowing through your life, or that your life will be free from any unpleasantness, challenges, or sorrows. In fact, as you grow more like the Lord, who faced all possible mortal challenges, you will find that trials come with increased occurrence and intensity, but you will likewise learn and live what he did to overcome them. All good things carry a price, and that price is typically required to be paid up front. The paths that yield the greatest lasting joy frequently begin with willful suffering—sometimes for a prolonged period—but they always pay dividends that far outweigh the cost. The key indication that you are on the Lord’s path is progress. Those learning more about and living like Christ will grow in their ability to experience greater joy and hold onto it for longer, in the face of greater challenges than before.

Salvation and eternal life through becoming like Christ

Salvation refers to deliverance from death and hell. Death is the cessation of life, which can refer to mortal life or eternal life. Through being born, we inherit physical death. Through choosing to sin, we each suffer spiritual death, which is separation from the presence of God. We are delivered from physical death through resurrection, where our bodies and spirits will reunite in immortality. We are delivered from spiritual death through aligning ourselves with God to the extent that we understand him to be, which reopens the living connection through which we receive eternal life. Hell is a condition of torment caused by exposure to ideas and circumstances that overwhelm one’s ability and willingness to live joyfully aligned with God as far as you understand him to be in spite of opposition. You are saved from hell by learning and living the principles required to overcome what would otherwise overcome you while recognizing and using the protection God offers from situations beyond your capacity.

Most people who are saved from physical death will still suffer spiritual death, as resurrection does not free you from the penalty of the sins that you have not forsaken. The one and only way to be saved from spiritual death is by reconciling to your understanding of how God is and faithfully following his example until you die.

Resurrection does not provide you with any extra capacity in death to overcome what overcame you in life. What causes you sorrow, grief, pain, and suffering here will cause you the same there, if not more, because you will not be able to lie to yourself or distract yourself there as you can here. Meanwhile, the conditions necessary to encounter the tools needed to conquer or qualify for shelter from what overcomes you here are not possible in the afterlife. The one and only way to be saved from hell is by seeking for, perceiving, believing, and living the principles needed to overcome what overcomes you. The Lord Jesus created the world to provide us with the opportunity to obtain and live these principles, having possessed them before the foundation of the world, and coming here to live in order to demonstrate them to us.

There is no other way you can be saved, except through learning more about Jesus and living all you learn. You cannot be saved in spite of willful differences between you and God. These differences must be reconciled through your choice to follow his example. There are no backdoors or shortcuts to heaven—he is the gate and the way.

Too many find comfort in the fact that they are doing better than they used to or they are doing better than other people they know, when they should be asking whether they are living up to Jesus, as far as they understand him to be. You shouldn’t judge yourself based simply on whether you are doing better than your worst. Your worst is not the standard you will be compared against—Jesus is. You shouldn’t judge yourself based on what others do. Your capabilities are not the same as those of others. Your accountability before God is based on what you know and could know, not what anyone else knows. God will hold you accountable for your own capacity and understanding, not that of others. The degree of blessing you receive from God is determined by the degree to which you are like him. Only judge yourself against others if you want to limit yourself to the blessings they have received.

In the day of judgment, you will be judged for whether you lived up to your understanding of how Christ is. Jesus Christ—his works, his character, his sinlessness—is the standard of salvation. You will be judged by how well you live up to your present understanding of how God is. Everything about you and your life plainly demonstrates how much like him you have become, and by this you can know your standing with God at all times.

Eternal life is the opportunity offered to all to learn about and live like Jesus Christ, both of which depend on the choices of the individual. If we desire eternal life, we must learn and live what Jesus would do in your place. The Lord came to show us how the Father is and provide us with the power to follow his example in all things. Jesus obtained eternal life before this world was, and by laying down his eternal life, he provided the opportunity for all men to advance toward the same. The life of Jesus Christ was a demonstration of the process and outcome of obtaining the character of the Father, which in combination define the outcome and process of eternal life. The Lord obtained eternal life through learning about and living like the Father. We obtain eternal life through learning about and living like the Son. God, knowing all things, provided a way whereby any individual could come to understand the same. Through learning what he knows and acting and feeling how he does, an individual can come to possess all things that God possesses.

Immortality and eternal life are not the same thing. Immortality comes because of what Jesus did, but eternal life comes because of how Jesus is. Eternal life is not about what you get after you die, but who you become here and now. Through the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all people will be resurrected, whether they believe in God or not, and irrespective of how well they know and obey him. Eternal life does not come from what you say you believe about Jesus, nor from him visiting you. You receive eternal life as you learn how Jesus is and live that way yourself. Only those who live as they sincerely believe Jesus would in their place will be saved from spiritual death.

The attributes of God are what yield eternal life. God is what he is because of how he is, not who he is. If his character were different than it is, he would not be God. The character of Christ is what makes him God; it is predefined and inalterable. The role of God is defined by his character, and that set of qualities is the same from eternity to eternity.

God is not God for any other reason than that he possesses the precise character of God. God’s attributes, including his knowledge, beliefs, and desires, are precisely what define him. Knowing and living God’s character is what makes God who and what he is. It is because of God’s character that he possesses all things, has overcome all things, is immortal, is happier than any person, has complete, untouchable peace, is able to endure all things that can happen without any anxiety or stress, and never wavers from his character qualities, no matter what situations he encounters. Eternal life is the kind of life that God has, and to the degree that you have obtained and live by the same attributes as God, you will experience the same life that God does. To the degree that your attributes vary from God’s, you will experience a life less like that of God.

As you consecrate yourself to the will of God, you will find that who you used to be is sequentially replaced with your evolving understanding of who God is. The scriptures call this process “quickening,” but modern people call it “improvement.” You will recognize the effects of quickening as improvements to your actions, feelings, depth of desire, direction of desire, and understanding relative to the past. In every instance, whatever comes from God will be of greater worth and result in greater joy than anything that you had or were before. It is through the acquisition of these attributes that we become one with God.

You become one with God by learning what he is like and doing what he would do in your place. You become one with God by learning and living his character. The Lord Jesus is one with the Father because he has perfectly developed the character of the Father within himself by yielding to the words of the Father. Through him, we can do the same, and this is the purpose of life. Becoming one with God does not merely consist of obeying him, but of learning what he would do in your place, why he would do it, and using your brain to fill in the gaps. God is with you as you learn and adopt his character within yourself. You are one with the Son and the Father if, when, and as long as you perfectly align yourself with what you believe God would think, feel, and do. The Lord once said, “the kingdom of God is within you.” You are one with the Father to the extent that the character of the Father is within you.

The purpose of life isn’t just to live forever, but to live forever as a better person than you were before. Eternal life is an outcome, but it is reached through the process of learning more about Jesus and living up to what you learn.

All people who obtain eternal life are saved from their sins, as you cannot enter into eternal life without sincerely living as you believe he would in your place. However, while you can’t enter into eternal life without fully reconciling to how you understand Jesus to be, doing so does not entitle you to a degree of eternal life beyond the limits of how well you know and live like God.

The measure of eternal life that you receive will equal the measure of the character of Christ you acquire and live in mortal life. The degree of eternal life you obtain is a function of how similar to Jesus you become. The more similar you are to Jesus, the more your eternal life resembles his. Eternal life is something that exists by degrees, corresponding to the accuracy, depth, and breadth of the individual’s understanding of Jesus to which they are reconciled. The more you know about and live like God, the more of eternal life you will receive, because the more like him you are, the more your life will resemble his.

Everyone with eternal life is fully reconciled to everything they know about Jesus, but they differ in how much they know about him. Each will have a different portion of eternal life depending on how accurate and complete their understanding of Jesus is. The extent to which people learn about and live like Jesus will create severe distinctions between people, even among those who live like Jesus, as far as they understand him to be.

The fullest degree of eternal life is to be as God actually is and to live as God actually does. It is to act like God would in your situation at all times and in all places; to do as he does and to feel as he does, all of the time; to see the world as he does, see yourself as he does, and see others as he does. You can’t live like God does or have what God has beyond the extent to which you are actually as God is. This is the only way possible to receive everything he has, which he only has because of how he is.

Eternal life does not come about through mercy alone. Salvation comes only through the mercy and merits of God, but for some reason, people are much more apt to cling to his mercy than they are to adopt his merits! Mercy and justice are both components of salvation. Mercy makes a way for justice to result in reward rather than punishment, but it doesn’t replace justice.

The Lord’s sacrifice provides for forgiveness of your past sins, but not your present or future sins. While mercy forgives you of past sins, you can be saved only through justly ascribing to the standard of Christ. You can be forgiven for deviating from your understanding of the Lord, but you can’t be saved without becoming the person God teaches you to be.

Mercy provides space for a person to choose better outcomes through obtaining and living the conditions that produce them.

Mercy does not impute better outcomes than a person deserves. Mercy enables forgiveness of past sins and provides opportunity for you to learn what you didn’t know, but it can’t magically transform you into a better person without your choice to improve.

Many professed Christians embrace the pagan belief that salvation is an arbitrary gift that is obtained from courting the favor of a capricious God, and several denominations differ only in how they attempt to court his favor. Some even believe that because Jesus was righteous, they are too, even if they don’t obey his teachings. Salvation is not the gift of an arbitrary God. If God could freely give salvation to anyone, he would give it to everyone. He does not give you eternal life against your will. You cannot be treated by God as if you were righteous without actually being righteous, and there is no righteousness that exists outside of similarity to Jesus.

God can “give” you immortality through resurrection, but he cannot “give” you his character attributes. You can receive immortality because of what Jesus did, but you can only obtain eternal life to the degree you become like he is. God’s characteristics can’t be forced upon you. You must willingly take them upon yourself. He can’t force us to know what he knows, to do what he does, or to share his motives. These are things he gives us, through the price he has paid, according to our choices to seek and obtain them.

The idea of meriting eternal life is a foreign concept to most Christians, in spite of many scriptures explaining it this way. They correctly understand that there is no path to what the Father has except through what the Son offers, and that none of us will ever deserve the sacrifice he made for us in coming here and dying for our sins, but they incorrectly understand our obligations in that path.

Salvation is a gift in the sense that it is impossible without what Jesus has done and continues to do. Jesus created this world which is necessary for the opportunity to learn more about and become more like God. He sacrificed the glory he had with the Father before the world was created to come down from heaven and demonstrate the example we are to follow. He endured a life filled with trials, sorrow, and pain, culminating with the sacrifice of his life in order to provide us with the opportunity to obtain forgiveness of our past sins and obtain greater eternal joy through learning about and living like him. The gift of Christ is not some way to receive the blessings of being like him while continuing to be unlike him. Rather, it is everything needed to know how he is, believe that you can be the same, have sufficient reasons to make the necessary changes, and be forgiven after choosing to follow his example.

Salvation is the greatest gift possible because of what it costs and what it enables. However, no gift, no matter how great, will increase the joy of those who refuse to receive it. We must receive and value it. We receive that gift through completely reconciling to the full application of our sincere understanding of the character of Jesus Christ throughout every moment of our lives. Through the gift he has given us, we can both conform ourselves perfectly to our present understanding of how he is, and receive incremental instruction and experience to advance the breadth and depth of our understanding of how he is.

The justice of God dictates that your eternal wellbeing be exclusively determined by how virtuous you have become. The sacrifice of Christ doesn’t violate his justice, but rather gives you the opportunity to separate yourself from the moral indictment of your past sins, providing you with sufficient reasons and means to improve so that God’s justice can result in your exaltation instead of abasement. In order to obtain better outcomes than you have, you must become better than you are.

All people are forgiven of the differences between them and God which they are unable to discern. For example, children are forgiven for the law that they are too young to be able to learn and understand. However, there is a difference between being spared the penalty of disobedience to what you don’t yet know and receiving the benefits of obeying what you don’t yet know. Being spared from death and hell is not the same as receiving eternal life.

The atonement frees you from the punishment of failing to live up to how Christ is beyond the limits of your understanding, but it doesn’t provide you with the blessings you would have if you were like Christ beyond the limits of how you understand him to be. Many Christians believe that God declares you righteous as long as you say you believe in Jesus, even if you don’t actually follow his example. You can’t be treated by God as if you were righteous without actually being righteous. This would be a lie. The gospel doesn’t magically transfer the blessings of Jesus’ righteousness to sinners. Rather, through the gospel, Jesus provides you with the opportunity to choose to be more like him, making a way for you to be forgiven of past sin and providing sufficiently persuasive arguments for you to choose to be better, thus meriting those blessings in your own right.

The Lord’s sacrifice provides the opportunity for you to learn more about and live up to how he is, but it doesn’t magically make you more like him than you choose to be. The idea that God treats sinners as saints simply because they say they believe in him, like him, or worship him, is an example of the extent to which Christians have replaced what Jesus taught with overtly pagan beliefs, in this case the idea that your affinity for an idol transposes its qualities upon you. Sheep gain the benefits of a shepherd by following his instructions, not by saying they like him. Believing that you become holy merely by expressing support for God is as ridiculous as believing that you will magically become a basketball star by wearing your favorite player’s jersey. Forgiveness from God doesn’t reward you with the blessings of obedience any more than it removes from you the temporal consequences of disobedience.

Moral forgiveness doesn’t exempt someone from the temporal consequences of ignorance. Forgiveness from God is a moral absolution, not a material miracle; it absolves you of the divine punishment your past sins would otherwise require, not the temporal consequences that those choices still carry. While you aren’t morally responsible for what you don’t know, you are still subject to the consequences of the laws that apply to your situation, even if you don’t know them.

God’s forgiveness makes you blameless, not holy. Blamelessness is not holiness. Holiness is a measure of how similar you are to God. You become holy as you learn what Jesus is like and live that way yourself. While an innocent person isn’t bad, they are only good to the extent they have become better than neutral. Forgiveness takes away the bad, but it does not substitute the good in its place! To be empty on the inside is much better than to be evil on the inside, but emptiness is not the same as goodness. Emptiness is an indication of preparation for becoming good, but it is not the same as being good. A plowed, weed-free field is not the same as one full of crops ready to harvest. His forgiveness can erase your slate, but it can’t refill it with better things—only you can do that by choosing better things over time. To become better requires learning and living better ideas than what were possessed or followed before.

Your eternal state is determined by what you do while in this life. This life is especially designed to provide the necessary and ideal conditions for every individual to learn as much about Jesus as they are willing to live up to. God created this world and gave everything necessary—including his life—to give you the opportunity to learn what is good and choose to desire it. Everything in your life is designed with the end of providing every opportunity you are willing to receive to become as much like him as you will.

Your eternal happiness is determined by how fully you learned, desired, and chose as Jesus would during your life. You cannot choose to become more like Jesus after you die, because there is no progression after death. Death does not change your desires, nor does it magically transform you into a holy person. You are not resurrected into a person that is more like Jesus than you chose to be during your life. God does not override the choices you made in this life, but rather rewards you eternal good or evil according to how you made them. You are resurrected to the same state in which you died.

While eternal life exists on a continuum, salvation is a binary condition—you are either saved or you are not. You either perfectly follow the example of Jesus Christ to the degree you are aware of it, or you do not.

Salvation is not a static state. In order to maintain your salvation, you have to remain “obedient unto the end of your lives.” (Mosiah 5:8) Life does not remain the same from the point you decide to reconcile to Jesus, but continues to ebb and flow, bringing new challenges and learning opportunities day by day. In order to remain saved, you have to remain fully aligned with Jesus until you die, no matter what God may reveal about himself, what commandments he gives you, what challenges he may expose you to, or what opposition arises.

The moment you deviate in any way from how you believe Jesus would live in your place, you lose salvation, and will remain in this state until and unless you repent by changing whatever is out of alignment.

Two reliable aspects of human nature are the desire to get something for less than it costs and the desire to be done. Both desires are wrapped up in ideas held by some regarding the promise of eternal life, otherwise known as making your calling and election sure. There are people who believe that there are shortcuts to receiving eternal life that do not involve becoming more like Jesus, or that you can reach a point where you no longer have to labor to live as you believe he would in your place.

There is no shortcut to receiving eternal life. Eternal life isn’t gained through rite or ritual. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of the conditions, content, and outcomes of salvation. There is no way to receive eternal life except by becoming like Jesus. Anyone who is like him will have eternal life, because to be like him is the very meaning of eternal life. If you are reconciled to Jesus, you have eternal life, and will continue to until and unless you cease to remain reconciled with him.

Much confusion has resulted from the assumption that the promise of eternal life is unconditional. The promise of eternal life, like all of God’s promises, is conditional. The conditions of eternal life have been set since the foundations of the world; they are to fully reconcile yourself to your understanding of Jesus and to maintain this reconciliation as you learn all you can about him until you die. There is no cessation to the labor salvation requires except for death. Until then, your salvation is at risk. The promise of eternal life demands the continuous sacrifice of everything required to remain true and faithful to the Lord’s example in spite of every obstacle.

Rather than see the promise of eternal life as a special accomplishment of the privileged few, we should see it as an invitation unto all. When God mentions it to individuals, it isn't to grant them an unconditional outcome specific to them, but to remind all people of what is available for them, and inspire them to faithfully live by the conditions upon which it depends. The promise of eternal life is extended to all people because of his impartiality. Anyone who fulfills its conditions will receive the promised result. As long as you do everything you can to learn more about Jesus, and live up to everything you learn, you qualify for eternal life. As long as you do anything less, you don’t.

God’s power and authority come from God’s character

The pages of scripture are full of the miraculous power of God being poured out upon and through believers throughout history. How is it possible that there are so many professed Christians today with so little of God’s power in their lives? God has not changed, but those who claim to believe in him have.

God’s power is based on belief, faith, and goodness. The corrupted versions of these principles as practiced by common Christians are insufficient to fulfill the conditions of God’s promised power.

The power of God comes through belief. Belief in God is not a question of what you think about him, how you feel about him, or what you say about him. Your belief in God is a question of how closely your life actually aligns with how you believe he would live in your place. To believe in Jesus is to model and live according to his character. If you do not labor to learn more about Jesus and live up to what you learn, you do not believe in him. Jesus proclaimed that those who believe in him would do what he did. Consequently, anyone who claims to believe in Jesus without doing what he did is using a definition of belief different than Jesus would.

The power of God comes through faith. Whenever there is faith, God will send his power, including miracles. Consequently, a life without the power of God lacks faith as God defines it. Faith is a willingness to improve, quantified by your effort in searching for and living according to what is better than what you already have. If you aren’t improving, you aren’t exercising faith. God is the source and destination of all improvement. Faith yields outcomes beyond what would otherwise occur through new or better beliefs—new actions based on new or stronger desires, more accurate understanding, and superior reasoning. If you aren’t living the best way you know how to, you do not have faith, and until you live up to the best way you know, you will not receive more power from God. The lack of faith in people who profess to be Christians is deeply troubling, because it is by the same faith that miracles are performed and salvation is obtained. The lack of the one indicates the lack of the other.

The power of God comes through goodness. Because all good comes from and leads to God, the power of God that flows through his goodness comes according to one’s similitude to God. Most Christians fail to acquire or experience much of God’s power because they treat the gospel as a means to feel less guilty in doing less than their best rather than the way to become their best. Common Christians have replaced goodness with religion, losing sight of the fact that the gospel is about facilitating improvement, not recitation of scripture, religious rites, and celebratory worship. These things have no utility outside of the improvement they are intended to foster in practitioners. All power from God comes from and through God’s goodness. Without exerting effort to learn about and live like he is, you cannot have his power, and if you do not have his power, it is because you aren’t learning about and living like he is.

Power is the ability to achieve, obtain, and retain what you desire. God has all power because he achieves, obtains, and retains what he desires.

Modern people misdefine the concept of power. They presume it means the ability to dictate the actions or seize the property of others through force and chicanery. Those who use such an evil definition of power can only seek more of it through violence and dishonesty, and will always see those with the ability to resist them as their enemies, erecting considerable barriers between themselves and God or any of his servants. Those who believe that power can only be gained and exercised through force or deceit can only grow in power through becoming more violent or dishonest than those more violent or dishonest than them.

Evil power spreads like a cancer throughout any society where it is permitted to be practiced. Power through force catalyzes a race to destruction as contenders vie to exert the greatest tyranny, and as increasing numbers of those increasingly subjugated by it do the minimum required to avoid punishment rather than their best. The spiral downward continues until a critical mass is reached, where the problems presented overwhelm society’s ability to overcome them.

Godly power differs from evil power in its essence and effects. Godly power leverages persuasion and merit rather than manipulation and force. Godly power functions through hard work, courage, and wisdom. Godly power can come through increases in any virtue that contributes to your ability to obtain what you seek, that modifies what you seek, or changes the degree of desire with which you seek it. Those who seek godly power do not destroy people or things, but improve themselves and others.

Godly power is distinguished from the power of evil by its independence from the choices of others. The power of evil relies upon people to manipulate and subjugate, but godly power functions and grows whether others yield to it or not. The dependence of the power of evil on those who yield to it is one reason why good always eventually triumphs over evil. Any power dependent on others is unavoidably transitory, as it can only endure for as long as they choose to fulfill your desires. A person can have the support of the majority only to find the majority turn against them, turn against itself, or face its demise at the hand of a greater superior force.

The Lord’s life demonstrated the power of good. Jesus’ perfect emulation of the character of the Father gave him power over death, in spite of the fact that the masses rejected and killed him. In resurrecting himself from death into immortality, he established himself as the unique possessor of what no other person could obtain without him. Jesus learned and lived the character of the Father independent of—and in spite of—the decisions of any other person. We can learn about and live the character of the Son independent of the decisions of others. Jesus obtained all power through maintaining adherence to the character of the Father, and we maximally acquire and access that power through maximal adherence to the character of the Son.

God’s power comes from his character. It is the embodiment of his characteristics of wisdom, mercy, truth, justice, and judgment that make him God. These attributes, coupled with his knowledge of all things, are what enables him to have all power.

The great power of God seems to be a significant difference between him and us. The Lord’s ability to endure difficulty or perform miracles is not the source of our differences, but an effect stemming from them. The root of the differences between us and God lies in our character, as it is our character that is the source of strength and power in him and in us. There is an unbroken path of steps to attaining his character, no matter how different from him you are. God has more strength and power than you do because he.

Knows more than you do. Understands better than you do. Has faith to pursue longer-term benefits and endure greater hardships than you. Is more honest than you are. Is more just than you are. Is more willing to suffer for others than you are.

As you acquire his intelligence, desires, and love, you will also grow in his strength and power.

The power of God comes through obtaining the character of God. Before the world was created, Jesus Christ was with the Father, and had acquired his character. The Lord made all things in accordance with the power and purpose of the Father, both of which came through his knowledge of and adherence to the character of the Father. Just as the Son gained his power through obtaining the character of the Father, you can gain the power of the Son through obtaining the character of the Son.

You have to actually become like God to have power like God. It is through learning and living the character of God that you increasingly obtain God’s power. Power from God is a question of similitude to God. The “powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness.” (D&C 121:36) Righteousness means similitude with God. Priesthood doesn’t just require righteousness—it is righteousness. Those who desire to serve God must build and exercise faith, hope, charity, and love, uniquely focusing on learning and living God’s purpose with all their heart, might, mind, and strength.

To obtain the outcomes of Jesus, you have to adopt the character of Jesus. Only by possessing his attributes can you be more like he is, and only by being more like he is in quality can you be more like he is in outcome. All of the Lord’s outcomes are tied to all of his attributes. The only ones who will obtain the fullness of God’s outcomes are those who have become indistinguishable from Christ, and no one will receive any of God’s outcomes except to the degree they have become like Christ.

God does not act contrary to his character, and you will not enjoy his power while you act contrary to his character. Your ability to call down miracles from heaven is directly proportional to the completeness of your reconciliation to God. You can’t work “...a miracle in the name of Jesus save [you are] cleansed every whit from [your] iniquity.” (3 Nephi 8:1) “Every whit” means in totality. If elements of your life are contrary to his will, as you understand it, you will not have his power in your life, and you will suffer unnecessarily.

God’s power is not a binary attribute. God’s power is obtained and held by degrees, because God is known and obeyed by degrees. The more of his character you learn and live up to, the more of God’s power you will have. The more accurately your desires, thoughts, and actions approximate God’s, the more his power will flow in and through you in every aspect of your life.

A great deal of artificial distinction has been made between the words “power” and “authority” in the New Testament that does not exist among the Greek words they are translated from, all of which show that a person’s ability to accomplish what they desire stems from their character qualities. The word exousia (Strong’s Greek 1849), which means “that which arises out of being,” is arbitrarily translated as “authority” or “power,” while other mentions of “power” come from dunamai and dunamis (Strong’s Greek 1410 and 1411), which mean the ability to achieve something due to how a person is or what they do. As with anyone else, then, God’s power and authority are inseparable.

Modern churches conveniently claim that they somehow possess the authority of God without demonstrating the power of God. Devoid of God’s power, modern churches rely on the same false tokens of authority that apostate churches always have, claiming that they perform no miracles because God doesn’t do them anymore, and claiming that God doesn’t speak because he expects you to listen to them instead.

The ancient Jews also made the mistake of separating power and authority. Instead of interpreting Jesus’ ability to do what none of them could as evidence that he had more of God’s authority than they did, they constantly denied, explained away, or ignored his miracles. They asked the Lord: “By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave this authority to do these things?” (Mark 11:28) They did not understand that his ability to do what he did was the authority— because it could only come from God.

The authority Jesus wielded during his ministry should serve as the ideal. The authority of Jesus did not come from his titles, or even his parentage, but from what he did, how he did it, and why he did it. The outwardly demonstrated bona fides of Jesus were that he taught with wisdom that exceeded anyone else’s and worked miracles beyond what anyone else could do. The Lord’s statement that “all power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18) was not a declaration of authority in the modern sense of the word. Instead, the Lord was saying that he had attained the ideal character by learning and living exactly as the Father would in his place, inheriting a fullness of the Father’s capabilities through acquiring a fullness of his qualities.

Valid authority is a question of what you can do and have done, not who you claim to be or what you claim to be able to do. Valid authority is a question of who you actually are, as demonstrated by your actual qualities and demonstrated abilities, not titles you claim for yourself or which others bestow upon you. The value of a person is in what they actually do, not in what they claim to be. A wise man with a proven track record is better than any number of self-proclaimed prophets with nothing to show for all their credentials. All of the preceding statements apply equally to institutions. A social club that provides recognizable value is greater than any church that claims unique authority yet fails to enable its members any better than they were before.

The greatest power is the hardest to see. Jesus had power to forgive sins and wielded greater wisdom than any man before or since, but few were able to perceive or willing to receive that power. He worked many miracles, but these did not compare to the much greater gifts he gave in the ideas he taught. Through the beliefs he held, Jesus possessed and imparted to others the ability to endure heavier burdens than they otherwise could, to love others more than they previously imagined possible, to overcome challenges that previously overcame them, and to know God better and become more like him than anyone they knew. Today’s false teachers do the opposite of what Jesus did. They claim to have the greater power to save and condemn the souls of men while they lack the lesser power to achieve even the smallest physical miracles. They claim to be capable of leading you to eternal life when they can’t even figure out daily life. They claim to understand the mysteries of heaven without even demonstrating basic common sense.

You cannot separate God’s power and authority; where one is, the other always is: “...the rights of the priesthood are inseparably connected with the powers of heaven...” (D&C 121:36) A person or organization that lacks God’s power likewise lacks God’s authority.

People are quick to claim the effects of being like Jesus, but slow to choose to live as he would in their place. It is dishonest to desire the effects of being like Jesus without first desiring to adopt the attributes that cause them.

The authority and power of Christ comes from his character attributes. While you refuse to take up his character attributes, he will refuse to give you his authority and power.

If you believe it is impossible to live as Jesus would in your place when it comes to preferring service over selfishness and obedience over indulgence, honesty compels you to similarly believe that it is impossible to perform miracles, receive revelation, and lead other disciples of Christ.

The Lord said that his authority over the world would be detectable through the improvements it provides over what the world offers. What is from God is what is better than what you already have, and what is better than what you already have is from God. The world provides a different definition of authority—one where authority is intrinsic and detached from actual merit.

Modern religious, government, and research institutions have all committed the same cardinal mistake of separating authority from merit. In such institutions, actual merit has been replaced by institutional ranking. Authority does not come from titles. Though authority can co-occur with titles, it is increasingly the opposite of what you find in practice. Jesus was devoid of any earthly religious credentials. Bestowal of titles and honors independent of competence and contribution assures disaster when problems arise.

The idea that institutions have inherent value is, of course, tantalizing to institutions. Imagine how tempting it would be to receive all the proceeds due to a valid institution without the need of providing any value! There is no such thing as inherent value, nor any such thing as inherent authority. Authority is inseparable from merit. If an institution claims that its authority is its merit, it has neither.

Valid authority comes through and cannot be separated from actual merit. When authority is taken beyond the merit provided, we call it apostasy in religion, tyranny in government, and scientism in research. In all cases, dominion is exercised beyond the limits of virtue, and the costs to the people exceed the benefit provided.

Authority does not come through shallow mimicry of those with the power. The Pharisees pretended to revere Moses, and claimed to hold authority from him, yet didn’t obey the commandments he gave! Many Christians repeat this mistake, pretending to revere an individual they claim authority through without even bothering to become familiar with their teachings, let alone obeying them. Empty reverence for those who had power does not reproduce power replication of their works and motive does.

God’s authority is never present without evidence of it. Instead of working in concert with individuals’ God-given ability to reason, providing logical arguments and visible evidence for their truth claims, false messengers simply say: “I have God’s authority, listen to me.” Instead of making the case for each idea they present, they pretend that the task is for you to figure out if they are “from God,” so that you will automatically and unthinkingly accept everything they say. Beliefs should never be separated from the reasons for them. Claims of authority do not take the place of actual evidence. Self-claimed titles are not valid substitutes for actual evidence. It is through the accumulation of evidence via successive validation of ideas that a true messenger gains someone’s confidence—not through feelings in response to prayer.

Tokens of true messengers are obvious, but rare. They provide evidence that the putative messenger knows more about God and lives more like him than you do. True messengers have repented of all their sins. They live what they teach and they teach what they live. They help others become more like Jesus. They are able to answer questions and solve problems. They are efficacious. They are offensive to those who do not love improvement, because they say and do what needs to be said and done—what actually works, even if it is often perceived as uncomfortable or discouraging.

Common Christians imagine the qualities of Jesus as those the world considers to be good. They do not realize that the sensibilities of the natural man find actual righteousness repugnant. They ignore the many scripture accounts where Jesus demonstrates qualities they find offensive. Jesus wasn’t crucified for being a nice guy, but for pointing out that a lot of what people thought was good was actually evil, and at least some of what people thought was evil was actually good. The problem is that God’s character cannot be subdivided, and the undesirable portions are at least as necessary to obtain as the desirable portions. All of God’s power is completely coupled to all of God’s character. To obtain and exercise his power in ways that normal people find attractive, you must also obtain and exercise his power in ways that normal people find repulsive.

When God’s power is spoken of, it is typically in the context of working miracles. The kinds of miracles you expect—healing, prophecy, and so on—are performed in conjunction with and as a result of the kind of miracles you probably wouldn’t even count as such, let alone desire. The power of God includes the power to.

Love those who hate you. Rejoice in suffering for the benefit of others. Stare into the darkest abyss for as long as it takes to see the light Overcome evil with good. Forgive those who spitefully use you and persecute you Bless those who curse you. Limit yourself to actions that are God’s will. Endure all intensities and duration of suffering Maintain the Lord’s principles in spite of all opposition Overcome all things that would otherwise control you Do what you say. Say what you do.

If you aren’t interested in developing the power to do these things, you will never develop the power to perform miracles such as healing the sick, commanding the elements, or raising the dead.

God’s power is found in God’s purpose, and those who only pursue the parts of his purpose that are pleasant will find very little of his power. Only those who are as willing to advance God’s purpose when it hurts them as they are when it helps them will possess more than minimal power with God.

Most Christians make deals with God in prayer, begging for the worldly outcomes they desire with no thought of the eternal will or character of God. The purpose of living the gospel is to become more like God, not to bargain with God for goodies. God is not a pagan god. He is not arbitrary or fickle. He does not want token favors or pretended piety. He wants us to be like him. God’s power is not a reward for what you do; it comes from who you become.

Power is the ability to achieve, obtain, and retain what you want. God’s power is the ability to achieve, obtain, and retain what he wants. The connection between God's power and God’s purpose is illustrated by the way the High Priest’s ephod was tied to his breastplate with a symbolic blue cord. While the breastplate provided the wearer with the ability to seek and receive revelation from God through the urim and thummim it held, the priest’s access to it was determined by his willingness to bind himself to and maintain his connection with God.

If you want God’s power, you need to learn what he wants and shift your own desires to align with his. When the crowds saw the miracles that Jesus did, they asked “what shall we do, that we might work the works of God?” (John 6:28) Jesus responded: “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.” (John 6:29) He explained that God’s power comes to those who live as he would, and is exclusively for doing what he would in your place. Like most people, they were only interested in using God’s power to pursue their own desires, and “from that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.” (John 6:66) This was not the only occasion where Jesus explained that divine power comes only to those who seek God’s will above their own.

You may be surprised to learn how often your requests to God actually oppose his purpose. For example, many people seek miracles to reduce suffering, assuming that this is always good. God’s blessings are not for the purpose of reducing suffering, but for increasing improvement. It is rarely the case that these two ends overlap.

The Lord’s power is for advancing the Lord’s purpose. The more you seek the will of God, the more often you will find the power to accomplish what you desire. God’s purposes cannot be frustrated, and to the extent you make his purposes your own, neither can yours.

What God would do in your place is not meant to be an educated guess. You need to know God’s will in order to exercise God’s power. You can’t have faith when you ask for something that is contrary to God’s will, but you also can’t have faith if you aren’t confident that your desire matches what God wants.

The secret to gaining more of God’s power is not just in learning more of what he knows, but also in perfectly aligning your actions to what you have high confidence is his will. If you do not have extreme confidence in what you ask of God, you should focus your requests on learning more about the situation rather than asking him to intervene.

Those who receive great priesthood power learn how to restrict their requests to what they have high confidence is the will of God. When the Lord proclaimed that Nephi would be given whatever he asked, he said the reason was that Nephi would not ask anything contrary to his will. He did not mean that Nephi knew everything God did, but that Nephi would refrain from asking anything from God that was not perfectly in alignment with his sincere, best understanding of God’s will. Nephi only desired what he had sufficient reason to believe was God’s will.

Learning God’s will in a particular situation is the same as learning what is best in that situation. God’s will is not arbitrary. His will is the best that can be done. You cannot find out what he wants in a particular situation without learning more about what is best. As you learn what is best, you learn what his will is.

God knows what is best because he knows what outcomes are available and the cost and benefit of each. In order to better ascertain his will, you will have to learn these things, too.

God’s power can’t be separated from God’s knowledge of things as they are and could be. He knows all possible outcomes and the path to realize them. The universe operates according to certain inviolable relationships of cause and effect. Every outcome has a cause, regardless of whether or not we yet know or understand it. God’s power derives from his knowledge of and adherence to these relationships. God is how he is because of the laws he lives. The source of his power is knowing the relationship of cause and effect in all things to a greater extent than we do. God knows and understands all things. He sees what we are ignorant of, and he understands relationships we do not know.

A principle reason for creation is to provide each of us with the opportunity to obtain a greater measure of God’s power through the acquisition of a greater portion of God’s knowledge. To the extent that you lack the knowledge of God, you lack God’s power. In order to encounter greater manifestations of God’s power in your life, you must not only reconcile yourself to your present awareness of reality, but increase it. It is impossible to learn more about God’s character without learning more about his creation, or more about his creation without learning more about his character.

The more you learn about reality, and more effectively you use your knowledge to bring to pass better outcomes than would otherwise occur, the more of God’s power you will experience. Those who possess a little of God’s awareness will, when reconciled to it, experience a little of God’s power. To have all power, you need to know all things.

God’s power is frequently seen as a mechanism to make you stronger than you would otherwise be. The truth is that obtaining God’s power requires you to become stronger than you have ever been, and that the power you exercise and the power you obtain are much more symbiotic than they may otherwise seem. The acquisition of God’s power is an incremental process where each step begins with doing all you presently can and ends when you obtain greater power than you had before. Your present power comes from living up to all you know about Jesus, and your future power comes from learning and living something more about him than you did before.

God’s power comes from knowing God’s will and being willing to do all you can to accomplish it. Many would claim that they can’t do what God would do in their place because they don’t have the power to do so, but the truth is that they don’t have more of God’s power because they don’t do what God would do in their place with the power they already have. Why would you expect God to endow you with his power beyond your present capacity while you continue to use the power you already have to rebel against him by doing less or worse than you could? If you aren’t doing all you can to advance God’s purposes right now, why would he give you more power, when doing so would only increase your condemnation? How can he give you more power when you refuse the next incremental step toward it?

Don’t ask God to do for you what you are unwilling to do yourself.

You shouldn’t seek God to miraculously intervene in situations where.

you have not yet done all you can. Before asking God to give you power to move mountains, buy yourself a shovel and start digging.

God does not want anyone to hesitate to act in his name when they confidently believe that their desires match his, even though they will frequently be wrong.

God’s power flows to and through people by degrees, according to their similitude to him. While dissimilarity from God impedes the flow of his power, it does not stop it. The presence of God’s power indicates that the person wielding it is acting according to the sincere belief that their actions are accordant with the will of God, not that their actions perfectly match what God would do in their place. Any limitation in the person’s understanding of God will cause differences.

It is precisely through our imperfection in understanding that God’s perfect work is accomplished, forming a stepwise chain connecting everyone’s sincere idea of what is best to what is actually best through men of increasingly more godly understanding.

When people think of priesthood, they think of either the authority of God, the power of God, or both. None of these definitions are adequate. The authority of God does not exist independent of his power. Meanwhile, the power of God is an inadequate definition of priesthood because it does not address where that power comes from or how it is to be used.

Priesthood is any information that extends one’s understanding of how God is, how he would live in your situation, the benefits of doing so, and the consequences of failing to. The priesthood is therefore a conduit of information through which people who have adopted God’s character are linked. This information conduit provides the power to do, feel, and think as God would in your place, as far as you choose to. This information provides the key to becoming more like God. Without learning about and living the character of God, there is no real priesthood, no matter how much authority or unseen power is claimed.

Too many believe that God’s power and authority can be conferred via ordination, independent of a person’s similitude to Jesus. The idea that God magically bestows merit to previously unworthy individuals is false, as can be readily seen by the fact that no such individual claiming his authority has ever demonstrated power equal to their claims. Ordination is not a workaround to personal righteousness.

Priesthood is not a permission slip that entitles the holder to God’s power or authority independent of their informed understanding of his will. Priesthood is not an alternative pipeline of power outside of learning about and adopting God’s character. Ordination to the priesthood does not empower the recipient to use God’s power in any way other than that which God has ordained. Ordination does not make you any more like God than you were before. Priesthood is not a dispensation of power to man independent of God. If you fail to live up to your understanding of how God would think, feel, or act in your place, you will decrease in the power of God you wield, no matter what authority someone has ordained you with.

Ordination is not meant to be an invitation to achieve greater similitude to God, but the outward acknowledgment that such a change has already occurred. God does not look lightly on those who make priests out of people who are nothing like him. Only those who are actually after (or like) the Son of God are actually priests “after the order of the Son of God.”

Ordination is meant to be the continuation of the process of becoming more like God, not the beginning of it. Melchizedek performed mighty miracles in the Lord’s name before his ordination, earned the approbation of God, and continued exercising greater measures of God’s power as he continued learning more about him. As part of his progressive receipt of priesthood, Abraham received greater peace, happiness, rest, knowledge, and righteousness. None of these attributes were new to him; rather, he received the next increment of each having consummately lived up to what God had already given him. He had dedicated his life to serving all as God would in his place as far as he already knew him to be, attracting, instructing, and retaining hundreds of people into his family.

Greater similitude to God can only come through a lengthy process of choosing to learn more about and continuously live like the Lord. Priesthood progression includes the receipt of additional power from heaven, but it comes through what you enact on earth. As you live up to what you understand God would think, feel, and do in your place, he will continue to reveal more about himself. Power from God comes from knowledge about God, which comes in response to your fidelity to and fulfillment of what he has already taught you about himself.

God has always provided the world with sufficient reasons to believe in him. A crucial element of such evidence consists of continuous demonstrations of his power throughout time. The most effective way God has to help his children to believe he exists, know what he is like, and persuade them to be like him is to send to earth those who are more like him than those they are sent to minister to. The more like God one of his messengers is, the more they will be able to demonstrate his character qualities to the people with sufficient demonstrations of his power to prove that they are his emissaries. Unfortunately, the more like God a person is, the more they are rejected and persecuted. God is extremely merciful, and in times of great wickedness, he still makes his power known through giving his power not through merit but as a gift. Because the righteous are so rare and the wicked so abundant, most examples of God’s power are in the form of a gift.

Miracles performed through God’s gifts are usually held up as the epitome of faith, when in actuality they are the result of a lack thereof. The gifts of God are so minuscule in the share of God’s goodness, purpose, and power that it is not appropriate to speak about them in the same frame as God’s power through merit.

God’s power through gifts is a form of palliative care—a limited lesser blessing given to those who refuse the improvement necessary to continuously perceive, receive, and value greater blessings. While God is able to demonstrate more of his power to the wicked through gifts than he can through merit, this mechanism makes it more difficult for the people who witness the gift to understand his character and less likely that they will make the changes needed to become more like him. During his mortal life, the Lord ministered to a people primed to think of God’s blessings as gifts detached from merit, whose promises came from the worthiness of distant ancestors. He continuously struggled to persuade them to seek their own righteousness rather than the rewards earned by others, but the Jews’ desires for gifts from God far exceeded their desire to become like him.

God’s gifts are very limited in their ability to show how God is, because they can only show the outcome of his power, not its source. Because gifts come independent of the worthiness of the individual receiving them, they offer no evidence of the merit of the character of the person possessing them. The generative version of God’s power not only shows that God exists and has power, but also certifies the virtue of the person wielding it, as generative power is an outward indication of how much the character of a person aligns with the character of God. The generative power of God cannot be shown without also showing how to obtain it via the demonstration of the character of the person who has it. For example, while the gift of healing can reduce suffering and may perhaps demonstrate something about God in the process, the generative power of God will provide all of these benefits along with a demonstration of God’s character in the form of the person performing the miracle. The purpose of miracles isn’t to reduce suffering; it is to increase godliness. Generative miracles do this much better than miracles by gift. While the gifts of God provide fruits of his power plucked from the vine, the generative power of God provides continuous access to the vine that produces them.

The most common reaction to demonstrations of God’s power is to set up the demonstrated power as an idol—something sought after or worshiped apart from God who gave it. When people worship miracles instead of God, they tend to set up fake mechanisms for transmitting God’s power. While this never works, it doesn’t seem to stop it from happening. Institutions following this pattern respond to the lack of real miracles by inflating common occurrences to the status of miracles and claiming that God’s authority can be transmitted separate from God’s power. God’s gifts cannot be transmitted through those who possess them because they do not know and do not possess the character qualities that generate the power organically, including the power to give it as a gift. Someone who has generative power from God also knows something about his character, and can impart power to anyone who is willing to become as he is.

Why do common Christians fail to obtain and experience the power of God in their lives? Because they desire to receive the fruits of how he is without becoming that way themselves. All those who truly desire the power of God will also truly desire to be as he is. Those that truly desire the power of God will only desire to use it to pursue his purposes. Those that truly desire the power of God will desire to know what he knows and to live according to that knowledge no matter the cost.

The attainment of God‘s power is inseparable from the attainment of his character. Those that emulate and obtain his character, who do their best in all things, seeking to make all things as good as they can be, will have the power, authority, and priesthood of God in all that they endeavor to do to further his will and his work.

God’s power is found in God’s purpose. Too many members of both sexes incorrectly view extrinsic religious service as a way to attract attention, gain clout, accomplish their own desires, or otherwise serve one’s own purposes.

The differences between men and women mean that each is best suited to advance the purpose of God in different ways. The primary way all people serve God is through learning what he is like and becoming like him. The secondary way all people serve God is through helping people do the same. The most effective way anyone can help others learn about and become more like God is through becoming a righteous father or mother. Service to those outside the home can be considered once you reach the point where you are doing everything that could possibly be done to assist your spouse, children, and grandchildren to learn about and live more like Christ, and still have surplus resources. Because of differences between the roles and capacities of men and women, men will reach this point more often than women, although very few men do.

No one should fall for the trap of seeking supposed service to God outside of the home in order to avoid what they would rather not do in the home. No one should fall for the trap of believing that they will encounter God’s power outside the home while neglecting their service to him within the home. A servant of God joyfully serves where assigned, and men and women each have assignments within the home.

The life of Christ demonstrated how to become like him

Jesus is the example of both the end and the means of salvation, the archetype of eternal life. The role of the Lord as the archetype of eternal life is unnecessarily obscured by weak translations of the Greek word archégos (Strong’s 747), which means “the first example.” An archégos is the first person who demonstrates something by doing it, and by demonstrating it, makes a way for others to do the same. Consider how much clearer the following verses become when archetype is used in place of the parenthesized word that the translators chose instead.

And killed the archetype (Prince) of life, whom God hath raised from the dead; whereof we are witnesses. (Acts 3:15)

Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a(n) archetype (Prince) and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins. (Acts 5:31)

For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the archetype (captain) of their salvation perfect through sufferings. (Hebrews 2:10)

Looking unto Jesus the archetype (author) and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2)

Jesus is not just the Prince of life, the captain of our salvation, or even the author and finisher of our faith, but the demonstration of the process and outcome of obtaining the character of the Father—the archetype and fulfillment of eternal life.

In who he is and how he became that way, the Lord shows us the process we must follow if we are to obtain eternal life. We must become the same way he is, and we must do it the same way he did it. The Lord knows the process to become like he is because he went through it. Jesus is our “forerunner” because he has gone to where we can follow by doing what we must do to join him there. By embodying how the Father is through learning and living according to his character, Jesus made it possible for all who would live according to his demonstration to do the same.

The life of Jesus Christ was the representation of how the Father would live mortal life, the example of how we can become like him, and the demonstration of the potential of man.

The Lord’s life demonstrated what the Father’s character looks like embodied in a mortal man, here on earth. In mortality, Jesus was the visible and apparent application of the divine model to mortal life, “the image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15) The Lord explained that his life was meant to show us how the Father is in terms that we could understand.

The life of Christ provided the example of how to come to know God through becoming like him. We are to follow this example. Jesus said that he sought, discovered, and did the will of the Father in all things.

Jesus taught that everyone who follows him would do the same.

True religion is to learn how God would be in every situation, and to become that way yourself. Jesus predicted that a time would come when all people would understand this, and all believers would practice it. Jesus instructed his disciples to obtain and live as God would in their place so effectively that others would learn more about God by seeing their actions.

Those who believe they can become like God behave differently than those who do not. It is rare to find a person who actually believes that they can become like God. One who thinks this will act and feel very differently than one who does not. They will purify themselves by following his example as far as they understand it.

The life of Jesus Christ showed the fulfillment of the potential of what man can become. During his life, the Lord constantly called himself the “Son of Man” (Hebrew: “ ben Adam ”) as the heir of the role of Adam. Adam was the first son of God, created in his image, charged to fulfill the purpose of creation by stewarding creation as God would in his place. Instead, Adam fell, leaving a void for one of his descendants to fill. The Lord called himself “Son of Man” to demonstrate that he was fulfilling the potential that Adam had—and the potential of all mankind—by learning and living the character of the Father. In using the title, he was not making a difference between himself and others, but calling all people to reach toward their full potential: “I am living as all of you could and should.”

The life of Christ was meant to be irrefutable proof that the gospel “...works for you just as it did for Christ....” (1 John 2:8, The Living Bible) The example of Christ is obscured for those who do not understand that the bodily difference between the Lord and us is a result of his decision to remain sinless as he developed the mental capacity necessary to sin. Because he maintained sinlessness, he retained power over his own life and could therefore atone for the sins of the world by enduring pain beyond what would kill anyone else. Everything else he did was through power available to anyone willing to choose to live as he did.

What Jesus became, he became through the same faith we have access to. His ability to exercise faith was through the same power of choice available to us, not through some magic power the Father uniquely gave to Jesus. No matter how advanced his spirit was, he did not arrive with any special privileges compared to anyone else. Just like you, Jesus was born as a baby, and grew spiritually through time—just as he grew physically—until he attained the full stature of the Father, just as we can grow into the full stature of the Son. His whole life is a testament to what is possible for you to achieve through faith, not an exposition of what can only be done through exclusive and unattainable gifts of God given to Jesus alone.

The value of the Lord’s example is severely restricted when instead of seeing him as being made a little lower than angels, we insist that His mortal sojourn was somehow free from everything that makes mortality a trial. As plainly attested to by those who would know the best, Jesus endured a life more difficult than any of ours, with fewer privileges than any of us enjoy, and still managed to learn and live the fullness of the character of the Father against greater opposition than any of us will face.

False traditions about how and when Jesus learned who he was, received knowledge and power from the Father, and suffered all he did place artificial distance between us and the example he demonstrated. Christians can pay lip-service to Jesus as the author and finisher of our faith, but while they believe he was endowed with magic powers from birth, couldn’t possibly sin, wasn’t tempted to do so, and knew everything about himself and the Father from birth, his example provides no help to any of us in knowing how to follow it or believe that we can. By learning the truth about the progression of Jesus throughout his life, any person can grow closer to him no matter how far from him they may currently be through following the same exact patterns he did.

We should temper our assumptions about the life of Jesus by the fact that it was necessary for Jesus to face greater challenges than anyone else. Understand that any special privilege possessed by the Lord would render his sacrifice for our sins null and void. Of what worth is a sacrifice for sins by someone who is not tempted by sin?

In order to see the life of Jesus as proof of our ability to live a sinless life, it is essential to understand more about sinlessness and what he faced than most people do.

To be sinless is not the same as being as God actually is, only how you understand him to be. There is a difference between fully knowing good and evil and choosing good over evil, based on what you presently know.

Jesus was born sinless, but he was not born flawless. Jesus was always perfectly reconciled to his understanding of the Father, but his understanding of the Father grew over his lifetime. As his understanding of the Father increased, he immediately and consistently lived according to what he learned. Jesus was the only man who has ever lived his whole life without violating his conscience. He never acted contrary to what he thought the Father would do in his place. Jesus was perfectly obedient to his understanding of what was best from the beginning, and his understanding of what was best improved over time.

Some denominations teach that Jesus had to be miraculously conceived to be free from original sin. Our ability to sin comes from the moral judgment that we gain as our bodies grow from infancy, not the inheritance of judgment passed upon Adam. Sin is a question of whether we choose against our capacity to judge what is best. Jesus did not inherit sinlessness as an invariable quality of his godhood. Jesus had the choice to sin, just as we all do. Jesus wasn’t sinless because he had to be, and none of us are sinful except because we want to be. Jesus was sinless because he did what no one else was willing to do, not what no one else was able to do. While all of us have chosen to sin in the past, we can adopt the example of Jesus from this point, choosing to be sinless in the present and future.

Some erroneously think that Jesus was born free from any temptation to sin as evidence that we cannot follow his example of being sinless. If this were true, it would mean the scriptures are lying when they speak of how he was tempted by Satan, the pain he endured, the loneliness he suffered, the disappointments he endured, and by Peter’s suggestion that he did not have to seal his sacrifice with his life.

Jesus did not have magic power to avoid temptation. Instead, he faced and conquered a lifelong series of temptations, proving that we could do the same and showing us how by doing so. He was subject to all the temptations that we are, but he yielded to none of them. The difference was not how difficult it was for him, but that, unlike all of us, he actually “suffered the will of the Father in all things from the beginning.” (3 Nephi 11:11) He wasn’t immune from temptation, he simply chose to follow the Father instead.

Too many disregard Jesus’ life as proof that they can live without sin by claiming that he somehow had it easier than we do. None of the temptations we face are worse than what Jesus experienced. Jesus didn’t operate under greater privileges than us. Rather, he operated under harder conditions than anyone. Even in comparison to the two thieves who were crucified with him, he faced substantially worse conditions, being innocent of any crime and having been beaten nigh unto death. God only allows us to be subjected to temptations for which he has provided us the power to conquer or flee. The Lord inherited this promise from the Father, just as we do. The Father protected Jesus from temptations beyond what he could bear, just as he does for you and me. His tribulations were present from the beginning and escalated in intensity throughout his life.

Jesus was sinless because he loved the Father more than sin. When presented with the option of continuing in the Father’s love or preferring sin, he always chose to love the Father. Whenever you sin, it is because your love for sin is stronger than your love for God. From this point forward, you can choose to follow the example of Jesus by loving God more than sin.

Life provides each person with time and experience to discover their strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to develop beyond the identity they inherited from their parents, ideally toward the potential that God sees in them. The Lord’s life is the ideal example of how to discover and develop your potential, but this lesson is lost when we assume that Jesus knew exactly who he was from the moment of his birth.

Christians assume that Jesus had greater certainty about his identity earlier than he did. The truth is that the Lord did not fully resolve who he was until the moment he said: “it is finished” and died. Until he completed everything the Messiah was meant to do, he could not with perfect certainty know that he was the one who would do it. The uncertainty stretching across his entire life formed a significant part of the difficulty of it. Every trial he faced, from the loneliness of his daily existence to the brutal crucible he endured in the end was salted by the ever-present possibility that he was not the Christ. Even as his confidence in his identity increased, Jesus understood, from the end to the beginning, that his being the Messiah was not guaranteed by anything but his willingness to actually do the things the Messiah would do. A review of the evidence provided for who he was helps temper the assumption that he would have had high confidence in who he was.

Joseph was reported as having had three dreams about Jesus. The first pronounced that Jesus had been “conceived...of the Holy Ghost” with the purpose of “sav[ing] his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:20-21) The subsequent dreams concerned the danger posed by Herod, who would attempt to kill their son, warned him to flee with his family, and announced when it was safe to return (see Matthew 2:13, 19-21). The weight of the content of these dreams and their implications would have been considerable evidence of the importance of the baby concerned. However, these need to be weighed against the fact that they came through the low-confidence channel of dreams, and hardly contained enough information to substantiate the common assumption of how Joseph and Mary saw their son, let alone how he saw himself.

Mary had additional witnesses of who Jesus was. She was visited by Gabriel, who told her she would miraculously become pregnant and that her son would be the promised Messiah. Her cousin Elizabeth provided an additional witness when she proclaimed by the Holy Ghost.

Shortly after the child’s birth, Mary was visited by shepherds who told her that an angel had appeared to them and announced that “a Savior, which is Christ the Lord” had been born (Luke 2:11). Foreign wise men visited the child, “fell down, and worshipped him,” and gave him expensive gifts. (Matthew 2:11) When Joseph and Mary presented the infant in the temple, they were met by a pair of holy individuals who were inspired to prophesy over the baby. Anna, a prophetess, “gave thanks...unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem.” (Luke 2:38) Simeon, a man whom God had promised would not die before seeing the Christ (see Luke 2:26), proclaimed.

As impressive as these events were, they did not reveal anything close to the scope of what we know in retrospect about the mission and works of the Lord, but rather echoed the limited expectations held by the Jews for the Messiah to be a temporal deliverer in the style of King David. It is easy for us to interpret Mary’s experiences through a lens of historical certainty and clarity that she did not possess. She knew that her son was meant to be the Messiah, but she did not understand what that entailed, and we do not know how confident she was in her expectations. Her life would have featured changes to her interpretation of her revelations about and observations of her son, along with ebbs and flows of confidence in it. Far from a view that incrementally increased in detail and confidence, her doubt in his identity probably crescendoed at his death, where the bitterness of losing her only son would have been mixed with the possibility that they had both been incredibly incorrect about who he was.

Jesus had many exceptional experiences, but were any of them sufficient to remove all doubt from his mind about who he was, what he had to do, and what it would be like?

Satan’s temptation of the Lord in the wilderness centered around one question: “ if thou be the son of God...” (see Matthew 4:3 and Matthew 4:6). If he knew beyond doubt that he was the son of God at this point, why would this be any kind of temptation? Interestingly, the question would be posed again at the end of his life as mockers at the cross jeered: “ If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.” (Matthew 27:40)

None of us will face a life as difficult or a mission as exceptional as the Lord’s, but all of us will face situations where we are unsure of what the Lord has planned for us and whether we will be able to measure up to it. A more accurate understanding of the Lord’s own process of incrementally discovering his identity and mission can provide us with context, strength, and an example of how to operate in full trust in God, even when we don’t yet know the full picture.

The life of Jesus Christ provides a powerful lesson in how to incrementally increase in knowledge from God, and how to boldly act with confidence in spite of limited information. This lesson is lost when we assume that Jesus knew all things from the moment of his birth.

There are many mentions in the New Testament of Jesus knowing something about what he was meant to do before he did it or what would happen to him before it happened. For example, he knew when his end had come, that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he would return to him, that he would be betrayed, that his disciples would flee for their lives, and that he would be crucified. The question is: when did he learn these things, and how?

Jesus did not know everything the Father did, especially not from the beginning. There were certainly things that happened that he was not expecting. He continued to be surprised throughout his ministry, such as in Gethsemane when he marveled at the burden of each of the three successive waves of increased suffering required to take upon himself the sins of the world, or on the cross when his expectation that the Father would always be with him was violated. We know that there are things he learned along the way. John the apostle reported that Jesus progressed in his similitude to the Father over the course of his life. In Luke, we read that “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.” (Luke 2:52) We also know that there were things he didn’t know, even at the very end of his life. For example, he proclaimed that no man knew when he will return except the Father.

In conjunction, these facts can only mean that Jesus operated under the same process of revelation that we all do, subject to the same rules, possibilities, and limitations. He was led by the Father, line upon line, through a mix of information of various levels of detail and certainty, and against the backdrop of ignorance, just like all of us are. His understanding, like all of ours, was like a dark city at night, with great clarity in certain areas because of the light received on them, no information on many other spots, and interpolation of all things in between.

Jesus was required to exercise the same kind of faith amidst uncertainty that all of us do as we receive less content or confidence in revelation than we wish. If Jesus was able to accomplish his mission in spite of limited information, you can too. If Jesus was able to move forward in faith in spite of imperfect information, you can too. If Jesus was able to obtain greater revelation through living up to his present understanding, you can too.

How did Jesus manage to memorize, process, live, and extrapolate the scriptures beyond those around him? Some would say that he had some special power that made it easier for him, but any special advantage Jesus possessed would void the example he provided and the sacrifice he made. Instead, he used the tools available to everyone then and now, but with greater heed and diligence than they chose to exercise.

The fact that Jesus was incredibly familiar with the scriptures is shown by his frequent quotation and intentional fulfillment of their contents. In the Lord’s time, copies of the scriptures were handwritten, expensive, and rare. Most people would only have access to the scriptures through memorization and recitation of the copy held at the local synagogue. Those with much greater access to the scriptures marveled that Jesus could have known them as well as he did in spite of not having been formally trained in their contents. The increased familiarity Jesus had with the scriptures over his peers—in spite of equally limited access to them—indicates how much more effort he exerted over the same experiences they had with them.

His example in developing proficiency in scripture is perfectly applicable to the modern world. How often do you think Jesus thought about the scriptures he heard each Sabbath? Do you think he only thought about them while they were being read, or do you think he frequently thought about them throughout the week? Do you think he listened with an academic perspective, as the scribes did, or did he actively think about his daily life and how he could improve based on what he heard? Do you think he relied on his religious leaders to teach him what the scriptures meant, or do you think he actively questioned the status quo? Do you think he limited what he learned to whatever the synagogue leader chose to teach about, or did he search out his own questions? Do you think he passively listened to what was taught, or do you think he extended the lesson with prayer and direct revelation?

The example of Christ in learning and applying the scriptures has special significance to learning about his character. After all, the Old Testament he had access to was full of prophecies about who and how he would be. You not only have greater access to most of the material that Jesus had, you also have access to many other subsequent scriptures that even more thoroughly describe his character. Just like Jesus, you can use those scriptures to learn more about the character of Christ and gain stronger reasons to live that way yourself.

It is widely assumed that Jesus had greater power than he did, earlier than he did. If Jesus had a fullness of power from birth, how could any of us follow his example?

If Jesus was born with all the power of the Father, why aren’t earlier miracles recorded in the New Testament? The simplest possibility for why there are no stories of Jesus performing miracles in his childhood is that there were none. Several aspects of his story support this probability.

As soon as Jesus began working public miracles, he was followed everywhere by a mob. If he had worked miracles before, how could they pass by the attention of the small village in which he lived, where the people reacted to the start of his public ministry by asserting that there was nothing special about him. One possibility is that he worked miracles, but kept them to his family. It is not likely that such privacy could exist in such a small town, but if it could, why were his brothers among those who disbelieved in him after the start of his public ministry? While Mary’s behavior at the wedding of Cana suggests that it wasn’t the first time she had seen Jesus perform a miracle, it is not improbable that she was merely hoping for a temporal solution. After all, by that time Jesus had cared for her for many years, she would have had countless examples of his ability to solve problems, and he was exactly the one she would ask for help if she needed it.

Regardless as to when Jesus began performing miracles, there is no reason to believe that he began life with any special powers. Everything he did and everything he received was done and received according to the same laws of cause and effect that we are all subject to, all of which require choices on our part, and all of which develop as we grow into the ability to make moral judgments for ourselves.

Some discount the difficulty of the Lord’s life, the power he wielded, or what he accomplished by believing that he had frequent interaction with heaven that made this easier than it would be for anyone else. Many Christians assume that the Lord’s interactions with heaven came only because he was the Christ, and that they were far more numerous than those described in the gospels. Under such assumptions, the value of the Lord’s life as an example to follow in seeking and obtaining interactions with heaven is lost. The truth is that the Lord’s life provided an example of incremental interactions with heavenly visitors at significant and appropriate times during his life, and serves as a template for all others to follow.

If Jesus received so many angelic visitations, why are only three recorded? The first recorded instance of Jesus being visited by angels was after his long fast and temptation in the wilderness. The only other two stories of Jesus interacting with angels was his interaction with Moses and Elijah on the mount and an unnamed angel in Gethsemane. What if these were the only visits by angels he experienced? There are many people who have entertained angels more than three times. Some of them are alive today.

Many assume that Jesus must have had many angelic visitations because he was the most righteous man who ever lived. While righteousness is a criterion for angelic visitation, it is not the only one. The more righteous you are, the fewer the angels you need to visit you, and the fewer there are who have anything to offer you. What, exactly, could any angel do to help Jesus? The angels who ministered to him after his fast could have brought him food. Moses and Elijah did not minister to Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, but rather the reverse. The angel in the Garden provided information to him that he did not have, which helped him decide to finish taking upon himself the sins of the world and sacrificing his life.

Jesus did not have greater access to angels than you or I. If anything, the conditions under which they could visit him were more constrained, not less. Angels are limited in their ability to visit those for whom their visit would deprive the opportunity to exercise additional faith, making them less likely to visit Jesus for at least two reasons. First, he had grown incrementally to have greater power than anyone else and, second, any angel who visited him would have given him additional witnesses of his identity and mission, if only in their obeisance to him. On both counts, angelic visitations would have prevented his expression of faith. Angels don’t come to make hard things easy for you. They come to make the impossible possible. Angels will not come to do for you what you could do yourself. This is why angels did not minister to Jesus during his trial with Satan, only after.

Jesus did not have special access to angels. He obtained interactions with angels the same way anyone else does. Because the same laws are in play for all, you can receive angelic ministration if you follow the example of Jesus. Exert yourself to your full capability. When you exhaust your resources, God will provide more, and he will use heavenly angels to do so whenever no earthly angels are available with sufficient capabilities and willingness.

While Jesus described that he felt as if the Father had forsaken him while on the cross, many people assume that, until then, he had a constant, unbroken, instant, verbal line of communication with the Father. It’s impossible to approach an accurate understanding of the suffering the Lord endured while holding to the incorrect idea that he had access to the Father that extended beyond what anyone has who is equally obedient to him.

There are exactly three times when the Father is recorded as speaking in an audible voice to Jesus.

At his baptism, a voice from heaven was heard to say: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17) Christians assume that this voice came only for the sake of John, whose mission was to testify of the identity of the Messiah, and that Jesus had heard the voice of the Father many times before, potentially even having regular and more involved interactions with him. But what if this was the first time Jesus heard the voice of the Father? What if, just like everyone else, the Lord had to strive to learn and live more like the Father for years before he heard his voice?

The next time the Lord is described as hearing the voice of the Father is at the Mount of Transfiguration (see Matthew 17:4-5). Just as at his baptism, the voice is directed towards a special audience—in this case, Peter, James, and John—further stressing the point that it was no light thing for anyone—including Jesus—to hear the audible voice of the Father.

The final time the voice of the Father is recorded is six days before the last passover, when Jesus explicitly says the voice did not come for him, but for those with him. What if part of the Lord’s trial wasn’t getting to the point where he would hear the Father’s voice, but getting to the point where he would do the Father’s will without needing to? This theory is supported by the trial from Gethsemane to the cross, where Jesus “cried with a loud voice...My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)

Any special privilege that made his life easier than ours would void his purpose of demonstrating the example of how each of us must live. As far as we know, Jesus never received the voice of the Father when he was lonely, when he was tired, when he was sad, when he was unmotivated, or when he struggled to believe in himself. He heard the voice of the Father when John needed to know who he was, when Peter, James, and Andrew needed to know who he was, and when his disciples needed to know who he was. If we want to follow the example of Jesus, we will not seek the voice of the Father—or any other manifestation of his power—to rob ourselves of the trial of faith, but only to increase the faith of others. God’s power does not exist for our convenience, but to further his own purpose.

Justification and sanctification through learning about and living like Jesus

Living the gospel of Jesus Christ consists of an initiatory event of justification followed by the lifelong process of sanctification. You are justified by reconciling yourself to what you already know about God. You are sanctified as you learn more about God while remaining reconciled to him.

Justification is an event, but sanctification is a process. The Lord described justification and sanctification using himself as a metaphor. He called himself the gate, explaining how walking through him was an event, and he explained himself as a path, the traversal of which was a process. By reconciling your life to your present understanding of how Jesus is, you enter the gospel gate. As you continue along the strait and narrow way, you progress in the gospel process.

Justification is the decision to submit to God. Those who perfectly follow the example of Jesus as they understand him to be are called justified. Justification is a condition of perfectly replicating your understanding of how Jesus would be in your place. We are justified if we continuously live according to how we believe God would live in our situation. Justification through Christ means living in a state where you completely and constantly reconcile your desires, thoughts, and actions to your current, sincere idea of what is best, and as such, is a synonym for blamelessness. Justification occurs when you scrutinize your life, admit where your desires, thoughts, and actions deviate from the example of Christ, and improve to reconcile yourself to his example.

Justification is an event. It occurs in the moment you decide to follow God, and is maintained as long as you continue to follow him. When you determine to choose God’s purpose as your own, and subdue all other interests to his, you are justified. Justification is a gospel doctrine that has been significantly distorted by common Christians. An unfortunate number of Christians believe righteousness is a question of God’s decree upon a person in response to their statement of belief in him, rather than a description of how they actually are compared to their belief about how Jesus is. God can’t and won’t bestow upon you the rewards of righteousness while you continue to willingly sin against him. Justification is a property, not a decree. God does not lie, and because righteousness is a measure of similarity to God, he cannot declare anyone righteous except through their conformity to their understanding of how God is, or how he actually is. There isn’t a third option that magically transforms a sinner into a saint. Even when God forgives you, he cannot make you holy except through your choice to follow how he demonstrates himself to be.

There are special blessings available only to those who live in full alignment with God. Sanctification increases the quality and quantity of blessings to which you have access. All good comes from and leads to God, and the concentration of its value increases as you draw nearer to him. The bandwidth of wisdom, blessings, and power from God available to you is determined not just by whether you are aligned, but by the level of knowledge about God that you are aligned to. As you learn more about him while remaining aligned with him, the amount of good he can send into your life increases. It is through people who align with God and increase the bandwidth of their connection to him that God establishes his kingdom on earth. Most of the blessings we read about in the scriptures are among those reserved for those who live in full alignment with God. It is because very few Christians live in alignment with God that so few scriptural blessings are available in the lives of many Christians.

When you are aligned with God, or justified, you open the maximal conduit of wisdom, blessings, and power from God available to you.

You enjoy unparalleled peace. You can stand in the presence of God. You are sustained by God without any impedance. Nothing good is withheld from you.

Falling out of alignment with what you understand God to be like disqualifies you from further revelation of how he is, and will also result in the loss of the grace you have received until now. Each way in which you think, feel, or act less than the best you know creates impedance between you and God. Every difference between how you are and how you believe God to be creates an obstruction in the flow of God’s goodness to and through you.

Sanctification is the process of becoming holier through learning more about God while continuing to live all we know. To be sanctified is to gain more of the joy, knowledge, beliefs, power, and glory of God. Sanctification requires learning more about Jesus than you knew before. Justification requires sacrificing what cannot remain, but sanctification requires becoming better than you were before.

Sanctification is the process of iteratively obtaining a better understanding of God while applying that understanding to your life. This is a cyclic process that consists of.

Learning more about God’s character. Consummately applying what you understand about God’s character in your life. Repeating this process as God teaches you more about himself.

Sanctification is the process of learning more while remaining reconciled to what you learn. Sanctification occurs as you maintain complete conformance to the will of God in thoughts, words, deeds, desires, and character as you are exposed to greater challenges in life. There will always be more to know about God, and each increment of learning brings an opportunity to live what you have learned or turn away from it. You choose whether to remain reconciled to God or not. Those who choose to remain reconciled to God as they learn more about him remain justified and become more sanctified.

Sanctification cannot occur outside of the choice and capacity of the individual. Little children are involuntarily justified through the atonement of Jesus Christ, but like everyone else, they cannot be sanctified except through learning and choosing to live a greater law.

If children were sanctified against their will, it would be preferable to die as an infant. The truth is that this life provides a unique opportunity for sanctification, which is why the earth was created in the first place.

While we are forgiven or punished according to what we believe is good, we can only be blessed inasmuch as we have learned and lived up to what is actually good.

Greater knowledge brings greater accountability, but you can’t obtain greater blessings without greater knowledge. Those faithful to a little knowledge receive the blessings of having a little knowledge. Those faithful to a lot of knowledge receive the blessings of having a lot of knowledge.

We are still subject to the temporal consequences of our ignorance, even if we are forgiven of the moral consequences of our ignorance. A baby is subject to the same gravity as an average adult or engineer, and while the adult can better avoid falling off a cliff than the baby, only the engineer will be able to design a plane to fly off of it.

Justification is a binary state—you are either justified or you are not—but sanctification is by degrees. You are justified all at once, but you are sanctified line upon line. Justification is a question of whether you are reconciled to all you know. Sanctification is a question of how much you know. You must be justified to be sanctified to any degree.

Sanctification is the process of obtaining greater degrees of eternal life by learning more about and becoming more like God. We grow proportional to the degree of heed and diligence we exercise in obtaining more information about God while living up to everything we already know. As you make every reasonable attempt to learn more about the character of God and as you are completely obedient to your present understanding, God will teach you more about himself. You draw nearer to Christ incrementally as you follow his incrementally revealed example.

Finding out more about how Jesus is begins by living as you believe he would given what you already understand about him. If you live according to your present understanding of how Jesus is, he will teach you more about himself. As you consistently live up to what you believe Jesus would think, feel, and do in your place, he will reveal to you more about how he is. As long as you remain consistent in fully following his example, you will continue in the process of refinement, incrementally increasing in your similitude to Jesus.

You will learn more about God line upon line as you live up to what you already know. The path to God is a path of correction. In each step, you learn that God would think, feel, or act differently than you if he were in your place. You implement the suggested improvement, and the cycle repeats with some new lesson. When the rich young ruler asked Jesus what he needed to do to be saved, Jesus responded by telling him what he would do differently if he were in his place. The next step in the gospel is always the next thing you know but do not do. How fast and far you progress in the development of your character will depend solely on your ability to focus fully on the changes he has already suggested to you: ways you think, feel, or act that don’t match your current understanding of what is best. As you fill your life with the light God has already revealed to you, greater knowledge about God will come to you daily like dew on the morning grass.

Maintaining your relationship with God requires more than just maintaining your obedience to what he has already revealed to you.

Your relationship with God is always either growing or decaying. It will never be the case that one living up to their beliefs will remain stagnant over time. God always sends the next increment of truth to those who live up to what they have.

Jesus said our work is to “believe on him whom [God] has sent.” Believing in Jesus means learning more about how he is and implementing his example in your own life. When you reconcile yourself to God, you enter into a state of alignment with him. When you are aligned with God, there is no part of you that lies outside of how he would be, up to the limits of your capacity, opportunity, and understanding. You align with God by seeking and pursuing his will in all things, all of the time. To be fully aligned with God requires you to be an integrated, honest person whose central, transcendent purpose is to learn and accomplish the will of God.

Maintaining alignment with God requires your continual reconciliation with God. We are innocent of the transgressions we unknowingly commit. However, we are accountable for every time we fall short of the best we know. Increased knowledge of God brings with it the opportunity to become more like him and receive more of his blessings, but also the accountability for living up to a higher standard. When you disconnect yourself from Jesus in anything, you distance yourself from him in everything. In order to continue receiving God’s grace for what you do not know, you must continue living up to everything you do know.

To remain aligned with God requires constant improvement. How willing are you to change your mind about how you believe Jesus to be? Greater knowledge about God does not just consist of additional ideas that stand apart from or build upon what you already believe about him. A great deal of what remains for you to learn about God will include ideas that directly contradict what you already believe about him.

How would you discover limits in your beliefs about Jesus? Discovery of limitations in belief can only come through so many sources; you must be willing to listen to the arguments of others, willing to experiment with their beliefs, and willing to fully live up to their beliefs while honestly assessing if they deliver the promised outcomes. There is no other way of discovering limits in belief, but for most Christians, all three vectors of learning are heretical, and they therefore never discover or correct the limits in their beliefs about Jesus.

Meanwhile, many non-Christians do an excellent job at becoming more like Jesus and gaining reasons for why to do so, at least as far as they can without actually knowing about or believing in Jesus. They do so in the name of improvement—all of which is inseparable from God, whether they realize it or not. Just as modern Christians cannot progress to better outcomes until they recognize and progress in attention to how to become more like Jesus and why to do so, nonChristians who are oriented toward improvement will only continue to find it by learning that Jesus is real, that everything good they have found in life is from him, and that everything better that remains is found through explicit belief in him.

Maintaining a growing relationship with God requires you to constantly learn more about him than you knew before and to remain aligned with all he reveals to you. To abide with Jesus, you must reach for anything in him that is better than you and let go of anything in you that is less than him. If you want to abide with God, you have to constantly seek and do his will, instantly changing any time you realize that your present path deviates from what he would think, feel, or do in your place. Correction can come at any moment. Disciples of Christ stand ready to receive them, watching and ready to hear and obey anything he might say. From the moment you rise until you retire, proactively pursue his purpose and be prepared to receive further instructions.

It is possible to live in constant reconciliation with God. Perfection is dismissed by many as an unattainable goal, in spite of Jesus commanding us to be perfect. In the scriptures, perfect is a synonym for blameless. It means a person who is living the best that they know. This is not meant to be an exceptional situation. Several well-known people attained this state as described in scripture. It is meant to be the state in which Christians continuously live. All disciples of Christ are commanded to be perfect.

It is possible to be in a state where you can’t identify anything in your life that God would handle differently than you do. To achieve this state is not the same as being exactly as Jesus is, but to be precisely as you understand him to be.

God’s commandments are a means of learning about and living like him

Your character is what you do, why you do it, and how you feel about it. A model of someone’s character is an estimate of the qualities that predict what they will think, feel, and do in a given situation.

Human beings are astonishingly adept at modeling other people. Artificial intelligence models are used to apply past observations to future decisions and actions, just as we model the character of other people to be able to predict or replicate what they do. AI model creation and usage requires many complex calculations and extremely advanced equipment. Amazingly, humans seem to have the ability to model the character of other humans with far less.

If you know an average person at least marginally, you will be able to predict their actions and desires to an astonishing degree of accuracy even if your knowledge of their lives is limited. For example, you could probably predict whether someone you knew even slightly would enjoy a particular movie or book.

Without ever thinking about it, you have probably managed to build a predictive model of the character of every person you know, and you use these models every single day to inform how you interact with others in order to obtain what you want.

On the one hand, your ability to model others is a skill so deeply ingrained that you can use it without even thinking about it. On the other, because the majority of supposedly Christian churches teach that the gospel exists in order to excuse us from being more like Jesus instead of enabling us to be more like him, you’ve probably never used these abilities to build or apply a model of Christ.

God’s commandments are not a static and synthetic list of rules that take the place of actual holiness. They aren’t what we do to avoid being punished for being unlike God. God’s commandments are successive descriptions of his character that show us how and why to live more like he is.

God’s commandments are a way to learn more about and become more like Jesus, not a substitute for doing neither. God’s Commandments are not some alternative means to receive more of his blessings without becoming more like him. God’s commandments are not a way to curry arbitrary favor with God, but a pathway to become more like him. The defining characteristic of heathen religions is their belief that divine favor can be curried through arbitrary sacrifices meant to bribe the fickle favor of selfish deities. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob does not benefit from our sacrifices, but we do. God’s commandments are not designed for what he gets out of them, but for what we become through them. His benefit from us is limited to how much we become like him.

God’s commandments are instructions that help you better understand how God would live in your place and why. To keep God’s commandments is to follow his example as far as you understand it. God’s commandments are given to teach us more about him, prepare to learn more about him, and increase in the desire we have to do so.

Various words are used in the scriptures in connection with God’s commandments, including but not limited to his laws, precepts, statutes, and judgments. While some benefit may come from attempting to impose specific definitions upon these obviously ambiguous terms, it is much more useful and correct to see all of these as overlapping variations on the same general theme.

Commandments can come in the form of precept, example, argument, or experience, all of which provide information to the end of helping you to better perceive or to persuade you to more fully follow how God would live in your place.

Precepts are prescriptive declarations of what you should or should not do, how you should or should not do it, or why you should or should not do it. An example of a preceptive commandment is: “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” (Deuteronomy 6:5)

Examples are demonstrations of better behavior. Jesus demonstrated an example when he was baptized by John.

Arguments are reasons shared with the intent of persuading a person to change how they think, feel, or act. The New Testament is replete with arguments from Jesus. For example, when he was attempting to persuade the Jews that he had authority from the Father to forgive sins, he healed a man, saying: “[is it easier] to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?” (Matthew 9:5)

Experiences show what is better or worse than thought by further unfolding the consequences of choice. Jesus provided countless miracles of healing to demonstrate the value of his teachings, while pronouncing judgment upon Jerusalem, foretelling its destruction to help illustrate the mistake the Jews had made in rejecting him.

When the Lord gives us commandments, it is with the intent that we better understand and more fully acquire the aspect of his character that generates the commandment. You should do what you can to use every precept, example, argument, and experience you encounter to increase the breadth, depth, and accuracy of your understanding of how Jesus would live in your place. Try to formulate and verbalize the aspect of God’s character that would result in the commandments you observe. Enumerate hypotheses and test them. Ask questions, and seek their answers.

A person’s character is a queryable store of information about the thoughts, feelings, and actions of another person. The better you know someone’s character, the more situations in which you can accurately predict what they would do, why they would do it, and how they would feel before, during, and after. If you truly knew the Lord, you would have a confident idea of what he would do in every situation of your life.

God’s commandments help you more accurately estimate how God would think, desire, and act, and delineate differences between how you are and how he is. Commandments reveal how you differ from God while giving you direction on how to close that gap. Your response to God’s commandments demonstrates who you really are by providing you with an opportunity to be better. God’s commandments reveal desires, flaws, and strengths that might otherwise remain hidden from you.

When sculpting a large work, artists sometimes first make scale models. Using a crane-mounted plumb line, measurements from the finished work can be scaled to the work in progress, indicating where material must be added or removed in order to yield a high fidelity replica of the scale model.

Do you reconcile your life in every way to what you believe God would do in your place? Before you do anything, ask if that is what Jesus would do in your place. If you aren’t sure what he would do, find out. If you don’t have time, think about what would produce the greatest long term outcomes for all without regard for self.

What aspects of your thoughts, feelings, and actions are different from what they would be if you were God? It is impossible to list all possible modifications, but here are a few to get you thinking. Would you be more reliable, humble, courageous, honest, hard-working, or reasonable? Would you be more intense? Would you be less selfish, or short-sighted? Would you be more grateful for the good things and people in your life? Would you be more resilient, less fearful, and more trusting in the midst of challenges? Would you be more amenable to opportunities to improve and those who precipitate them? Would you be more willing to adopt different ideas when given sufficient reasons to? Would you find better reasons for what you believe? Would you live your beliefs more consistently? Would you prioritize what you find to have the greatest worth? Would you minimize what you find to have little to no value? Would you be more patient with a person you currently dismiss? Would you swap out hobbies for something more productive? Would you sleep less, sleep more, go to sleep earlier, or wake up earlier? Would you eat better? Would you enjoy food more? Enjoy food less? Would you work harder? Would you speak up more often? Would you speak up less often?

God’s shaping radically removes what is less than him, but amply adds what is greater than us. Sometimes, large portions of how we feel, act, or think must be removed in order to make room for what God will add. Those who refuse to submit to the full removal will have to settle for the best approximation God can make from what remains. Given the grand differences, what he can make from what we provide is paltry compared to what he could give us if we allowed him to make room to receive it.

Whether intentionally or not, too many Christians exercise gross hypocrisy by using a different definition for the word “follow” when it applies to following Jesus than they would in other aspects of their lives. For instance, no one would think they could follow another car to an intended destination by taking different turns than they do, yet many Christians pretend they can follow Jesus while picking and choosing when to live as he would in their place. How silly it is to think you will go to the same place he is by traveling a different path than he did!

To follow Jesus is to walk on the way of life. The Lord said “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) As you walk with God, you will abound in all the blessings he enjoys. To walk with God requires you to walk as God would, as far as you understand him to be.

To walk with God is to live in complete reconciliation to one’s understanding of the character of Jesus. Anyone who does anything else does not know or believe Jesus, and the truth is not in them.

To follow Jesus means to live as you sincerely believe he would, at all times and in all places. It means to conform to whatever he reveals to you about himself, to follow every instruction he provides to guide you, and to prioritize him and his purpose above all else. To follow Jesus means to learn and live his character. It is to do, think, and feel what he would in your place for the same reasons.

Christianity is not defined by a set of rules, a set of behaviors, or even a set of beliefs. Rather, it is defined as those who follow the example of Christ. While Christians may disagree with their ideas of how the Lord would live in their place, no Christian should dispute the optimality or necessity of doing so. True Christians are disciples of Christ—they conform their thoughts, words, and actions to their belief of how he would live in their place.

You cannot be saved without believing in Jesus Christ, but what does it mean to believe in him? It is possible to profess belief in God without obeying him, but professing belief is not the same as actually believing.

You can’t believe in Jesus without following his example. When you actually believe Jesus, you always follow his example. What you really believe isn’t demonstrated by what you say you believe, but by how you actually think, feel, and act.

To believe in Jesus is to pursue the purpose of God as your own by following the example of Jesus. It is to adopt and maintain his character at all times and in all places. Anything that doesn’t fit the pattern of God does not belong in the life of a disciple.

It isn’t difficult to find a professed Christian who views their belief in God as independent of whether they actually obey him or not. Paul spoke of these types of people.

The so-called belief of those who do not obey God is different from the belief of the devils who oppose him only in that the devils actually fear him.

People who consider themselves Christians yet do not follow the example of Christ are deceiving themselves. How can you claim to believe in God if you think you know better than what he commands? When you really believe Jesus, you actually do what he says. Jesus taught that you do not become a Christian until and unless you reconcile to his example.

Until you reconcile your life to God’s instructions, you can’t truthfully say you believe in him. Until you actually obey Jesus, claiming to believe in him simply adds to your condemnation before God.

Jesus intended for us to follow his example. He said.

We are meant to live in the same manner he did.

One challenge in doing so is knowing what he would do in our place. While scriptural accounts provide stories from his life, those stories don’t directly map to every situation in our own lives. Missionary work is different than daily life, and modern life is quite different than ancient life.

The missing key in beginning to better understand what Jesus would do in your place is transcending from specifics to general principles. The stories from the life of Jesus are directly applicable in the unlikely event you find yourself in the same exact situation, but the principles they demonstrate are applicable in every situation.

The need to extract principles from particular stories is an essential task. Jesus said that what he had taught and done provided enough examples from which the character of the Father could be fully derived. In fact, he said they were so ample that anyone who knew them had seen the Father! It was the Father’s principles—not specific actions —that Jesus was referring to when he spoke of how the Father had shown him his character.

The most important principles the Lord learned from the Father are.

Love God with all of your heart, might, mind, and strength. Love others as God loves you.

There are two challenges in living these principles. The first and most obvious is that they require a consummate dedication. The second and most practical is that they require a level of understanding that very few possess. What love means and how it is applied, how God is, what a totality of heart, might, mind, and strength requires, and how God loves you are all mysteries that require a great deal of faith to uncover. However, it is possible to describe the implementation of these principles in exceedingly plain language: Be the best person you can be and help others become the best people they can be. This is done by seeking, developing, obtaining, and giving what has the greatest longterm net benefit. This plain statement does not instantly confer a perfect understanding of how to live these principles, but it does instantly provide a perfectly successive path towards that perfect understanding, as well as instantly provide the next step in that direction, and it does so more than an entire lifetime of typical religious teaching would. A paradigm of improvement will vastly accelerate your efforts in learning what Jesus would do in your place.

One of the most important aspects of thinking like Jesus is just to think in the first place. Most people are extremely passive about their lives and do their best to avoid the thought necessary to be intentional.

Passive people may hide behind the excuse that they trust in God. Submission to God and passivity toward life are not the same. The Lord is both the most submissive and the least passive individual there is. He is absolutely submissive to the Father, as we must be if we are to follow his example. In his life, he was constantly confronted with changes he had to make to better live as the Father would in his place. He immediately implemented every improvement and rejoiced in the opportunity to do so.

How do you respond to correction? Unfortunately, human nature opposes learning. Once they learn something, most people think they know everything. Paul said, “Be not wise in your own conceits.” (Romans 12:16) God can’t teach you anything when you think you know everything.

Submissive people, like Jesus, are teachable. They are willing—and even eager—to learn how they can improve; they want to know what they are wrong about and what they are ignorant of. They hunger and thirst after righteousness. Jesus said we ought to become like little children. We, like children, should question everything, assume there is far more than what we know, and seek after frequent paradigm shifts. We should test all new ideas and hold to those that are better than whatever we had before. How do you react when you are confronted with ideas that conflict with your preconceived notions? Are you as willing as he was to instantly leave behind what you thought you knew when presented with something better? As you do, like Jesus, you will “...increas[e] in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.” (Luke 2:52) No matter what you think you know, there may be more that God has for you to learn. We know from the account of his ordeal in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross that Jesus was still being confronted with ideas he did not expect until the final moments of his mortal life. Do you expect to figure it out faster?

While it is not possible to be more submissive to the Father or the truth than Jesus was, it is also not possible to be more courageous and tenacious to what he knew was better. Submission to the Father and the truth requires uncommon boldness in the face of challenges to either. You cannot serve God and anything else. Loving him above all else leaves no room for anything that conflicts with his character in your life. How do you respond to ideas that contradict the truth in God? Do you call out bad ideas, even when offered by those with seemingly good intent, and even when they are friends or family? Do you do your best to persuade others toward what is better?

If you want to think like Jesus, you’ll have to get better at perceiving and correctly assessing the long-term net benefit of potential actions for yourself and others. You cannot do what is best without considering your options. You can’t do what is best beyond the limits of the options you perceive or the accuracy of your estimate of the cost and benefit of each. To do what is best, you have to pay attention to how your plans are turning out and make changes as soon as you learn they are necessary.

The gospel isn’t just a means of changing our actions to align with Jesus; it also enables us to align with the Lord in how we feel. It isn’t possible to follow the Lord’s example only in outward actions. While some outward changes always occur downstream of inward changes, it is from within, in our hearts and minds, that we grow in the measure to which we have obtained and instantiated the character of Christ. The Lord repeatedly taught that good and evil cannot be assessed solely by outward actions, because your understanding and desire are necessary determinants of whether what you do is good or evil. It is primarily the corrupt default state of our mind and heart—our beliefs and feelings (including desires and motives)—that makes us natural enemies of God.

Jesus feels good about what is actually good, and he feels bad about what is actually bad. His desires focus on what has the greatest value, according to his perfect understanding of what everything is actually worth, and his emotional reactions are perfectly aligned with how things really were, are, and will be. As you learn more about the Lord, you will find in him every reason to yield to his feelings, even when yours differ, and through doing so, increasingly understand and agree with why he feels that way.

An abundant life is not obtained or defined by pleasant feelings, but by what we are willing to do in spite of the lack thereof. Those willing to do the greatest good even when it feels the worst are the ones who end up feeling the best.

A surprising number of professed Christians will only submit to God when doing so feels good. Many people truly believe that submission to God always feels better than the alternative. Why would you believe that submission to the Father will feel dramatically different for you than it did for Jesus, whose relentless suffering was so intense that it would have killed any other person? In just one episode of the Lord’s lifelong suffering, he asked the Father three times if there was any other way than what he had been told, as he sweat blood due to the intensity of the pain he felt (see Luke 22).

While the maximal suffering you face in life will be less than what Jesus faced, every true disciple of Christ will face suffering beyond what they expect would kill them—beyond anything they imagined possible. Will you prove faithful, as Jesus did, or will you turn away, as almost everyone will long before the pinnacle of suffering is reached? The answer is not determined by a burst of courage, but through your willingness to participate in the process that prepares you.

The Lord’s entire life was a series of trials of cascading intensity, as yours is meant to be. Life’s trials help you build strength, increase your trust in God, and, very importantly, adjust your understanding of worth. Each of these virtues increases incrementally as you recognize and overcome the trials presently before you. The more you actively compare your life to how you believe God would live it, and the more fully you make all necessary changes to align the two, the stronger your ability to continue doing so will become, even in the face of greater obstacles.

Some feelings seem to just happen to us, but our understanding of reality and the choices we make play a significant role in how we feel, especially in the long-term. Living the gospel requires improvement in your beliefs. Your initial beliefs about reality tend to be adopted from your surrounding environment, but like the Lord, you have the ability and responsibility to test, reject, seek, and adopt beliefs that exceed the limits of those around you. The more honestly you live your beliefs, and the more diligently you search for better ones, the more accurately you will see the world, the better the choices you will make, and the better you will feel.

God’s ability to reveal his commandments to you depends on how much like him you have become

God’s character does not change, but our perception of it absolutely will as we draw nearer to him. The commandments you presently know are not an end, but a gateway to greater understanding and assimilation of God’s character. Commandments are not issued as final truths that fully and accurately describe the depth and breadth of God’s character. Instead, they are progressive instructions that give us increasingly more accurate estimations of his character. They do not reveal all there is to know, but merely the very next increment of understanding. They are given as stepping stones toward the fullness of how he is. The purpose of stepping stones is not to yield the end, but to make it easier to take the next step toward the end. Those who reject the next provided stepping stone fail to reach the intended end.

Different people have different commandments. Commandments are instructions that delineate the next step from wherever a person is to the next increment of God they are capable of perceiving, receiving, and valuing. As such, while God does not change, his commandments will vary between and among individuals due to limits in and changes to their capacity or situation. As you walk in the way of life, you should expect God to continue to bless you with new, greater, and updated commandments.

The more like God you become, the more extensively God can show you more about himself, leading to better outcomes for you and those who know you here and hereafter. The ability of any person to perceive, receive, value, and live God’s commandments is limited by the differences between their character and God’s. Their intelligence, diligence, courage, strength, and direction of desire, and a host of other character qualities will all facilitate God’s ability to teach them to the degree they are similar to his, and impede his ability to teach them to the degree they are dissimilar to his.

Commandments are a means of drawing nearer to Christ by learning more about what he is like and living what we learn. The purpose of any commandment is to instruct you in the very next step from where you are towards how God is. God reveals new or expanded commandments at every stage of similarity to himself. The relationship between commandments and similitude to God is like the foundation to the height of the building. A foundationless building is very limited in height. The stronger the foundation, the higher you can build the building. Whenever anyone attains a greater level of similitude to God, he gives them new or expanded commandments.

Commandments come in incrementally more robust, informative, and effective instructions toward a fuller and more accurate understanding of God’s character. As you keep God’s commandments, you will learn more about his character and become more like him.

God’s commandments are incremental, revealing more and more about him in greater breadth, depth, and accuracy as the recipient advances. Yielding to incremental commandments will open your access to the continuous supply of new information about God’s character. Your obedience to the incremental commandments that you have received from God so far will enable you to see more of his character than you could see previously.

If you are progressing with God, you will receive commandments that expand or replace your previous understanding of his will in your life. You should expect God’s commandments to you to change with every step you take closer to him.

The pattern and purpose of God giving new or expanded commandments is found throughout the scriptures and in the lives of every person who seeks God. Like scriptural personalities, every time you live up to how you presently understand God to be, he will teach you more about himself and you will find yourself with new or expanded commandments.

A lack of new commandments indicates that you still haven’t obeyed what he has already taught you. We must remain obedient to God as he increases the breadth, depth, and accuracy of our understanding of how he is, always possessing a willingness to change in our understanding of what is best.

God can and does command people to do what they formerly believed to be sinful. For example, the man Jesus healed at the pool of Bethesda was commanded to take up his bed and walk, which he believed to be a violation of the Sabbath law. As another example, God commanded Ezekiel to bake bread on human dung, which he believed was a violation of the law of Moses. It is more important to listen to what God is telling you now than it is to cling to what you think he told you to do before.

When God shows you something of himself, it is immensely foolish to judge the goodness of what he shows based only on your present understanding of how he is. This kind of thinking has led to the persecution of countless servants of God, whose greater similarity to God was judged as wickedness by people less righteous than they, and even resulted in the murder of Jesus Christ himself. Imagine judging the Lord as immoral based on an incorrect understanding of the commandments he himself gave! We should formulate and reformulate our understanding of him (and his rules) based on what he tells us about himself, not on what we already believe.

The scriptures encourage us to seek and do good, but also indicate that the evaluation of good and evil cannot be reduced to a comparison to a set of rules. Commandments are tools to help us learn to discern good and evil, not a replacement for that discernment. New commandments reveal the good in things not previously thought of as good, and reveal the evil in things not previously thought of as evil. If you already shared God’s discernment of good and evil, desire for good, and hatred of evil, there would be no need for commandments, as you would live as God would in your place. As long as you remain different from God in any way, you should expect that there are aspects of your understanding of good and evil that differ from God’s.

God can and does issue personal and general commandments that contradict his former commandments. On multiple occasions, he commanded men who lived the law of Moses to kill others—something expressly forbidden by the law of Moses. The Lord commanded people to eat his flesh and drink his blood, when the law of Moses forbad eating man’s flesh or drinking the blood of any creature. Jesus also taught that nothing a man consumes can defile him, when the law provided a lengthy list of things that defiled a man to eat (see Leviticus 11).

As God provides justification for his commandments, do not make the mistake of presuming the benefit from the former commandment precludes greater blessing for the newer commandment. God routinely asks us to trade something good for something better. In doing so, he frequently leans on our understanding of his goodness to justify what we cannot presently see as better than what he asks us to sacrifice.

Your understanding of what Jesus would think, feel, or do in your place is the set of God’s commandments to you. Your idea of how Jesus would live in your place will differ from that of others in significant ways. Yours is the task of finding out what others believe about the Lord, why they believe it, and whether their beliefs are more supported than yours.

Every person’s understanding of God’s commandments will differ as much as their understanding and emulation of how God is. Those who invest more heed and diligence in learning more about and living like Jesus will be more like him and know more about him than those who invest less. Those who live as they sincerely believe Jesus would in their place will receive a greater understanding of his life through additional personal revelation.

With every commandment, God provides sufficient reasons for the recipient to believe that his contrary instructions are for a greater purpose than the original commandment. The improvement that comes from God’s commandments should be so obvious and dramatic that it becomes difficult to doubt where they came from. You should be learning, changing, and growing. You should find yourself with greater trust in God. You should find your character is more like his, and less like yours used to be. You should find yourself able to conquer things that previously challenged you and understand things that previously perplexed you.

As you follow God’s commandments to you, your understanding of how he is will merge to more closely resemble that of those who know him better than you.

Conformance to God’s instructions seems like a restriction to many because few understand that they are for their benefit, not God’s. The commandments are not a gift to God, but a gift from God. God’s desire is for you to obtain all the joy you are willing to receive. Lasting happiness is a question of how similar to God you’ve become. God’s commandments are provided to orient us toward greater joy by leading us to better understand how he would think, feel, and act in our place and providing us with sufficient reasons to follow his example.

God’s blessings flow through obedience to his commandments. The blessings that flow from keeping God’s commandments aren’t limited to the external outcomes that they bring, but the internal benefits of greater peace, meaning, intelligence, and joy.

God’s commandments demonstrate the path to the greatest possible happiness. If you desire greater joy, learn all you can about how Jesus would live in your place. Live as you sincerely believe Jesus would in all things, at all times, and in all situations. Do not yield to any ideas or actions that divert you in any way from this path. Following your model will lead to greater and longer-lasting joy than anything else. Nothing will yield a more direct path to greater happiness than God’s commandments.

Forgiveness requires reconciliation to the example of Jesus

Sin can be defined as any difference between you and God. To sin is to “come short of the glory of God” by thinking, feeling, or acting differently than how God would in your place, as far as you understand.

People become susceptible to temptation to sin by misjudging the cost and benefit of what they could think, feel, or do. Temptation comes through understating the cost and overstating the benefit of anything that is actually less than the best. Consequently, the most powerful way to stop sinning is through exercising greater faith and honesty in choosing what you perceive to be best and learning more about the actual cost and benefit of the choices available to you. By definition, each sin carries a benefit less than its cost, and every sin shares the consequences of all disobedience. The penalties of sin are physical death, which results in the end of your mortal life, spiritual death, which results in your alienation from God here and hereafter, and hell, which consists of your eternal misery.

We begin our lives involuntarily forgiven from so-called original sin through the sacrifice of Christ, having not yet developed the capacity to make moral judgments. All able-minded children reach the point where they have enough discernment to choose, and, unfortunately, all but Jesus choose to disobey God.

While “all have sinned” (Romans 5:12), there is a difference between having sinned in the past and choosing to sin in the future. Although your past sins make it impossible for you to replicate Jesus’ sinlessness from birth, no matter who you are or what you have done until now, you can begin to replicate his example from this point on.

All people have the opportunity to choose to obey God and, through doing so, receive forgiveness of their past sins. There isn’t a person so wicked that they are beyond God’s ability to lead them to something better. Anyone who turns to him with all their might, mind, and strength will be led by God toward eternal life.

Many Christians will plainly deny the possibility of actually obeying God at all times and in all places. They dismiss the Lord’s ability to obey the Father at all times as being a function of his godhood, but there are others who also obeyed him at all times. We read that Noah “was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God,” (Genesis 6:9) that “Asa’s heart was perfect with the Lord all his days,” (1 Kings 15:14) and that “there was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.” (Job 1:1) The Psalmist wrote.

If these people obeyed God at all times, why can’t you? You may be tempted to dismiss these and other examples of people who managed to stop sinning by claiming that they could only do so because they were exceptional, and that it was easier for them than it would be for you. You would be wrong on both counts. Even the most righteous people have to overcome the same struggles we all face. The Lord himself was “...in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15)

What makes a person exceptional is not what they begin with, but how much they are willing to receive from God through submission to him. Submission to God isn’t a question of the greatness of the one who does it, but recognition of the greatness of God. You would not have heard of any of the aforementioned people if it weren’t for their submission to God. It is your realization of your nothingness that enables you to receive more from God, not the presence of your greatness. When Jeremiah was overwhelmed by what God asked him to do, the Lord reassured him by pointing out that all he had to do was do what he was told. Obedience to God does not require exceptional strength or virtue, just a willing heart and all the strength and virtue you currently possess. A willing heart is a choice with a willing mind—a choice we already have every reason to make.

Modern Christians treat obedience to God as requiring some mythical level of sacrifice. The truth is that any sacrifice we could make pales in comparison to the sacrifice that God has already made —not just in the life and death of Jesus Christ, but in the continued gift he gives of our lives and every good thing within them. All good things we have, will have, and could have come from God. Every person already has every sufficient reason to willingly and gratefully sacrifice all things—up to and including their very lives—in order to obey God.

It is fully within your ability to permanently and completely forsake sin. God has promised that we will never be commanded beyond our capacity to obey. You have the power to overcome any temptation you face. You have the power not to sin. The test of mortality is whether you will begin to obey God all of the time or not.

Forgiveness of sins comes through repentance. Repentance doesn’t just mean apologizing for or feeling sorry for your sin; it requires forsaking your past sins. Repentance means to bring your life into complete alignment with Christ, as far as you understand him to be.

You can’t turn toward God in just some ways. God requires us to keep all of his commandments. To turn toward God requires turning away from all sin. He directs us to “cleave to him” with “full purpose of heart,” which denotes totality of dedication and primacy of priority. If you want to obey him, you must do it in totality, not just for his sake, but for yours. Those who do not fully obey God do not qualify for forgiveness of their sins. God does not excuse the least bit of continuing sin. While the level of understanding of God is variable between people, the level of obedience required to what each understands is not.

Forgiveness from sin requires forsaking of sin. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ provides a way for you to be forgiven of past sins and to begin to follow his example by keeping the Father’s commandment to live according to everything you know about him, all the time. While you continue to sin knowingly, you are ineligible for salvation.

The merciful sacrifice of Christ makes possible forgiveness for your past transgressions while you learn a better way to live. Mercy provides extra opportunity to obey God, but it does not void his requirement for obedience to him.

The blessing of God’s mercy is to be forgiven of past sins that you have forsaken and to be forgiven for the differences from him that you do not know about. God’s mercy will not forgive you for sins you continue to willingly commit. Because God’s mercy only absolves you for your past sins after you forsake them, you can’t experience a remission of sins while still sinning any more than you can experience remission of cancer while there are still tumors in your body. In both cases, all offending parts must be cut out to save the host. It isn’t enough to cut out some of it.

Mercy is not some alternate path to heaven or an exception to justice. Even after God has forgiven you, his justice will still exact the penalty of doing less than your best in the future. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ does not atone for those who continue to sin against what they know. The price of receiving mercy from God for the past is to fully submit to him in the future. You will not remain forgiven of any past sins if you continue in any present sin. The penalties of sin return with the repeat of sin, and they return worse than before.

You can claim to have faith in God without obeying him, but professed faith without obedience to God is powerless.

The positive effects of the gospel are preconditioned on obedience to the laws that provide them. To expect the blessings of heaven without obtaining and living the laws of heaven is foolish and vain.

We are saved through faith in Jesus. You can’t have faith in Jesus without choosing to live as he would in your place.

You can’t say you believe in God without living what you say you believe about God. When you choose to think, feel, or act outside of how you believe Jesus would in your place, you are showing that you worship something other than God. This is a violation of what Jesus said was the most important commandment, as well as the first of the Ten Commandments.

You can’t disobey God without believing that you know better than he does what would bring about your greatest long-term happiness. God is consummately focused on the greatest benefit each of us is prepared and willing to receive, and as such, anything contrary to his commandments is less than what is best for us. Nothing that lies contrary to God’s commandments can possibly be worth the cost. Can a person believe that God knows all things, loves us enough to prioritize our benefit above all else, and yet believe they know better than him what brings about our greatest long-term happiness? If you believe in God, why would you ever willingly live differently than you believe he would in your place? If you turn from how you believe God would be in your place in any way, you demonstrate that you do not actually believe in God.

Too many modern churches erroneously teach that you can be forgiven for your sins while you continue to sin. They teach that the Lord’s atonement makes it possible to fulfill the required sacrifice of your heart, might, mind, and strength with something much easier, much less consistent, and much less enduring. They teach that as long as you go to church, keep a list of rules, pay tithes, receive a list of religious rites, or simply profess that you believe that Jesus exists, God will forgive you of the ways in which you choose to think, feel, and act differently than you believe he would in your place.

These churches ignore the sacrifice and purpose of the Lord, preaching a watered down version of the law of Moses, where continued proxy sacrifices absolve believers for failing to come up to and become like God. The law of Moses wasn’t provided as a substitute for full obedience to God, nor given because the people couldn’t obey more. The law of Moses was given as a remedial measure, because the people wouldn’t obey more. Instead of repeating what the.

Israelites did to foment the wrath of God, we ought to reach for the better way of what they were first offered the opportunity of doing— serving him with their whole souls.

You can’t disobey God without loving something more than him. Can a person love God with all their heart, might, mind, and strength and still choose to do something other than what he wants, as far as they understand? To love someone is to prioritize them above everything and everyone. The Lord said: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) If you don’t keep Jesus’ commandments, you don’t love him. Whatever you prioritize above obedience to God is what you prioritize above God.

Christians believe that they will one day live with God in heaven. Unfortunately, they believe this irrespective of the measure to which they have reconciled themselves to how they believe God to be. Those who do not live as God would in their place are cut off from the presence of God. No one who willingly deviates from the example of God in how they live can dwell in the presence of God. To do so would overwhelm you with guilt beyond anything you can even imagine in this life. The only way to access God’s presence is through following the example of God, as far as you understand him to be, in your own life.

Every choice you make brings you closer or further from God. Each time you choose to follow the example of what you believe Jesus would feel, think, or do in your place, you become a better person, and will more easily perceive and choose subsequent decisions that more closely align with his example. Rebellion from God begins to affect you the moment you engage in it. Every time you turn away from God, you make future and larger rebellion easier. Each time you choose to deviate from his example, you become a worse person, and will more easily perceive and choose worse things in the future. You can repent of sins you slip back into, but it becomes more difficult and carries a greater penalty with each repeated transgression.

The Lord does not continuously extend mercy to those who refuse to obey him. The consequences of sin come to you if you do not repent, and they can be eternal. To turn away from God after obeying him is a terrible offense that carries penalties so severe that it is better not to be born.

Christians tend to think of rebellion against God as something difficult, requiring an overt act or a substantial decision. None of these perceptions are correct. At all times, you are either in a state of forgiveness through total submission to God, or a state of servitude toward Satan through rebellion against God, with full exposure to the consequences of your sins.

Denying the Christ starts when you deny anything you have reason to believe is true. Denying the Christ begins whenever you deviate in the least degree from what you sincerely believe the Lord would feel, think, or do. You deny the Christ every time you deviate from his example. When you do less than your best, you deny the Christ. When you ignore potential improvement, you deny the Christ. When you refuse to state or support the truth in spite of what it will cost you, you are denying the Christ. When you opt not to support someone who would be improved by your intervention, you are denying the Christ. When you opt not to consider the needs of those about whom you know, you deny the Christ.

Mercy does not last forever. Death brings the expiration of God’s mercy. Death changes your body, and it changes your awareness, but it does not change your character. Anyone who ever willfully disobeys God will go to hell unless they cease sinning before they die.

If you have not reconciled your life to the commandments God has provided to you in this life, you will not be reconciled to God when you are resurrected. Those who die in their sins are not prepared to meet God. They will be resurrected and judged, but will retain their sins. If you die while still in willful rebellion against God, you will go to hell.

While you remain an enemy to God, you cannot enter into his kingdom. Those who die in their sins will not be forgiven of them through the sacrifice of Christ. You can only enter into God’s kingdom by reconciling to him in every way.

When you act in accordance with your sincere idea of what is best, God forgives you of any errors in understanding, limits in capacity, or lack of resources. You are not accountable for circumstances beyond your control. Incapacity is innocence. It was by this law that Christ was sinless in spite of not beginning with perfect knowledge. Jesus was sinless in the sense that he lived up to what he understood, he did the best he had the capacity to do, and used the resources he had to the greatest long-term benefit. He did this while he had an incomplete understanding, limited capacity, and finite resources. You can, too.

You are accountable for your best, but your best will fluctuate based on circumstances beyond your control. Your best is subject to your circumstances, including the choices of others. When others don’t do all that they can, you will not be able to do what you could if they did. God forgives you of the shortcomings that result from the action or inaction of others.

Given all of this, it is vital to understand that “your best” is not a euphemism for any partial effort you arbitrarily decide to put forth. Remember that God’s standard requires your whole soul— all of your heart, might, mind, and strength. You are only forgiven by God from what you do not know as long as you live according to what you do know.

Remember, to be perfect in Christ is to obey all you know, seek all you can, and instantly obey all you receive. As long as you live the best you know, all of the time, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ will atone for your prior willful sins and your present and future unknown sin.

God constantly barrages us with signs that we need to adopt better ways of being. Guilt is a consequence of sin, appointed as such before the foundation of the world as a universal signal to point all people toward Christ, independent of their opportunity to learn about him.

Sin is transgression against yourself. When you turn away from what you believe is best, you turn towards your own harm. Sin is doing less than what you understand as best. Why would you willingly do what would lead to less than the best outcomes? Any rationalization for sin is a lie, and will make you feel just as guilty as the sin you attempt to justify. Only through freely admitting even the worst parts of oneself can one draw nearer to God and be healed. Hiding creates a downward spiral of decay and blindness.

Too many people seek escape from guilt through means that do not include improvement. Absolution for guilt cannot be separated from improvement from flaws. Any escape from guilt that doesn’t include improvement won’t last. If you feel guilty about something, you should interpret your guilt as God’s voice to you, inviting you to improve.

What is right begins with what is real. The path to greatest joy is the one most aligned with reality. You can fight reality all you want, but you will never win. Jonah tried to run away from God’s will. Finding himself in the hellish outcome of his foolishness, he prayed to God in plain humility. He admitted, “They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.” (Jonah 2:8) In order to make the best of any situation, you must first decide to get honest about what is really going on.

Guilt for sin in this life does not disappear after we die. In fact, the removal of the barrier between us and God at judgment vastly expands the guilt we will feel there for any deviation from the best we know here.

Justification and freedom from guilt are inescapably coupled. Justification can only occur as you live up to what you understand is best. Those who become free from guilt through repentance can dwell in the presence of God in eternal peace.

Submit to God by learning and living his purpose

Submission means to actively and singularly adopt the purpose of the person you submit to. You can’t submit to someone whose purpose you do not know, whose purpose you do not actively adopt, or whose purpose you do not singularly prefer to anything else.

Very few people can describe their purpose. An inability to describe your purpose guarantees that you are living far below your privilege. Optimizing your desired outcome requires knowing at what you are aiming. Without a fixed target, how can you prioritize the decisions you make and actions you take? How can you weigh the relative cost and benefit of different options?

If you do not know what your overarching purpose is, you can be sure that it differs from God’s. He knows exactly what he is aiming for, and it cannot be achieved by anyone with energy dedicated to anything else.

God’s purpose, plainly put, is maximal joy for all. Everything God is and does is dedicated to enabling all people to obtain and retain the greatest joy they are willing to receive. The Lord will do all he can to foster and promote our happiness. The most direct and effective way for God to help us advance our happiness, to the greatest possible ends, is through his assisting us in learning more about and becoming more like him.

The Lord’s purpose is to bring about the immortality and eternal life of man. This is his overarching motive in all things. He has the desire and means to offer the path to eternal life to all who will walk it. In order to more fully appreciate immortality and obtain eternal life as fully as possible, it is necessary to understand what immortality and eternal life are, how they are different, and how they are both achieved.

Immortality is to live forever. However, having a state of immortality does not imply the quality of that life. Eternal life is the quality of someone’s immortality. Eternal life is by degrees. It is to learn more about and live more of the character of Jesus Christ for the purpose of obtaining more of his joy. The more someone obtains the character of Jesus, the greater portion of his joy they also obtain and the higher the quality of their eternal life.

Just like God and creation, you also have a purpose—whether you’ve thought about it intentionally or not. Creation’s purpose is to provide the opportunity and means for all to increase in joy through enabling people to become as similar to Jesus as they are willing to. Your purpose is shown in how you actually live, not how you wish you lived or how you say you live. Your purpose is demonstrated by your character. Your character is who and how you actually are, not who and how you think you are or pretend to be in front of others. Your purpose is powered by your motive. Your motive is why you actually think, feel, and act as you do, not what you wish were the case, or wished others thought was the case. If you want to experience the blessings of God’s purpose, you have to actually think, feel, and act as he would in your place, not just wish you did. His purpose needs to become your purpose in so far as you understand it. The process of aligning your purpose with God’s is called submission.

Extremely few professed Christians have actually submitted to God. All Christians say they believe in God, but those who submit to him don’t just say they believe in him—they actually do his will. God’s purpose is aligned with God’s will. Most Christians will seek God’s will when they want something from him, but to really submit to God means to seek his will above your own and prefer to do his will even when—and especially if—it differs from your own.

Some will only obey God when compelled by guilt, public shame, or dire consequences. If you only seek to do God’s will when he forcefully corrects you, you have not submitted to him. Those who fear God will actively seek his will in all things, not just to do the minimum required to avoid his punishment.

You can find Christians who say they keep God’s commandments, but you can superficially keep the rules you think God has given you without submitting to him in heart. You can go through the motions of obedience without adopting and submitting to the purpose. You can keep the letter of the law without thinking whatsoever about the spirit of it. Submission to God requires seeking, learning, and doing his will in all situations, not just those for which you have rules. Submission is an inward, consummate aligning of one’s will with God’s. Outward obedience to rules is superficial and lacking in motive, coverage, and direction.

Obedience to superficial practices is not the same as submission to God. You can pay lip service to God through the practice of outward commandments without ever paying the deeper, inward sacrifice of turning your desires towards him. What only looks holy on the outside will never make you actually holy on the inside.

All inward character improvements will also lead to outward, visible improvements. However, the same is not true in reverse. Surface-level improvements based on specific instructions don’t need to and typically won’t change underlying character.

No amount of outward change can upgrade someone’s motive. While obeying God’s outward commandments can serve to teach you more about his motive and increase the reasons you have to trust him, no amount of outward obedience will change your heart. Only you can change what you desire, and you can’t do that in indirect ways. Changing your desires requires your intentional choice.

God’s blessings come through seeking his purpose. The Lord’s purpose is the transcendent commandment, binding together one’s conscience, one’s understanding of his law, and the examples he has given under a desire uniquely focused on him.

The more you serve God, the more you will come to know him. It is impossible to serve God without submitting to him. It is through diligent service to God that we become his friends, and eventually, his sons. The closer we become to God, the more he will reveal to us about ourselves, others, himself, and the rest of creation. Every increment of knowledge empowers us to serve him more effectively, as all power comes through faith in God.

God’s power is found in his purpose. Those who adopt the purpose of the Lord will encounter the power of the Lord to the extent that they accurately seek, understand, and execute his will.

The more accurate your understanding of God’s will and the more fully you submit to it, the more of his blessings you will encounter. God’s blessings are not arbitrary, and they don't come from an arbitrary set of actions. The blessings that God enjoys are the natural consequence of how he is. The blessings he enjoys come from his character, and we receive them to the extent that we become like him. The more like Jesus we become, the more we will inherit every good thing that Jesus possesses.

The more we seek and submit to God’s will in all things, the closer we draw to him. He promises that the faithful will abide in and with him, entailing a host of blessings ranging from his literal presence to the qualities that attend it (peace, power, understanding, joy). Those who adopt the Lord’s purpose will join him in progressing towards the greatest outcomes. Anyone doing anything different will necessarily experience something lesser—often significantly so.

The gospel of Jesus Christ provides the path to find, adopt, obtain, and fulfill the optimal purpose. God, knowing all things, has already discovered and adopted the purpose that optimizes for the greatest eternal outcomes. There is no other way than the Lord’s way. There is no alternative path with the same or better outcomes.

The Lord’s purpose is the only one that endures eternally. It is a unique solution to the puzzle of eternal meaning. Christ is the triumph over the tragedy of life. Unconditional preference for the Lord’s desires in your life will establish you on a sure foundation strong enough to weather the unwelcome and inevitable disappointments that will overwhelm any lesser aim in life. Only in the purpose of Jesus can you find meaning that overcomes the torment of life.

By nature, humans pursue motives, desire ends, and employ means that differ from what God would in their place. This is seen in the common approach to religious practices. Instead of viewing religion as an open-minded search for counsel from God, seeking for what they should change about what they think or feel or do, too many people view religion as the search for what they already think, feel, and do.

All who approach God will be taught better things to seek, along with why to do so and how to do so. Your desires will only match the Lord's to the extent that you have become like him in all other ways. Until then, the quality of your relationship with God can be measured by how often he asks you to do what you do not want to, and how intensely you do not want to do it. What you really think about the Lord is best demonstrated in your response to what you least want to hear from him. The greatest love to God is shown in the moments when it is most difficult to feel love from God. Those who truly submit to God relish moments that prove that they will obey when it is hardest.

While most professed Christians primarily seek God for help in obtaining their own desires, those who submit to God instead seek his direction and assistance in achieving his desires. God knows the path to all blessings, but those who only seek God for what they already desire are barely scratching the surface of the blessings that the Lord desires for his children. God knows of blessings better than what man can contrive, and these can only be obtained by those who seek God without preconceived notions of what his blessings might be.

Each person has the power to choose to follow Christ by willingly and fully pursuing and submitting to his purpose. Those who live the gospel actively seek the will of God. They ask what he wants early and often, consistently and diligently study the scriptures, and frequently reflect on their lives seeking feedback on how they can improve. They do not draw arbitrary distinctions between spiritual and temporal things in their lives, knowing that the will of God is for every moment of every day to be as good and purpose driven as it can be.

How frequently do you seek God’s will, independent of your own? How do you feel on occasions when you realize that God’s will differs from your own? How do you respond to suggestions of how you could improve?

Those who serve God prefer God’s will to their own. Disciples of Christ dedicate themselves to his purpose. They follow the Lamb’s example without exception or reservation (see Revelation 14:4). While we are indeed commanded to ask God for those things which we need or desire, our requests are only effectual inasmuch as they align with the will and character of the Father and the Son.

Do you mostly pray only when you want something? The gospel is not just a tool you deploy when convenient to you, but the demonstration of how to live and what to become in order to obtain the greatest joy. The way of life is a master, not a servant. God doesn’t exist to beckon to your requests like a genie, but to guide you in how and why to become like he is so that you can obtain what he has and enjoy what he does. Those who live the gospel fully do not just call on God to help them get what they want, or to help them when they are in distress, but seek and follow his will at all times and in all places.

Those who fully adopt and submit to the purpose of the Lord will enter into and abide in his rest and overcome the world. Those who insist on seeking their own desires will have to settle for far less.

Many fool themselves into thinking they have submitted to God when they have only submitted to a limited list of what they believe to be his rules. Religions offer you a short list of what is prohibited and prescribed. Unfortunately, this mindset creates an underdeveloped ability to actively seek out God’s will, having replaced the sophisticated question of what God’s will is with a simple yes or no match to a fixed list of rules. Submission to God doesn’t consist of adopting a few rules and doing whatever you feel like in all other things. The gospel of Jesus is the way of life, and life doesn’t pause, stop, or take breaks.

Submission to God doesn’t just consist of obedience to instructions, but entails subordination to his purpose in all things and at all times. While specific instructions describe minimum standards, one’s purpose defines the ideal under all possible circumstances. Submission advances a person’s aim from minimalism to maximalism. A life directed by a finite list of rules will only advance as much as necessary, but one subordinated to God’s purpose will advance as much as possible.

Submission is a question of adopting God’s purpose, not just obeying his instructions. The idea of obedience implies the existence of instructions that can be obeyed. However, adopting God’s purpose requires you to realize that his purpose is higher than the instructions given to help you fulfill it. By definition, a specific instruction can only prescribe behavior under specific circumstances.

In order to adopt God’s purpose, you’ll need to better understand his purpose, which is to achieve the greatest benefit of the world, actively assessing and doing what is of greatest long-term worth all of the time. As you do, you’ll find that the “little” decisions you make from moment to moment have incredible effect on both your short and long term well-being. You may also be surprised to find that what is best at least sometimes violates the rules you have lived by so far!

It is possible to think you are keeping God’s commandments when you are actually fighting his purpose. In the same way that activity does not imply progress, religious activity does not imply that you are serving God’s purpose. Many common religious activities fail to advance God’s goals, and some even actively work against them. The religious in Jesus’ time predominantly opposed him and were the perpetrators of his murder, and too many Christians believe that they would never do such a thing when Jesus expressly warned that many of them would fight him while thinking they are worshipping him.

Learning and living God’s purpose, for the same reasons he does, is greater than all the rules-based commandments. The Ten.

Commandments are the capstone of the law of Moses. Notably, all of them are rules. Two of the commandments greater than these, according to Jesus, are to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” and “love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matthew 22:37, 39) The Lord said that “all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:40) hang on these two commandments, which are both principles, not rules.

God is worthy of your submission, as proven by his unlimited love towards the children of men. We can have confidence in loving him and submitting to him because he “loved us first.” (John 4:19)

The love of God enables God’s purpose. God’s purpose is to maximize joy, which he accomplishes by maximizing improvement. Love edifies. Love improves. Love serves God’s purpose by making things better. What does not edify doesn’t come from or lead to God, because God is love. It is through the love of God that this world was created and through the love of God that Jesus came here to live and die to enable us to grow in similarity to him in life and to be resurrected into immortality after death.

God’s love is much more than a feeling. God’s love is a measure of how much you are willing to suffer for the benefit of another. While many people would describe love as a feeling, the only feeling the Lord demonstrated in his example of love was suffering. His demonstration consisted of caring completely for the welfare of others without any special consideration for himself. It was this example he explicitly commanded his disciples to emulate. We love God by submitting to him.

It is hard to find a Christian who takes offense at the several scriptures where God commands us to love him with all our heart, might, mind, and strength. It is equally hard to find a Christian who submits to God and actually does so, and increasingly difficult to find one who thinks it is even possible to do so. Who do you know that loves him with all their heart, might, mind, and strength?

Instances of sin are always situational, but the cause of sin never is. Rebellion against God is never about the situation that reveals it, but about a lack of love for God. All sin is betrayal of the love of God, showing you what you prefer to his love. When you sin, you show what you love more than God. While you love something more than him, you are not submitted to him.

Every Christian says that they love God, but what do they say through the choices they make? Love is a measure of what you are willing to sacrifice for another. You won’t find a professed Christian who doesn’t think they love God, but how much are they willing to sacrifice for him? Every sin is an example of something you are not willing to sacrifice to God. How many do you know who sacrifice everything they have or could have, and all that they are or could be for the benefit of God? How many bring about that benefit by “doing it unto one of the least of these” and therefore doing it unto him? (Matthew 25:40)

It is the tendency of mankind to seek self-benefit. The only remedy for the deep-seated selfishness of mankind is to willingly submit to God. In opposition to man’s natural motive—which is to get everything he can, irrespective of what it costs others—God’s motive is to maximize the joy of all, irrespective of what it costs him.

The transition from one’s natural state into a servant of God occurs as one learns and lives to maximize the purpose of God, which is to provide everything necessary so that all people progress as far as they are willing to into greater and longer-lasting happiness.

You cannot serve God without serving others. The consideration of others above self is a nonnegotiable quality of conversion. The converted do not seek their own benefit before the benefit of others. In doing this they walk in the example and after the order of God.

The Lord directly explained that he expects us to emulate his love for all people, commanding us to practice it in the same form it was demonstrated. God’s purpose is for you to love him with all your heart, might, mind, and strength, and to love others as God loves you. Our happiness here and hereafter is maximized to the extent that we take advantage of God’s love by becoming more like him and demonstrate God’s love by helping others to do the same.

Your degree of submission to God will always be limited to your expectation of what he might ask of you, including the circumstances under which he may ask it. Even when you submit to God with all of your heart, your agreement of service to him will include tacit limitations in your expectation of the scope or difficulty of what God will ask of you.

Almost all professed Christians have various limits in their submission to God. Their surrender to God is based on their assumption that he would never subject them to pain, suffering, or sacrifice beyond limits of their own invention. They are willing to submit to God, but only as long as he only asks what they are already willing to give, and as long as it doesn’t hurt more than they are willing to suffer.

Some people overlook their lack of faith in God by persuading themselves that there are things he would never ask of them. For example, many assume that God will always provide them with food, shelter, and clothing. Like all other things, the necessities of life align with God’s purpose as long as they are not displaced by anything more important. You are not here to earn your daily bread, but to glorify God by learning and demonstrating what he would think, feel, and do in your place. The latter should govern the former.

Contrary to popular belief, God never promises to provide what you will eat, drink, or wear. The scriptures are replete with examples of holy men that God commanded to go without food and water, to go naked, to give their own lives, and to experience the violent loss of their loved ones. Instead of promising them continuous carnal security, God promises that what he provides the faithful will always be at least as good as what it costs them. God can provide opportunities for you to secure sufficient for your needs by the sweat of your brow, provide you with those who can if for some reason you cannot, enlist wildlife to help if people are in short supply, send angels with food, or even rain down bread from heaven. But even if he doesn’t, it is wiser to seek his purposes anyway, even if it costs you everything else. All possible constraints on what you are willing to sacrifice are too numerous to list, but here is a small sample.

I will submit to God as long as I have enough food to eat. I will submit to God as long as I get enough sleep. I will submit to God as long as I have a nice place to live. I will submit to God as long as I get to keep my job. I will submit to God as long as my family is taken care of. I will submit to God as long as I am comfortable. I will submit to God as long as I don’t look crazy. I will submit to God as long as people like me. I will submit to God as long as I am not alone.

The best way to test your submission to God is to think of the thing you would least want to do and ask yourself if you would do it if God asked you. You can’t claim that you prioritize God over all else while you still believe there are things he wouldn’t ask you to do. Not only has Jesus not promised you limits on what he will ask, he has also explicitly told you that following him will cost you everything less than he is.

Submission to God includes an unconditional agreement with all things he could ask of you, and an admission that all things really means all things. The sacrifice of all things is required to become like the Lord—he who has sacrificed all things for us. Those who are unwilling to sacrifice all things—even their lives —for the Lord’s purpose are unworthy of him and the blessings he provides. The Lord’s servants seek above all else to make his goodness more apparent to all, whether in life or death. Paul counted “all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8) because to obtain the faith by which he could enjoy the knowledge of the Lord, he had to suffer the loss of all lesser things. Until you do the same, you cannot confidently assert that you fully trust God, because you lack the currency necessary to quantify it.

God expects you to serve him at all hazards, up to and including your life. Always live as you sincerely believe the Lord would in your place, even if it kills you. Those who love God more than their lives will be loved by God unto eternal life.

Adopting God’s purpose as your own is a consummate sacrifice.

God’s purpose requires all of your heart, soul, and mind. When you are fully submitted to his purpose, there is nothing remaining in you for anything else.

Conditional submission merely reveals what you love more than God. Any supposed submission to God that is subject to conditions is not submission at all. As long as there are limits in what you are willing to sacrifice for God, your actual submission is to what you are unwilling to sacrifice.

The sacrifices God requires you to be precisely designed for your greatest possible benefit. As such, there are no alternative or replacement sacrifices you can offer instead. God’s requested sacrifices reveal to us the limits of our trust in and desire for him, enabling us to address flaws we would otherwise not even know about. As everything God asks of you is in your personal best interest, the existence of anything he could ask you to do that you would not do indicates a limit of your trust in him, his love for you, and his purpose.

The decision to adopt the Lord’s purpose is a one-time decision, not something you re-evaluate on a case-by-case basis. When you find yourself hesitating in your eagerness to adopt God’s purpose, you have discovered the next limit of your trust in him.

Submission to God is not complete, even when a person sincerely commits to following God in whatever way he reveals in the future. Submission to what you know and expect isn’t the same as unconditional submission. You can believe that you would obey anything that God says and still find yourself disobeying something he says that you did not anticipate.

True submission to God occurs when your decision to submit to God transcends all conditions, constraints, and exclusions. When you achieve unconditional submission to God, you believe sufficiently in his love, knowledge, and other character qualities that you unfailingly assume that anything he asks of you is worth instantly and joyfully pursuing with your whole soul. You know and trust his character enough that no possible information would ever be rejected, resented, disobeyed, or ignored by you. The brother of Jared reached such a state with God, which is why God revealed greater things to him than he had to anyone prior. The Lord promised to reveal the same things to any who exercise the same faith as the brother of Jared. What milestone did the brother of Jared reach in his faith? He believed anything God could say before he said it. He had attained unconditional submission to God.

You grow towards true unconditional submission to God through achieving and maintaining submission to God in all things that you can presently imagine. Initial submission to God consists of correcting any differences you know about between how you are and how you understand him to be. Thereafter, every change you make will consist of differences that you did not and could not have seen before. God is infinite and eternal, and unless you are precisely as he is, you cannot know ahead of time what he might ask of you, or how hard it may be. You achieve unconditional submission to God through repeatedly promoting God’s will and character above your own in all things, submitting to everything you currently know and continuing to submit as he reveals more of himself to you until you trust him under all circumstances possible in life.

Your submission to God grows through the maintenance of your reconciliation to him in spite of greater opposition. As you proceed through life, God will incrementally expose you to greater degrees of sacrifice than you previously expected in order to give you opportunities to advance in your reconciliation to and trust in him. The passage of time will bring additional information about God and new life circumstances, and in each moment you will face the decision of whether to remain reconciled to God or not. Submission to God becomes more difficult to maintain as God exposes you to more of life’s difficulties and asks of you greater sacrifices. Life’s circumstances magnify the details of your desires, articulating and revealing the inclination of your heart beyond what you would otherwise see. Each situation you face in life can be used to illustrate the limits of your submission and give you the opportunity to submit more completely.

As in all things, the Lord set the example of increasing and unfettered submission to God. The Lord’s entire life was a pattern of learning more about the Father and bringing himself into submission to what he learned. Jesus never quit in spite of the fact that his mortal life was an unbroken chain of new requests from the Father that were harder than he had expected. He did not say it was finished until he died.

When you first decide to continuously submit to God, you will feel as if your life has become a never-ending queue of seemingly impossible sacrifices. If you find yourself feeling this way, lean on your trust in God and soldier on. As you continuously submit to God, you will find that sacrifices of similar difficulty as those you have made before become easier and easier, until you don’t even notice them. While God will continue providing you with new challenges that stretch you and give you an opportunity to grow, the pace will slow as you increase in your capacity and your trust in God.

Your desires must be uniquely focused on the purpose and priorities of God at all times. A part-time purpose is no purpose at all.

Submission to God is a full-time endeavor. Being a disciple and friend of God is a full-time job. There are no breaks, exceptions, or time off. When it comes to submission, sometimes isn’t good enough. Those who submit sometimes might feel like they know the Lord, but he will tell them he doesn’t know them. In place of the commendations they expect, they will receive terrible punishments.

Those who are inconsistent in their submission to God have not actually submitted to him, and cannot receive or retain the blessings of those who have.

Submission to God is without time limit. Disciples of Christ work at his purpose for as long as it takes. When the Lord hung on the cross, he did not impose time limits, but was willing to remain for as long as it took to accomplish the Father’s will. Those submitted to the Lord follow his example, living their lives in complete devotion to his purpose until they are taken.

The Lord gives us daily opportunities to take up his purpose. He teaches us how he is, so that we can choose to be the same way. He gives us uncountable opportunities, day after day, to choose the eternal joy of all mankind over our own immediate comfort and pleasure. He gives us daily experiences to fill out and expand our understanding of how godliness looks and feels at every scope of existence under the guidance of his Holy Spirit.

In more than one scripture, we are challenged to “choose ye this day whom ye will serve.” You must renew your commitment to follow Jesus each day.

Every moment of every day provides you with the opportunity to submit to the Lord’s purpose by prioritizing what is best for everyone and everything above all else. During the Israelites’ sojourn in the wilderness, the Lord explained that the tests that they faced even included how much manna they collected for food. Under the law of Moses, certain sacrifices were prescribed to be made on a daily and continual basis.

You shouldn’t expect God to reveal his purpose to you in big things until and unless you consistently seek his purpose in the little things. Expecting God to use you in accomplishing his purpose in future tasks is folly unless you are seeking his purpose in the tasks before you in your present daily life. In both cases, you should learn that obtaining and effecting what lies beyond your present situation can only be reached by fulfilling the ideal in your present situation.

It is typical to have priorities that compete with following Jesus, even if you don’t realize it. Sometimes, these priorities are things you know are not related to following Jesus but don’t realize you are placing ahead of Jesus. At other times, these competitors are things that you think are the same as following Jesus, such as your sacrifices for family, church, or service to others. It is important to scrutinize your priorities in order to prepare yourself for any adjustments God may ask you to make, particularly if those adjustments infringe upon what you presently believe to be his will.

In order to carry out God’s will in your life, you have to map his transcendent purpose down to your routine tasks. However, the danger in any routine is losing sight of its intended purpose. Even things as valuable as family, church, and service can become idols if they take such an unquestionable priority in your life that you cease consideration of long-term benefit, or would be unwilling to adjust them if God showed you the need to.

At all times, all priorities in the life of a disciple of Christ must remain subordinate to Christ himself. Conversion to the gospel of Jesus Christ consists of total abandonment of prior motives and purposes in preference to the motive and purpose of Jesus Christ. You “come into the fold of God” by covenanting to do, think, and feel as you understand he would “at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death....” (Mosiah 18:7, 9)

To promote God to the highest priority requires you to revisit and restructure every other priority in your life. To submit to God requires you to sever your priorities and reattach them only if and when they fit into what Jesus would do in your place. Anything that does not serve as a means to God’s purpose must be removed from your life, and anything that does must be added in order of priority from greatest to least importance, impact and benefit.

There are two ways we can violate God’s prioritization in our lives. First, we can include in our priorities things that do not matter to him. This certainly includes what most regard as sin, but also includes a surprising number of potential activities or desires that few regard as immoral. Too many Christians believe that if they practice what their sect dictates is most important in the relevant areas of their lives, God will bless, approve, or at least allow whatever they choose to do in the rest. We also violate God’s prioritization in our lives whenever we rank things at a higher or lower priority than he would. Human nature tends to value things more or less than God does, typically to a great degree, and most people do not live a consistent and intentional prioritization in life. The Lord reveals to us more accurate measures of value through his gospel which establishes and modifies the hierarchy of importance in the understanding of those who surrender to him.

While adjusting your priorities to place God above all else may seem like a radical change, most people will find that there is still room for everything good to remain in their lives. Sooner or later, however, God will test your priorities, as he has for every one of his faithful servants. God will test whether he comes first in your life by asking you to sacrifice what is most important to you. God’s tests can be as drastic and obvious as they were with Abraham and Job, or as subtle and subconscious as they were with many others. The subtle and subconscious tests tend to reveal as much or more about your deepest desires as do the drastic and obvious ones. Always be on the lookout for these tests.

The worth of prioritizing God isn’t about gaining some arbitrary favor with him. The favor of God comes in proportional relationship to those that become like him through adopting his purpose. The only things that will endure eternally are those which accord with the Lord’s purpose. If you choose in the time of trial to cling to anything that ought to be subordinate to God, you guarantee that you will not have it eternally.

This life is designed as an opportunity to choose to what extent you will submit to God, and it is effective in its aims. All people will be tested to see where their limit lies. Those who serve God above all else will receive greater eternal joy than those who do not.

The pursuit of God’s purpose will require you to increasingly engage others in an attempt to persuade them to do their best. Paradoxically, as you grow in your desire and capacity to make the world a better place, you will also find yourself increasingly submitting to the actions and desires of others. The more effort you exert in pursuit of God’s purposes, the more often you will discover the limits of how willing others are to do the same. In all outcomes that require the participation of others, you will be limited by the choices they make.

Respecting the choices of others is an important form of submission to God, and a critical one to master in order to receive the peace he promises to give those who serve him fully. While you can’t receive God’s peace without proactively seeking out all potential opportunities to help others improve, you likewise can’t receive God’s peace without learning to recognize when you have done everything you can under the present circumstances.

The Lord is the ultimate example of learning how to do all you can to help others, recognizing when you have done all you can, and feeling peace in doing all you can. Despite the fact that the Lord Jesus enjoyed more supernatural power and advanced knowledge than any man who had ever lived, his life portrays a seemingly unlimited allowance for the agency of those around him. He did everything he could to help persuade everyone he could to improve as much as he could, but he did not force anyone to do anything. How was he able to be so yielding to the agency of others in spite of his awareness of the benefits that they could obtain if they would simply yield to his view?

God is in ultimate control of the world he created. We ought to assume that the situations in which we find ourselves are ordained by a perfectly knowing, loving, and capable deity for our own benefit until and unless we have good reasons to believe otherwise. He provides us with the opportunity to do all things that lie in our power to bring about the greatest outcomes, but he also asks us to recognize and honor the choice of others to reject our best effort. As Jesus submitted to Herod, Pilate, and the crowds wanting him killed, we too should recognize situations when there is nothing more we can do to help the situation.

Part of submission to God is being able to recognize and willing to admit when there are others who control what we cannot. No power held by man exists outside of what God has given. Our attitude towards those who exercise authority over us reflects the level of trust we have in God. When the Lord was imprisoned, he told Pilate that all his perceived power was actually just from God. One way that the Lord showed obedience to his Father was by submitting to the people that the Father had ordained to cause him strife. Just as doing all you can to advance God’s purpose requires faith in God, so does submitting to those who continue to oppose God’s purpose in spite of all you can do.

Beyond developing and proving our faith in God, our patience in the situations God has ordained can also provide a witness to others of God’s goodness. Calmness can offer a louder argument in favor of your cause than any reasons you might provide. Peter taught this principle in the specific context of wives married to husbands that do not believe. Furthermore, being able to formulate and deliver convincing arguments requires you to be in a rational—not emotional —state. Defaulting to an emotional state will rob you of your ability to think clearly, make good arguments, and will cause you to make consequential mistakes. If you can’t remain in a rational, impartial state, you are better off remaining silent.

In issues of submission, it is important to avoid allowing the good desire to respect others’ agency to mask the evil desire to avoid confrontation. Submission becomes a righteous option only after you’ve done all you can to make your best argument in favor of what you see as best. It is abominable to God when people who pretend to believe in him hide their cowardice in a cloak of pretended godly patience or false submission.

As you learn more and more about Jesus’ purpose, and as you adopt Jesus’ purpose in all things as far as you understand it, you will find yourself experiencing many of the blessings of being in his presence while still being here in mortality. One such blessing is the courage imparted to the righteous in the presence of God, a trait exemplified by Stephen, who courageously continued to preach the gospel of Christ to those who were in the very act of murdering him, seeing the glory of God as he was stoned by those he attempted to help. As you dedicate yourself to the Lord’s purpose, you will find unshakeable confidence in all you do, as if you were standing in God’s presence in the protection of his heavenly host.

A striking difference in strength, endurance, and confidence exists between those who have adopted the purpose of Christ and those who have not. There is an absence of fear in those who love what is best, and an abundance of fear in those who love anything less. Cowards do not do great things because they lack the clear conscience and faith required to do them. Courage stems from an integral heart and strong confidence in the justice of God.

Many battles come down to the simple question of who has the worthiest purpose. A strong purpose can overcome many differences in resources, skill, and capacity. So few people adopt a purpose worth dying for that most people can’t even imagine the unstoppable force such a person becomes.

Live as if you are under the complete care and control of Jesus, because as long as you are on his errand, you are. If you are acting in full alignment with the Lord’s purpose, as you sincerely understand it, you can expect and will receive his full support. Your courage will not wane, no matter the magnitude of afflictions you might face, because you will have deep confidence that whatever you face is precisely the best situation for you according to God’s perfect wisdom and infinite love. This does not mean your task will be easy or your victory obvious. It does mean that those unconditionally submitted to God will find that God will provide every needful thing so that, whether in pleasure or pain, victory or defeat, or death or life, they will demonstrate his goodness to those with and against them, according to his purposes, will, and wisdom.

Choosing to be born again through choosing to submit to God

It is quite common in Christianity to discuss the necessity of being “born again.” After all, the Lord himself instructed that it was impossible to even see the kingdom of God “except a man be born again...” (John 3:3). What does it really mean to be born again and what are its effects?

To be born again refers to the combination of a choice you make to submit completely to God and the gift of the Holy Ghost that God gives you as a result.

The gift of the Holy Ghost is access to a greater breadth, depth, quantity, and quality of information from God beyond what all people have access to through the Light of Christ. The Light of Christ is a source of information possessed by all people through physical birth. The Light of Christ actuates our understanding, enabling moral judgment and critical thinking. Factors before birth dictate the quantity of the Light of Christ an individual has to start, and their decisions according to or against that influence determine whether it waxes or wanes during life. The channel of the Light of Christ is limited in bandwidth and content. These limitations are demonstrated when you experience unanswered prayers and unmet requests to God. Each barrier you experience in the information you request from God indicates a limit in the window of what you are willing and able to receive from him.

By fully surrendering how you feel, think, and act in preference to how Jesus would in your place, you gain access to the gift of the Holy Ghost, which makes more information available to you about God, yourself, and the word.

The combination of your complete submission to God and the additional information you receive from him cause you to perceive the world through a different lens than before, providing you with the opportunity to choose to act differently than before. The scriptures describe this change as becoming a “new creature.”

Discussions of spiritual rebirth tend to interchangeably refer to the gift of the Holy Ghost and the choice that precedes it. The choice made by an individual to turn toward God catalyzes what God does in response to that choice. The remainder of this chapter will focus on what a person must do to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, rather than what occurs thereafter.

There are billions of professed Christians on earth today. How many can say that they no longer willingly disobey God—ever? How many people do you know who can say that they are without sin? How many can truly say they no longer desire to do evil? And yet, this is what it means to fully submit to God. This is what it means to be born again.

Sin is the choice to do less than you know is best. Sin requires that you know what is better and that you have the power to choose it. Therefore, sin is always a choice. Repentance is not a question of willpower. It is a question of value, honesty, and trust in God. Anytime you improve these things, you will move towards repentance.

You will choose to stop sinning when you believe that following God’s example is preferable to anything else. Whenever you are tempted to sin, stop and ask yourself if you really believe in Jesus. Do you really believe that everything he tells you is for your greatest benefit? Do you really believe that he loves you and knows better than you what will lead to the greatest possible joy? If so, how can you desire to do anything contrary to what you believe he would do in your place? The Lord will provide you with a stream of sufficient evidence that his way is preferable to all others. As you continue to live up to what he has already shown you, he will continue to confirm the wisdom of doing so.

This change of heart is fundamental. Why should anyone expect to draw nearer to the Lord while in active rebellion against him? Should those who have not been born again call themselves Christians? After all, while they continue to willfully disobey God, they do not actually believe in Jesus, have not been converted, and have not been saved.

Those who are born again do not sin. They do not knowingly deviate from their understanding of how Jesus would live in their place. They always think, feel, and do the best they know.

By nature, you make choices based on what feels good right now rather than what benefits the most long-term. This shortcoming affects every choice you make across every domain, distorting the true value of the options of choice available to you, subconsciously filtering out options, and ensuring that the choices that you make will lead to less than the greatest long-term happiness possible.

God’s preference is for what yields the greatest long-term benefit. To think, feel, and act based on the long-term net benefit of the options available to you is the same as governing your life based on your understanding of how Jesus would live in your place. Optimizing for long-term value is the only path to the greatest happiness.

Spiritual rebirth occurs when you choose to desire maximizing long-term benefit instead of the default aim of maximizing present pleasure. This shift occurs when you abandon a guidance system based primarily on the emotional direction of carnal impulses and present pleasure-seeking in favor of the rational direction of choosing to think, feel, and act based on the long-term net benefit of the options available to you.

While the natural way of deciding can be practiced without much thought, optimizing for long-term value is always intentional. It requires actively choosing to be governed by reason instead of feelings. Reason gives us the ability to subject our emotions to objective reality, choosing what we expect will be best long-term instead of what feels good right now.

Reason is meant to reveal the course of action that transcends your emotional impulses—to guide you in how you should feel and act based on how things really are over time, not based merely on how you feel right now. The shift from emotional to rational direction is so fundamental that it is like becoming a new person, because you become aware of and begin developing a completely new way of interacting with the world.

To become born again is to intentionally reason instead of emotionally react. Reason is the guidance system of the spirit, and by submitting to it, you become a child of God. As you rationally consider the cost and benefit of options before you, you can identify what option carries the greatest net benefit and, in so doing, decide what God would do in your place.

The “mighty change of heart” is a scriptural phrase referring to the change that occurs in what you desire. The scriptural meaning of the word “heart” is a combination of what we would call our thoughts and our desires. Change of heart would be better expressed as change of mind and change of desire.

Your desires come from your beliefs, what you value, and by how much you value it. Though few realize it, every desire is actually just the preferred outcome from a list of possibilities. That list might include impossible outcomes, or it might be missing possible outcomes. For each imaginable outcome, including the one you presently desire, you may have an incorrect idea of the cost or benefit.

Your desires are subject to change. When your beliefs and value appraisals change, so do your desires. Changes to your desires come completely from information about what you desire, what alternatives exist, the cost and benefit of each, and your response to it. As you live up to all you presently know, and seek for more, God will.

Provide you with more information to persuade you to improve, Delineate new options that you do not yet know about, Remove options you think you have but don’t, and 4) Suggest more accurate cost and benefit in options of which you are aware.

From this information, those who seek him will find sufficient means and motivation to become more like he is. As you diligently learn and honestly respond to this information, your desires will change to align more closely with God’s.

You can change what you want and by how much you want it without being spiritually reborn. A shift in desire occurs any time an honest person learns something different about the options available to them, the cost they incur, or benefit they provide. The mighty change of heart transcends changes to your specific desires, taking place when you decide to value all things as God does, appraising their value based on the long-term net benefit rather than how they make you feel right now.

Following God requires you to act against your feelings. The path of growing toward God consists of choosing what is best, even when it feels worse than alternatives. What feels good to you will only match what the Lord would do in your place to the extent that you have become like him. You come to want what God desires through submitting to what he desires, even when it doesn’t feel good in the moment. As you yield to your sincere understanding of what he would do in all ways, all the time, he will teach you more about himself, and as you continuously remain reconciled to him, you will find greater and greater joy in doing so.

God doesn’t take away temptation. He gives us sufficient reasons not to sin, and leaves us free to choose. While God is the source of the information that can catalyze the change to your desires, he does not cause that change, except in the power he gives you to make the choice yourself. Even God’s punishment serves as a source of information. Suffering can be a powerful source of information to persuade us to agree with God, and though it requires far less faith to notice and heed than other forms, there are still many who choose to ignore it. No matter what information he makes available to you, you still have to choose to perceive, receive, and act upon it. It is your response to this information that causes a change of heart.

Many expect God to take away their desire for sin simply because they have asked him to. While some scriptures seem to describe God directly causing the mighty change of heart, they can only be interpreted this way by ignoring their context.

Asking God to make you not want to sin anymore is asking him to take your agency from you, because he has already given you power to make that decision for yourself, and you’re not choosing to do it. It’s no different than asking him to help you stand and walk when you already have the ability to do so. God will not force you to find or recognize better ideas, to honestly consider them and compare them to alternatives, or to implement them.

A request for God to take away your desire for sin is a confession that you desire sin more than you desire him. Not only are you asking him to reward your ongoing rebellion against him with better outcomes than you deserve, you are also proving to him that you don’t really want what you are asking for, as you continue to choose contrary to it when you have the ability to do otherwise. God has never given anyone a reason to believe that he would answer such prayers.

Even if God could magically change your heart to no longer desire evil, why would he not do so for everyone? If the requirement for God to magically free you from the desire to do evil is simply to ask for it, why are there so many who have asked and yet not received, and why are there so many who have chosen to sin again after being born again?

If God could magically change your desires, of what worth would it be to use the desire of our hearts as a criterion for eternal judgment, as God does? Why did God pay so high a price to gift us with agency if all he expects us to do with it is beg him to take it away by forcing us to desire what is good? Instead, we are told repeatedly that he has given us moral knowledge and left us free to choose.

The atonement is not a magic trick where you get something for nothing. It’s a system where he has made a way for you to be forgiven —something you could not do yourself—while giving you the power to choose to live up to what you know about him.

No one who is waiting for God to “give” them a “mighty change of heart” will ever find what they seek. Full submission to God is a choice. God doesn’t forcefully change what you think or how you feel about anything. Doing so would be counter to his purpose in maximizing the joy of all people. Joy can only be found in what you desire and choose of your own free will. Removing your power of choice removes your potential for joy.

Spiritual rebirth does not magically remove your desire to sin; rather, your desire to sin abates through a conscious choice to fully reconcile your ideas, desires, and actions with your understanding of how God is, based on the reasons he provides. It is faith and repentance that bring the change of heart.

In order to be born again, you must completely and constantly prefer the desires of God above your own and completely submit to him in all things and at all times. You can’t enter the kingdom of God until you are born again, as you can’t be the subject of a king to whom you do not subject yourself.

You can’t ignore sections of your life or specific areas of improvement and still experience spiritual rebirth. Often, people fool themselves into thinking they have submitted to God by sacrificing more than is appropriate in some aspect of their lives, hoping to compensate for other aspects of their lives where they have not given what God has asked. Any limits in what you are willing to do for God, or when you are willing to do it, or how long you are willing to do it, show you that your submission to God is still conditional.

Unconditional submission to God is sometimes referred to in the scriptures as having a “broken heart and contrite spirit.” You have a broken heart and contrite spirit when you decide to fully obey God and desire his will exclusively above all other things, adopting the purpose of God as your own. To achieve a broken heart and contrite spirit is to make your life a sacrifice to God through living in the same way Jesus would at all times and in all places.

You cannot be saved without a broken heart and a contrite spirit. Just as you cannot gather grapes from thistles, your works cannot be holy while your heart is still unholy. If you are not fully submitted to God, you will not draw any nearer to him with substitute religious activity. The sacrifice of a broken heart and contrite spirit is what makes religious activity effective instead of vain. Without it, all worship is an abomination to God, an affront to his purpose, and a mockery of his sacrifice.

You don’t need to be baptized to be born again. You can and should fully submit to God before baptism, and if you do, you will receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, whether you are baptized or not. The gift of the Holy Ghost comes to those who are as aligned with God as they know how to be, whether they have had the opportunity to be baptized or not. Full submission to God is required in order for your baptism to be valid, and your spiritual rebirth is evidence of whether it is or isn’t.

There are multiple examples of people in the scriptures who were spiritually reborn independent of baptism. The Lamanite king was born again in the instant he proclaimed his willingness to give away all his sins to know Jesus. Alma was “redeemed of the Lord” and “born of the Spirit” after he “repented of [his] sins.” (Mosiah 27:24) King Benjamin’s people were born again as they responded to his sermon, independent of baptism. The Lamanite prisoners who witnessed angels ministering to Lehi and Nephi were born again as they cried to Jesus to save them. The disciples of the Lord in Jerusalem received the gift of the Holy Ghost after his resurrection when they repented, long after they were baptized.

Spiritual rebirth happens instantaneously in the moment you fully submit to God. If you have not experienced it, the only reason is that you have not yet fully submitted to God.

One of the qualities of being born again is that you prefer submission to God over sin, scripturally described as “having no desire to do evil.” It is important to realize that having no desire to do evil at your present level of understanding does not imply that you will have no desire to do evil at a greater level of understanding.

Total submission to God is a binary condition—you either are or aren’t—with differences in degree, depending on how well you know Jesus and what kind of opposition you have faced. When one submits to God, it is a one-time choice meant to be forever binding and unconditional. However, getting to know God is a never-ending process. While deciding to submit to God is meant to be a one-time event, you can’t be sure of your commitment to God beyond the limits of your understanding of him. Similarly, it is not possible to know against what level of opposition you would remain faithful to God beyond the maximum opposition you have experienced.

It is not infrequent that a person who has been born again will decide, after exposure to new challenges, to once again prefer sin to God. Remember, being born again is not an effect, but a description. The sinlessness of one who is born again is what defines their state, and when they choose to change through sin, they relinquish their state.

Being born again does not suspend your ability to sin, but it does increase the consequences for doing so.

You can be born again as many times as you dedicate yourself to God while in this life, though it will be harder to achieve the level of repentance required each time you willingly disobey God. One who has surrendered to God will do more damage to their conscience and find it harder to return to God after sinning again than one who has not. In any case, becoming reborn again is the same process as becoming born again in the first place, through forsaking sin and unconditional future submission to God.

Baptism for the remission of sins

In all of Christianity, few tenets are as argued over as baptism. Baptism is meant as an outward affirmation of an inward shift in your desire to align with God as far as you understand him to be and adopt his purpose with your whole heart.

Baptism is only available to those who show themselves worthy of it. Worthiness is not a question of desire, tradition, or expectation. It is a matter of choosing to submit fully to God. In order to be worthy to be baptized, a person must live as they believe God would in their place and commit to continuing to do so as God continues to teach them more about himself.

Baptism is called the first fruit (or result) of repentance because it is meant to come after one decides to fully submit to and serve God. Baptism is only valid for those who have changed their thoughts, feelings, and actions to align with how they believe Jesus would live in their place. Thus, one should be born again before being baptized.

Baptism and the remission of sins are often linked in the scriptures. The remission of sins means the forgiveness of past sins and the cessation of future sins. In the scriptural framework, this is synonymous with justification, a state where an individual is freed from the guilt and eternal penalty of their past choices through continuously making the best choices they now know of. This occurs when one is born again.

Remission of sins is something you choose, not something that happens to you. You obtain the remission of sins through forsaking all sin. To have a remission of sins is to be in a state where you continuously follow the example of Jesus, as far as you understand him to be. In this state, you cease to sin as far as you know. It is called remission of sins and not just cessation of sins—which it includes— because a person who has stopped sinning has fulfilled the conditions given by Christ to be forgiven of their past sins.

Sometimes, baptism and remission of sins are mentioned together because baptism and the remission of sins share the same requirement: keeping all God’s commandments as far as you know them. Baptism is a commandment, and all who keep God’s commandments will seek to be baptized. However, it is the keeping of all God’s commandments—not just baptism—that brings forgiveness of past sins.

Baptism does not change you. Rather, it is a commandment that you follow and a symbol acknowledging the change you have already made. The distinction between baptism and the remission of sins is made clear in the case of people who have forsaken their past sins, yet do not have access to someone who can baptize them. They still have remission of their sins, because they are living how Jesus would in their place, even if they have not yet been baptized due to conditions beyond their own control. Likewise, there are many people who have been baptized, but who do not have a remission of their sins because they continue to think, feel, or act contrary to how they believe Jesus would in their place.

A remission of sins is a perishable state. If an individual willfully sins after having been forgiven, their former sins return to them, and they become even worse off than they were before.

Most people who are baptized know they are participating in a sacred ritual. Some few among them further understand that they are agreeing to attempt to follow Jesus in some way. Baptism is intended to consist of a much more detailed and intense commitment.

To receive the most from baptism, the participant must understand it as a symbol of reconciliation to what they already know about God and a promise to continue to reconcile to all they learn about God in the future. Until a person makes and maintains this sacrifice by consistently thinking, feeling, and doing as they sincerely believe Jesus would in their place, authoritative baptism would be of no benefit to them. Anything less will cause the recipient to believe they are better off than they actually are and less willing to repent than they would otherwise be.

The level of understanding you have of the character of Jesus Christ at baptism will vary based on the quantity and quality of instruction you have received before baptism. Consequently, each person who is baptized will be baptized to a potentially different standard, even if all are equal in their perfect obedience to their understanding of Christ.

All people who are baptized after receiving and living up to an improved understanding of the character of Christ will receive the blessing of forgiveness of sins, but the blessings that come from living and learning the character of Christ will only flow to the extent that what is learned and lived accurately reflects how he actually is.

As explained in a prior chapter, priesthood authority comes through obtaining and living information about and from God. The qualification for authority to baptize is knowing about and living more like Jesus than those you baptize. The authority to baptize consists of a willingness to live up to the character of Christ beyond those you baptize.

The stark contrast between this assertion and what is taught by today’s churches is acknowledged. To help bridge the gap, consider the following question: What is being offered through baptism? When performed validly, the baptizing priest is certifying to God that the candidate is true and faithful to everything they could presently know about the character of Christ. That witness requires someone who a) knows at least as much about the Lord as the baptismal candidate, and b) lives what he knows about him. To seek baptism is essentially to persuade someone that you are living up to everything you mutually believe about God. Optionally and ideally, that person will know more about God than you. Not optionally, they live those beliefs themselves.

What about ordination? John the Baptist was purportedly ordained at eight days old with the authority to baptize. By lineage, he also possessed the right to baptize, as his father was the High Priest. However, he would have had all the rights and privileges he exercised without these factors based solely on the fact that while all of his contemporaries knew the gospel, he actually lived it. Thus, he was more like Jesus Christ than his contemporaries.

While there are scriptural examples of people being given authority to baptize, there are also examples of people who conducted valid baptisms without ever being ordained. For example, the Lord not only commended Alma Sr.’s ministry, but made particular mention of those he had baptized, a ministry he had embarked upon based solely on his hearing the sermon delivered by Abinadi. Paul was as much an apostle as any other in his time, and yet there is no record of his ordination by Peter, James, and John. Instead, he cited as his authority his personal knowledge of Jesus Christ, who had called him directly.

This teaching presents a paradigm shift in the interpretation of the Lord’s ending invitation in the gospel of Matthew.

The Lord’s instruction wasn’t just to his eleven apostles—or his several hundred remaining disciples—but to anyone who knows anything about him to go and teach others to live the same, in whatever scope of life they occupy, conveying upon them the authority to baptize based on the information they have received about Jesus and their willingness to live it.

If the authority to baptize is based only on having learned and lived some dispensation of information about the Lord, why were there instances where Jesus gave particular authority to particular people? The primary purpose was to provide a mechanism to resolve disagreements. The Lord identified a hierarchy for the purpose of indicating whose perspective was to be accepted as his own in the event of a disagreement. It is sad to reflect upon how much the idea of religious authority has been abused while simultaneously ignoring the purpose for which it was given.

Priests are meant to teach people how Jesus is and baptize those who choose to become like him. The baptizing priest has a duty to teach the candidate what the priest knows and lives about the character of Jesus, subject to the limits of capacity—but not effort—in the candidate.

As a symbol of submission to God, a baptismal candidate must conform to what they understand about God. To be worthy of baptism, you have to make any changes necessary to live as you understand God would in your place. The priest you apply to for baptism decides whether you are worthy of it. By performing the ordinance, a baptizing priest is certifying to God that the candidate has been true and faithful to everything he has taught them about God.

Once the priest is satisfied with the candidate’s repentance, he leads the recipient into the water.

It is very difficult for a baptizing priest to adequately ascertain the worthiness of a candidate he does not know well. The greater the proximity of the priest to the candidate, the more effectively he can teach the candidate, and the more accurately he can assess whether they are fully living the gospel in the details of their lives. Ideally, the baptizing priest will be the husband or father of the applying candidate.

While a priest may baptize a candidate with less instruction, interaction, and verification, such baptisms provide far less of an opportunity to the candidate to learn about and live like Jesus before the baptism and a much lower likelihood that they will continue to do so after baptism. The gospel is designed so that, where possible, adherents can remain with the person teaching them more about Jesus until they have exhausted what the priest has to teach them. In ancient times, technological and geographical limitations forced gospel interactions to incidental contact on one extreme and leaving everything to accompany a gospel teacher on another. In the modern era, the internet provides opportunities for much greater contact without the need to uproot one’s life to follow a preacher.

You may not presently know of anyone with the ability to baptize you. God can lead you to such a person, and your effort to find one is part of the process of coming into submission to God. For example, Limhi and his people experienced an increase in preparatory humility as they sought someone to baptize them, finally coming under the authority of Alma, who they had previously rejected, persecuted, and chased out of their kingdom.

In the meantime, remember that baptism is a part of repentance, not the other way around. You can fully reconcile your life to your understanding of Jesus before you meet someone capable of baptizing you, and doing so is the best way to prepare to recognize and receive them when you do. For example, as the aforementioned people of Limhi searched for someone to baptize them, they were able to make the sacrifice of deciding to follow the Lord’s example at all costs.

The fact that the blessings of a broken heart and contrite spirit are available to those who have no available way to be baptized does not mean that baptism is of no effect, or that its outcomes are available to those who have not received it. Every commandment from God has a blessing associated with it, and baptism is no exception. The blessings of baptism consist of the blessing of living up to your understanding of God’s commandments, as well as blessings that come through the interactions between the person being baptized and the priest who baptizes them. Water baptism matters beyond the general blessings of obeying all commandments because it requires you to find and reconcile to the teachings of a person who knows more about God than you do and therefore can provide you with invitations to improve beyond where you could otherwise.

Some correctly understand that baptism is the form in which God has designated people to join his church, but most do not realize that cessation of known sin is required before anyone can be baptized into the church in a way that God will acknowledge.

Neither did they receive any unto baptism save they came forth with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, and witnessed unto the church that they truly repented of all their sins. (Moroni 6:2)

And again, by way of commandment to the church concerning the manner of baptism—All those who humble themselves before God, and desire to be baptized, and come forth with broken hearts and contrite spirits, and witness before the church that they have truly repented of all their sins, and are willing to take upon them the name of Jesus Christ, having a determination to serve him to the end, and truly manifest by their works that they have received of the Spirit of Christ unto the remission of their sins, shall be received by baptism into his church. (D&C 20:37)

Churches that do not require baptismal candidates to conform to the commandments of God as they teach are not practicing the form of baptism prescribed by the Lord.

That being said, to think of the church of Christ as an entity that controls access to the ability to repent and come unto him is to reverse roles. The Lord’s church is composed of those who align with their understanding of how he is.

The important takeaway here is that baptism isn’t about joining a church, but becoming the church, and you don’t do that by finding an institution, but by finding a person who knows him better than you.

There are two potential circumstances where one might consider rebaptism is in order. The first is when you break your baptismal covenant to always live as Jesus would in your place. The second is when something causes a disconnection between you and the priest who baptizes you. Neither of these are valid reasons to be rebaptized.

In baptism, you promise to God to keep all of his commandments, even unto death. If you knowingly break a commandment, you have broken the covenant of baptism through willful rebellion against God. You repent and renew your commitment to God through forsaking the sins of which you are aware and rededicating yourself to greater fidelity to God than you had before. Since this commitment is independent of baptism, there is no reason to get rebaptized in order to renew it. In other words, while there is such a thing as baptism for repentance, there is no such thing as rebaptism for repentance, as the only people that would need to be baptized in order to repent of their sins are those who have not yet been validly baptized.

The commandment of baptism is to receive it once. There is no commandment to maintain a valid baptismal connection to a worthy priest. For example, while Jesus went to lengths to receive baptism from John the Baptist, he had no continuing connection to John after his baptism. One of the blessings of baptism is the additional information about God or application of that information to your life that could come from a continued relationship with the man who baptizes you. However, such relationships are available outside of the context of baptism. Whether you have an ongoing relationship with the priest who baptized you or not, the blessings available from those who know God better than you are always available.

In order for a person to enter the covenant of baptism, they must possess the ability to make moral judgments. Authoritative baptism requires a candidate to be capable of learning more about and living like Jesus. Like all phases of human development, this does not occur at a given age for everyone, but depends on their particular environment, capabilities, and choices. Those baptized as babies have never entered into the covenant of baptism, because the choice was made for them by others. Some baptized as children may feel the same way. In both cases, these individuals should seek to be rebaptized.

Those possessing moral judgment still possess it to varying degrees. A priest will be impeded in his ability to convey what he knows about God to someone with less understanding than he has. The certification of baptism is not “this person knows and lives what I do,” but “this person has learned and lived everything they have the capacity to from me, given their capabilities.” The certification of baptismal worthiness isn’t a question of achieving equivalence in holiness to the person baptizing, but a question of demonstrating complete submission to God.

You do not know what God is really like

Some Christians believe that God can’t be known. Like Job’s friend Elihu, they believe that God’s greatness requires him to be unknowable, not realizing that his ability and desire to make himself known to such lowly creatures as ourselves ranks chief among what makes him the greatest of all.

God can be known. Coming to know him is a process. The Lord defined eternal life as knowing God, not just showing that it is possible to know him, but showing that the very process of coming to know him is eternal life. As you learn more about him and live everything you know, you will increasingly know him and increasingly obtain eternal life.

Many Christians would be offended by the suggestion that they don’t know God very well, if at all. Their offense is only possible if they use a completely different definition of what it means to “know” God than they do when referring to others. The differences between knowing God and knowing others consists only of how much there is to know—not the process of coming to know it. God is more complex and more intelligent than anyone. There is so much more to know about God than any human.

Knowing God consists of much more than knowing some things about him. Knowing of God or just knowing about him is not the same as knowing God. You would never say you knew a fellow human if you knew as little about him or her as most Christians actually know about God. To know God requires more than what knowing another person does, not less.

Knowing that God exists isn’t the same as knowing God. You could never say that you know another person simply because you know they exist; why would your criteria for knowing God—who is deeper than any person—consist of anything less? You can know very little about God and still believe in him.

Seeing God is not the same as knowing him. After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to two of his disciples along the road to Emmaus as an unrecognized man, walking and talking about the events of his ministry and the scriptures that pertained to it. If you can see him and yet not recognize him, you can obviously see him without knowing him. To know God, you must learn more about him. You can learn more about God without seeing him, and you can see him without learning more about him.

To know someone is to know their character: what they do, why they do it, and how they feel in doing so. When you know someone’s character, you can accurately predict how they will think, act, and feel in different situations. Knowing God is a question of knowing how he thinks, feels, and acts. The more accurately you can anticipate how God would think, feel, or act, and the more situations across which you can accurately do so, the better you know him.

Knowing someone’s character is more difficult the more sophisticated they are. The more sophisticated a person is, the more variations and layers will exist in what they do, why they do it, and how they feel across varying situations. The more sophisticated a person’s character, the more partial your understanding of their character will be, and the more your understanding can increase in breadth and accuracy as you observe and analyze them in different situations over time. The more knowledge they have, the more nuanced their beliefs, the more complex their desires, and the purer their motives, the more there is to learn and the more opportunities there are to make mistakes in predicting their experience in a specific situation.

God’s depth far exceeds the depth of the deepest person. A superficial understanding of God’s character is insufficient to know his character well enough to even begin to replicate it in any recognizable way. The Psalms contain as much information about the character of God as any other book of scripture, and yet the Psalmist wrote.

Common Christianity criminally oversimplifies God to great detriment. An illustrative example of this is the question, “what would Jesus do?” Some Christians don’t seem to mind that they can’t answer this question for the vast majority of the situations they face in life. Others answer it in nearly every case with something like “be nice,” ignoring how often Jesus was far from nice in the gospel accounts or how much worse those situations would have been if he had been. Few stop to consider that an answer to this question in any degree of accuracy requires far more knowledge of God’s character than they possess. One reason why so few bother to exert any significant effort in knowing Jesus is that they think there isn’t much to know. To presume that knowing the Lord is quick or easy requires contradicting every verse of scripture and every ounce of common sense. And yet, Christians and atheists alike tend to believe exactly that.

The character of God takes serious time and effort to discover. Consider what you would need to know in order to fully know God’s character. You would need to know what he does, why he does it, and how he does it. Because everything he does is for the benefit of the world, you would need to know everything necessary to calculate the best possible circumstances across all time, all situations, and all people. There is certainly more to God’s character than can be learned in a lifetime.

To know the Lord is not only difficult—it is the most difficult thing you can do. It is also the most valuable thing you can do. It both requires the highest cost (everything you have) and provides the greatest benefit (everything God has, notably including the greatest joy that anyone can have).

The Lord is constantly attempting to reveal more of himself to us. He uses broad means, including: attempts to speak to us in our minds and hearts, the testimonies of angels and men who know him better than we do, our surroundings, and our life situations. All of creation is an attempt to convey this revelation. He even came to earth to live a mortal life in order to demonstrate to us how he is. Were it easy to know him, none of these interventions would be required, let alone all of them. In spite of all of these great efforts, there are still only very few who know him very much at all.

God created every able-minded person with the ability to make moral judgments, whether they believe in or have been taught about him or not. Your conscience provides a mechanism for learning more about how God is and how he would act in your place. That mechanism is guilt, which is a signal that you have done less than your best and different than God would have in your place. The way to minimize the guilt that you feel is to always do the very best that you can. As you consistently do your best, you will increase in the strength and accuracy of your assessment of what is best, learning more about how God would live in your place, and gaining greater reasons to live the same way.

Since the fall of Adam, God has sent angels and inspired men to “minister unto the children of men, to make manifest” the character of Christ; that all good things come from and lead to him. God carefully arranges to send specific people to the earth at specific times to demonstrate aspects of his character to his children throughout time and across geography.

The difficulty and complexity of communicating to us the content of God’s character is evidenced by the complexity of creation. This creation is intricately designed to provide uncountable witnesses of who, how, and what God is. God created everything we know of in order to provide a place where we would have the opportunity to learn more about him, implement what we learn into our own lives, and do what we can to help others to do the same.

The difficulty and value of communicating to us the content of God’s character is attested to by the high price that Jesus paid in order to demonstrate it. Jesus came to earth as a mortal man in order to make the Father known to us. It is in and through Jesus that we come to know and become like the Father. Consider how much Jesus suffered in leaving the glory of the Father’s presence to come here, enduring bitter contradiction against his character for three decades, experiencing stiff persecution against his ministry for another three years, and receiving death at the hands of those he came to save.

The historical examples of those who knew God best suggest that getting to know God’s character is no easy thing. Throughout history, even those who knew God best found themselves surprised in their continued interactions with him. For example, even after spending three years with Jesus nearly every day, his disciples were constantly shocked by what he said and did. Given that those who spent so much time with God still found themselves surprised by him, your operating assumption ought to be that your idea of God is incomplete and, at least in some ways, incorrect.

Each person’s view of Jesus’ character is determined by their heed of what they believe about him and their diligence in learning more. You may have an idea of what God is like, but that doesn’t meant that it is correct or complete. Like everyone else, your knowledge of God is limited in breadth, depth, accuracy, and application. As long as you lack complete knowledge of God, you stand to be surprised frequently and significantly by his thoughts, feelings, and actions, including his directions to you.

Your present perspective of Jesus’ character is not what he is really like. Your ability to perceive and replicate the character of Jesus is akin to a child’s ability to replicate a great master’s painting. Fine details are blurrily summarized, a broad color palette is mapped to a much smaller set, and many aspects are omitted completely. A child cannot reproduce a fine painting, and fallen man cannot instantly come to understand nor replicate the character of Christ.

Your understanding of God’s character at any moment is like looking down at a dark city from an airplane at night. Some areas are well lit, some are partially lit, and some are totally dark. You can’t see everything, so you have to make educated guesses about what you can’t see (the totally dark and partially dark places) based on what you can see. Your sincere idea of how and what he is will change with every step you take towards him. Though your perception of Jesus may change significantly with each step, you will see over time that it is becoming more accurate as you close the distance towards him. As you learn more about the Lord, you will marvel at his ability to guide you toward him given the abundance of your limitations and the magnitude of his perfection.

The scriptures are meant to teach us about the character of Christ, but few study them enough to learn very much about him at all. It’s not difficult to find a professed Christian whose confidence in how they imagine Jesus to be far exceeds their familiarity with the scriptures that describe him. Most Christians nonchalantly claim that they know Jesus, when few are even familiar with the scriptures that describe him. A superficial study of the scriptures may be sufficient to yield a list of God’s attributes—such as love, mercy, and justice—but not enough to surpass the superficial ideas of the meaning of these words, let alone their application to daily life.

It is nothing short of astounding that modern people believe you can know all there is to know about Jesus through vague familiarity with a few verses of scripture. Many of these same people have no problem spending at least four years and ever-increasing sums of money to study at college. No one should think that they know much about the author of all truth and the creator of everything known while their effort to study him dwarfs in comparison to the time required to gain a functional understanding of anything within his creation.

The best way to prove how little the average Christian knows the scriptures is to mark their surprise as you cite stories from the New Testament that illustrate a very different Jesus than they believe in. You may be surprised to hear that Jesus.

Responded to a sincere Canaanite woman asking for help by calling her a dog on account of her ethnicity. Used the profanity of his time to insult those with whom he disagreed. Insulted religious leaders. [Drank] and ate enough to be credibly criticized as a drunk and glutton. [Denigrated the religious beliefs of a Samaritan woman who] had honored him by calling him a prophet, while proclaiming the superiority of his own. [Disputed] his friends’ heartfelt proclamations of loyalty.

The fewer the scriptures upon which you base your understanding of God, the more likely you will be surprised by how he actually is. Anyone surprised by scriptural accounts of what God said, did, commanded to be done, or allowed to happen should diminish their confidence in their understanding of his character and wherever they obtained it. If you don’t even know the aspects of the Lord’s character demonstrated in the scriptures, how can you possibly imagine that you know him?

It is one thing to be overconfident in your expectation of how well you know God given a lack of familiarity with scripture, but there are many who manage to avoid learning how he is in spite of spending a great deal of time in the scriptures. Instead of searching the scriptures for improvements they can make to themselves, they make scripture study an end in itself. Rather than searching for differences they can reconcile between them and God, they ignore the differences and memorize the behavioral matches or irrelevant factoids, building up tall barriers of verse-enforced false traditions that make it all the less likely they will receive the truth when confronted with it.

The scriptures are not meant to be the product—you are. They are an instruction manual for the work, not the work itself. You can’t correctly understand how God is through only studying his word. You must also live it!

Those who study the word of God without living it tend to subconsciously skip over the parts that suggest needed change. Christians ought to know, explain, venerate, and emulate Jesus’ behavior on all occasions, not just when it matches their church’s arbitrary standards or their favorite feel-good activity. Instead of ignoring the parts of the scriptures that don’t align with your religion, you ought to ignore the parts of your religion that don’t align with your scriptures.

Even in the rare case that a person knows the scriptures well and applies them honestly, they should not mistake being familiar with that limited account for being familiar with the unlimited being. It is always difficult to convey an accurate model of someone’s character from one person to another in a way that the other person can accurately predict the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the person you are describing across many situations. If true for a normal person, imagine how much more difficult this would be if you were describing the Lord. The apostle John spent three years with the Lord, and yet he lamented how difficult it was to write adequately about him. If you were to somehow hear about what transpired during the remainder of the three year ministry of Christ beyond the few weeks covered in the New Testament, or the contents of his thirty years of life prior to that, how confident can you be that you would not be surprised in what you learned?

If you know someone’s character, you can accurately explain what they did in the past and why. A powerful test to assess the breadth of your knowledge of God’s character is to consider how well you can explain what God did in the scriptures. The first and most obvious question is: how familiar are you with the stories themselves? If you are not familiar with what he did in the past, it is unlikely you have any idea what he will do in the future.

For each story, ask whether you can explain what he said or did. Why didn’t he say or do anything else? Can you explain the differences between occasions when he was proactive, when he waited to respond to someone else, or when he remained silent or aloof? Can you explain why he healed people when he did and how he did? Can you explain why and when he didn’t heal people? Can you explain why he sometimes received violence, sometimes resisted it, and other times inflicted it? Can you explain why he sometimes endured persecution and sometimes fled from it? Can you explain his behavior in the Old Testament, and seamlessly link it to the consistent character of what he demonstrated in the New? If your model of God’s character can’t explain why destroying whole cities and nations is the epitome of righteousness, your model is significantly limited.

Any of God’s recorded behavior that conflicts with your present understanding of him provides you with opportunities to get to know him better. If you can’t explain why Jesus did things in the past, how can you hope to predict what he will do in the future?

If you know someone’s character, you can accurately predict what they will do in the future and why. The easiest way to predict what God will do in the future is by getting to know what he did in the past and applying those examples to similar present and future situations. If you observe what someone does in a particular situation, you can reasonably assume that they will do the same thing under the same circumstances at another time. There is no one for whom this is more true than God.

What about situations where you have not yet seen what they will do? If you understand someone’s character, you can not only accurately predict how they will act in previously observed situations, but also how they will act in any situation. This is because you not only know what they do, but you also know why they do it. If you know why he does what he does, you can more accurately predict more of what he will do across a broader range of situations.

If you know God’s character, you will be able to precisely predict what he will do and not do in the future. If you can’t perfectly predict the future, you must admit that there is still more for you to know about God.

Someone who knew God’s character could clearly and accurately unfold the cryptic descriptions of the End Times from scripture. After all, it should be easier to fill in the blanks on extensive predictions than it is to generate them from nothing.

If you know God’s character, your ability to predict his actions will not apply uniquely to the End Times, but also to the present time. If you know God’s character, you should be able to accurately predict his will in the small-scale situations of daily life as well as in the big picture over time.

God’s responses to your request provide a proxy to measure how well you know him. The less often God grants your requests, the more evidence you have of distance between how you believe God is and how he actually is. The more you learn about God and the more you restrict your requests to what best advances his purposes, the more often he will grant your requests. The Lord promised that.

The more unanswered questions you have for God, the more evidence you have of distance between how you believe God is and how he actually is.

The Lord’s responses to our questions are subject to what we are willing to receive. The more you know and live God’s character, the more directly and immediately he can answer the questions you ask him. The more you know him, the more building blocks you have from which he can construct the answer to your questions. The less about him you know, the more he will have to lay out to you in order to answer your questions, and the more likely limits in your cognitive abilities, diligence, or trust in him are to form a barrier between you and the answer to your question.

Do you know what God knows? God knows all things. Do you? He knows how everything came to be, and how everything comes to an end. He knows the relationship between all things and how everything affects everything else. He knows the true worth of all things. He knows all possible actions, their long-term cost, and their long-term benefit.

Most will readily admit that their knowledge is far less than God’s knowledge, but few realize that this means that they also do not know his character. God’s knowledge is a fundamental part of his character. How can you know what God would do, why he would do it, or how he would feel in doing so if you don’t know what he knows? If there remains anything that he knows that you do not yet know, then even if you know him somewhat, you do not know him fully. To fully know how he is, you would also have to fully know what he knows.

God’s wisdom is inseparable from his character. What God understands informs how he is, and how he is informs what he understands. Can you understand what he understands? Can you reason as well as he does? To the extent that you can’t think like God would in your place, you will be unable to predict what he would do in your place or how he would feel in your situation. To the extent that your ability to reason falls short of God’s, you will see different options for thought, feeling, and action than he does, and you will see them differently than he does.

God’s power co-exists with his character; it only exists in those who share his character, and to the extent they do. Can you do what God does? If you find yourself unable to do what you sincerely believe the Lord would in your place, you are either incorrect in what he would do, or too different from him in character to accomplish it. Either way, you should assume that your understanding of what is good is equally different from God’s as your power is from his.

As the Lord prepared for his death, he told his disciples that they were not yet ready to join him where he was going. They had not yet dedicated themselves fully to following his example. He said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6) They all claimed they would remain faithful to him even unto death. And yet, all of them abandoned Jesus in his time of greatest trial.

Like the disciples at the time of his death, it is likely that you still haven’t decided to follow him above all else, even if you think you have. Until you have faced and passed the test of the sacrifice of all things, up to and including your life, how can you be confident that you know his character?

Your association with God is determined by how much you know about him and whether you fully live all you know about him. A complete understanding of God’s character is not required to abide with him, but complete reconciliation to his character as far as you know it is. You become innocent before God, prepared and worthy to dwell in his presence through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as soon as you begin and continue to live according to everything you know about him. This is what salvation is.

If you always live in a way that pleases him, he will always accompany you. The Lord said: “...If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” (John 14:23) Has the Lord “made his abode” with you? If not, can you confidently say that you’ve kept his words? Do you even know his words?

God will not abide with those who willfully rebel against him. The spirit of God actuates a person’s ability to perceive and evaluate the net benefit of available options. To approach the presence of God requires you to adopt reason as your guidance system, always thinking about and doing what leads to the greatest long-term outcomes rather than what feels good in the moment. While God welcomes into his presence those who always do their best, those who are dishonest remove themselves from him.

The love of God is the central quality of his character. But what does it mean to love others as God loves you? As with other aspects of his character, people are too quick to reduce God’s love to their present understanding of what it might mean. God’s love is not just difficult to attain—it is difficult to perceive and learn.

How can you know that your understanding of love differs from God’s?

Do you keep all of God’s commandments all of the time? Do you follow God’s example completely, all of the time, as far as you understand him to be? Do you find it difficult or onerous to keep God’s commandments? Do you treat the needs of other people as equally important to your own? Would you die for a family member, friend, stranger, or enemy? How do you respond to correction? Those who invite you to improve are inviting you to draw nearer to God, and your response to them indicates the love you have for God.

Those who know God love one another as God loves them. If you fall short in any of the above-mentioned qualities, you should consider it as evidence that there is more about God’s character that you need to learn and live in order to obtain eternal life.

Barriers that impede learning more about God

Many have asked why God does not do more to reveal himself to his children. The fact is that he has always done absolutely everything that can be done. There is no limitation in willingness or activity on his part.

God desires to reveal himself to his children, but he can only do so in certain ways. We can think, feel, or act in ways that narrow or close off the ways in which God can reveal himself to us. Wherever a limit exists in our understanding of and experience with God, it is completely due to our choices, not his.

God invites all people to come to know him better, all of the time. While knowledge about God is a limitless feast, individuals differ significantly in how much of it they obtain and live. Different people desire to know more about God with different intensities. How much you learn about him is determined by the effort you exert in searching for more and the obedience you exercise in applying what you know.

God’s knowledge is an unending resource that we are meant to continue seeking after indefinitely. Only those who continually search for more of God’s knowledge obtain eternal life. Those who stop searching after God’s knowledge will experience the loss of some of the knowledge they have obtained, although their diminished awareness will make this more difficult to notice.

If you believe that God knows all things and that he cares more about your eternal joy than you do, it should be extremely easy to constantly seek his guidance on all things in your life. You will constantly seek and joyfully feast on any knowledge he is willing to give. The blessing of desiring more knowledge about and from God is obtaining and living according to it. Those who do not seek greater knowledge about and from God turn away from his offered gift to help them become better and achieve more than they ever could in and of themselves.

A significant cause of satiation in seeking knowledge from God is the busyness of modern life. The pursuits of modern people prioritize what has no eternal worth over what does. Few understand that their misprioritization isn’t a matter of church versus the rest of life, but the failure to apply God’s character to the daily tasks in life. God didn’t give us the requirement to earn our daily bread and raise children simply as a constant overhead cost to compete with church. Instead, our temporal lives are meant to be a learning lab where we consistently discover and apply the will of God in practical ways. The problem isn’t just that people don’t think about God in their daily lives, but that they don’t bother thinking at all. They fill their lives with activities that fail to advance their eternal purpose as much as other things would—or, in some cases, fail to advance their eternal purpose at all. In fact, many intentionally overburden themselves in order to have an excuse not to think about their lives or feel guilty about doing less than the best they could. These are problems with dire consequences that the Lord expressly warned against. It is vital that you think intentionally about how you spend your resources, prioritize what has the greatest longterm effect, and delete from your life anything that does not provide greater benefit than cost.

You are limited in what Jesus can reveal about himself by how much like him you have become. The more like God you are, the more he can teach you about himself. The fact that Jesus reveals more of himself to those who already know more about and live more like him is no accident. Without living what you know about Jesus, you will be quite limited in what more you can learn about him. Endlessly talking about or even studying about Jesus will do you very little good unless you are identifying and making the changes necessary to live what you learn.

Perception and becoming are inseparably intertwined. Your understanding of God can only slightly exceed how much like God you have become. You can’t comprehend God much farther than you’ve become like him. What you notice, understand, and value are all progressive and sequential. You can only progress one step at a time in what you notice, understand, and value, and the next step is always limited by your present position. While you will always have access to the next step in the path, you cannot perceive, understand, or value what lies very far from who you presently are.

The more like God you become, the more you will notice, understand, and value additional demonstrations of his character. As you become more like God, you increase the breadth and accuracy which you can perceive, understand, and value his goodness. You become more like God iteratively, living up to what you already know while learning more about him. New knowledge about God incrementally ratchets you closer and closer to him as you live up to it, which allows you to see more and more of what he is really like.

Your idea of God’s character is far less than his actual character, no matter how lofty your idea of his character may be. Anyone who is not God still has a great deal to learn about him. You must avoid the temptation of believing that all you know is all—or even most—of what there is to know. You can't receive greater joy from God without learning more about God. As long as you remain satisfied with your current beliefs about God, you will never learn more about him.

True disciples of Christ readily recognize the limitations of their understanding, firmly believing that even their most supported beliefs are incomplete, if not incorrect. They constantly test their beliefs against their observations of reality, and stand ready to open-mindedly listen to the ideas of others. They gratefully acknowledge when someone offers them constructive criticism. They emulate the humility of the Lord by yielding to any idea that is shown to be better than what they already believe, and adopting it as their own.

While few would admit that they believe that they know everything there is to know about God, many act this way by spending little to no effort searching for new or better ideas about him and by ignoring or persecuting those who present them. Even those who have spent a lifetime diligently searching for and rigorously testing the beliefs they hold should be willing to search out and listen to the ideas of others. If this is the case, how much more humility should be exercised by those whose religious beliefs are so simple and unsupported that they can be adequately conveyed within a few sessions of a child’s Sunday School class? Even with such shallow exposure to scripture, these professed Christians ought to realize how little resemblance they bear to the believers described there, either in their discipleship or the fruits that always follow, but they don’t seem to notice or care because they are taught that God’s most valuable blessings are already theirs but will only show up after they die.

Remembering that there is always much more to learn and become will help you be as prepared as possible to learn more from God no matter who or what he uses to teach you. You will continue learning more about God the same way you learned what you already know: through searching for more information about him and by living everything that you learn.

The more God shows you about himself, the more you will see yourself as he sees you. It is not possible for God to reveal more of himself to you without revealing more of yourself to you. He is the Spirit of truth, he knows all things, and the more about him you learn, the more you will learn about everything, including yourself.

As God reveals more of himself to you, you will see yourself differently than you did before. Whether these differences indicate aspects of yourself that are better or worse than you thought, their revelation will result in a greater burden to you than your prior understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, placing upon you the duty to do more and better than you did before.

You may come to see some aspects of yourself as better than you thought. The revelation of greater capabilities, whether realized or potential, will require increased performance in order for you to retain a conscience free from guilt.

The things that God reveals to you will, in many cases, show that you are not as good as you thought, and do not deserve as much as you expected. You will see that some of your merits are less valuable than you think, at least some of your faults are worse than you think, and that you probably have more faults than you knew. This revelation is necessary for you to find the motive and means to become better than you are and deserve more than you presently do. It is only through seeing more of the differences between you and God that you can know the way to become more like him and muster the willingness to do so. However, human nature interprets all such downward revisions of selfworth as negative, and those who have not yet learned the value of correction will tend to avoid and resent them. Take courage and be humble. God only corrects those who have the power to implement his corrections.

What God reveals to you will change the value you perceive in who you are and who you aren’t. As a result, you will see character qualities that must be added, modified, or removed in order to reconcile to your new understanding of God.

When God reveals anything more to you about how he is, it is always as an invitation for you to choose to be more like him in that way. You have to make any changes required to reconcile yourself with the new information he shows you about himself in order for him to continue to show you more. The more you learn about God, the more you will learn about yourself, and the more you respond appropriately to what you learn about yourself, the more you will continue to learn about God.

It takes time to find, test, and adopt new ideas. The faster you can accurately perform each of these steps, the more quickly God can teach you, and the more light and truth you will acquire compared to others.

The physiological strain of the pace and content of information about God is significant. It is not difficult to overwhelm most people, as few are interested in or accustomed to considering, reconsidering, or changing foundational beliefs.

Capacity for truth must be developed just like physical strength: through regularly exercising to the edge of your limits. Unlike physical strength, spiritual strength can be developed to the point where growth no longer requires regular rest. Train yourself to change faster by changing as fast as you can. Make a prioritized list of the potential improvements of which you are aware, and begin today to implement them. Train yourself to rely less on breaks by relying less on breaks. Learn that the value of rest is limited to helping you advance your purpose more than you otherwise could.

It’s rare to find people who are willing to change, but it is even more rare to find people willing to change their rate of change. Through intentional effort, you can increase both, and the more you do, the more reasons you will have to continue to do so.

The way you interact with opportunities to improve is the way you interact with God. God knocks on your door by showing you the possibility, necessity, and value of improvement across every aspect of your life and character. You knock on God’s door by searching for how you can improve yourself, others, or the world. Those who do not perceive or correctly respond to God’s invitations to improve cannot abide with him.

“Knowing the Lord” and “being known by the Lord” are phrases that depict the removal of the barrier between you and God. They measure the frequency and content of corrective interactions between you and him, not just the amount of knowledge that has been transmitted through that barrier. Knowing and being known by the Lord are a question of how valiantly you search out and respond to him.

The word “know” does not convey a specific sense of intimacy as used in modern speech. When a person is said to know another in the colloquial sense, a wide range of intimacy levels is possible. You could say that you know your spouse, children, parents, and in-laws—all of whom share different levels of intimacy in spite of being family. You can say that you know your work colleague and neighbor, even if you know them far less well than your family. You could even accurately claim that you know a person you sat next to in school decades ago but have not spoken with since. The scriptural sense of the word “know” is vastly different. To know someone in the scriptural sense of the word requires much more than simply having knowledge about them.

Knowing of God is not the same as knowing him or being known by him. To be known by the Lord is not a question of what God knows about you. God knows all about you, but that doesn’t mean he knows you. If the Lord says he never knew you, he doesn’t mean he doesn’t know who or how you are. He knows everything, including everything about you.

A knowing relationship is uniquely intimate, beyond what is found with friends, occasional acquaintances, or the general public. It is not coincidental that the Lord employs the same language for our interactions with him as he does for the relationship between a husband and wife. The interactions between husband and wife are meant to join them together in the most complete way possible given their individual and separate physical bodies.

Though the fulfillment operates differently given the differences in particulars, the spirit of the intended unity we have with God is meant to be at least as broad, deep, and enduring as the ideal relationship between a husband and a wife. The unity intended between a husband and a wife is meant to span mental, emotional, and spiritual domains, with physical connections being an important yet fairly limited means to that end.

To be known of God is a question of the frequency of contact and depth of familiarity that you have with him. It is not a binary measure, but one of degrees. A person’s relationship with God can vary immensely compared to others in terms of what is exchanged, and with what level of familiarity. With obvious connections to marital relations, to know the Lord is to receive his influence within you, becoming alive and bearing fruit because of it. To know the Lord requires you to receive new instruction from him often, and to live differently than you otherwise would because of it. To receive his influence once changes you forever, and to receive it continually changes you continually. Scripturally knowing someone requires an ongoing relationship with them—growing, not static, and certainly not receding. Through knowing him, he is in you (through your receipt of what he gives you), and you are in him (through his love for you).

To know the Lord and be known by him requires that you intentionally pursue his purpose. It isn’t enough to merely search out and do his will as far as you can discover it, nor is it enough to only do what he preemptively asks you to do. Just as a good wife knows and is known by her husband as she does her best to pursue his purpose as she sees it and responds to his specific corrections and requests, to know God and be known of him requires that you search out and follow his purpose and also that you respond when he sends you specific opportunities or invitations to improve.

The Lord asks for the dedication of our heart, might, mind, and strength in service to his purpose. Those who limit their relationship with him to some subset of all they have to give will experience far less with him than what is possible and what he intends. It is not enough to mindlessly reduce your service to the Lord to a routine or checklist of tasks. Maximizing your religious activity is not the same as maximally advancing the purpose of God. Knowing the Lord requires a relationship that exceeds what can occur only at or through a church or within strictly religious bounds. No amount of overindulgence in a limited domain of interaction with God will compensate for neglect in another. A busy servant is not the same as a good servant. Service to God is always about what he thinks is good, not what you think is good. You can be fully occupied in what you suppose is service to God and yet have a heart, mind, or even actions very far from what he is actually asking of you.

Being known of God yields similarity to him, because the process of coming to know God consists of yielding to correction from him that shows you how to be more like him. As you are known of God, you will gain a greater understanding of what is best in yourself, in others, and in the world.

Walking with God requires making changes as you are shown ways in which you can improve. To abide with God requires you to be open to being corrected, and to implement corrections as they are made known to you. The slower you are to implement the changes suggested by what he teaches you, the slower he will be to provide subsequent increments of further information about himself.

As you learn to value the additional aspects of God that he reveals to you, you will come to recognize him and everything he provides as being increasingly more valuable than any alternative. Unfortunately, because so few people strive to learn and live all they can from God, the more you learn about him, the less often you will find others who have done the same. While it is comforting to think that God himself can make up for the loss of human relationships capable of the depth and quality you will increasingly crave, there are impassable barriers to experiencing a fullness of God’s glory and joy while in the flesh. The combination of increased distance from your peers and increasing desire for glory and joy that only exists outside of this world creates an increasingly strong unanswered longing that must be carried while in this life.

The more you learn about and value God, the more overwhelming your desire becomes to be with him instead of remaining here. Increasingly, the only force that counters your desire to leave this world is whatever desire you have to remain here in order to demonstrate his goodness to others. Imagine what it would be like to have the value you previously found in all things and people suddenly stripped away in comparison to the divine value of what cannot be found in this world. To the extent that you lack altruism, greater revelations of the goodness of God and the blessings he can provide hereafter increase misery here and now beyond the limits of what anyone who knows less about him can know is possible. The goodness and glory of God are such that increasing your knowledge of them by necessity shows everything else to be increasingly worse by comparison.

Only those of indescribably great faith would be able to continue mortal life in any normal way after gaining an appreciation of what is possible, bearing the extreme contradiction between the toil of mortal life and a knowledge of the greatness of God’s love. Pain is not the greatest form of suffering. Knowing what good is possible without being able to obtain it is far greater. Those carrying the burden of knowing something of God’s goodness must bear the disparity between what they know could be and what actually is in each task, every day. You need immense trust in God and faith in him in order to bear such a burden.

You increase your ability to bear the burden of knowing what is better than what you have through increasing your trust in God. Increase the trust you have in God through remembering all the reasons he has given you to trust him. Enumerate the times in your life when things were much better than they could have been. Recognize his hand in all things and be grateful for every good thing in your life. Learn more about God’s justice, and learn to lean into it by living up to the blessings you desire. Ultimately, increasing your trust in God is a matter of choice. As you repeatedly recognize all the ways in which God has blessed you and others in the past, you will have more than enough reasons to choose to trust in him.

God’s judgment is among his most important qualities. To judge correctly means to have an accurate idea of what is possible and what it is worth, which is necessary to ascertain what brings the greatest joy for the longest duration. Your value appraisal differs from God’s in many ways. In every instance, differences between what options you see and what options God sees, and how you value something and how God values it present a situation where you would judge God as less than ideal were he to show you that difference.

Every time God reveals more of himself to you, he will reveal differences between how you thought he was and how he actually is. Each revelation of God provides you with the opportunity to either upgrade your own idea of righteousness by replacing it with what God shows you, or insist that somehow your preconceived notion of righteousness is more righteous than God.

Your ability to judge others correctly is bounded by the limits of your own righteousness. Human detectors of moral judgment are limited to discerning the next increment of their progress towards God. The more like God someone is than you, the more likely you are to misjudge them and what they do as evil. This is why it is so crucial to judge others by comparing your weaknesses to their strengths (how are they better than you?), and not your strengths to their weaknesses (how are you better than them?).

God reveals himself incrementally to prevent your condemnation. As hard as it may be to believe, his character is so far from how you are that to show us it entirely all at once would guarantee your rejection of him. You would not presently value the aspects of God that you do not presently know. God will not reveal to you more about himself than what you can recognize as righteous. He won’t reveal himself so sufficiently that you will hate him. If he revealed himself fully, you would assuredly reject him, and rebellion against such great demonstration of his goodness would so significantly damage your ability to make moral judgments that it would be very difficult for you to obtain forgiveness.

The natural man does not value what God values. Many Jews in Jesus’ day misjudged him as unrighteous in response to his teachings and works. Some were being dishonest, but many genuinely believed he was wicked. For some, limits in their intelligence prevented their ability to correctly judge him. For others, closed-mindedness prevented them from detaching from their prior beliefs of what was right when he contradicted them.

Different approaches exist for moral judgment. A common method is to use static rules that define what is good. While rules can describe what is good in a specific situation, they can be misapplied and will not likely continue to indicate what is good under different situations. A much better way—God’s way—is to calculate what is good based on the calculation of net benefit across available choices.

Those who operate on a rules-based morality are assured to see morality differently than God does, as his morality is based on the calculation of net benefit, and rules cannot accurately replicate what principles describe. Those whose morality is based on net benefit across available options will deviate from God’s morality only when there are limits in their understanding of the set of available options or the cost and benefit of each.

Holy means that which is different and better. You can’t correctly judge what is better beyond the limits of your appraisal of value. In order to recognize God’s holiness, you need to correctly perceive available options and the long-term net benefit of each. The less you know about reality and the less correctly you assess value, the less prepared you are to recognize the holiness of God.

You mitigate the barrier of misjudging God by developing your intrinsic trust in him and learning more about reality. If you truly believe he is wiser and more knowledgeable than you, and you truly believe that he loves you more than you love yourself, you must assume that anything he shows you about himself is more righteous than anything else. In this manner, you can turn revelations from God from an opportunity to be offended into an opportunity to learn more about reality. The more you know about God and live as you believe God would in your place, the more you will see and value what is from, by, or like God.

Your understanding of who and how God is increases gradually and incrementally. You can’t know God completely all at once; you can only come to know him a little more than you presently do, over and over again.

Knowledge about God is sequential. In the path to God, each subsequent step builds on what came before. What God can teach us about himself depends on how much we already know about him. In the same way that new vocabulary words can only be defined by using words you already know, new knowledge about God builds on previously understood ideas about him.

Each step in the path towards God expands our view of what lies ahead. One reason that so many people think there is so little to know about God is because they have done so little to live up to what they claim to believe about him. Those who live as they believe Jesus would have found an unbroken pattern: each step reveals that there is much more to be learned than they had ever before supposed.

Getting to know anyone is a process because it takes time and interactions to learn someone’s character. With God, the process isn’t just limited by time or interactions, but also your ability to perceive. In order to correctly see more of God, your awareness has to increase beyond its present limits.

God will reveal more about himself to you as you learn more about him and live what you learn. Because he reveals himself to people commensurate with their heed and diligence in seeking him, this happens iteratively over time. To maximize your progress with God, fully and instantly implement anything he shows you about himself in your life, and tenaciously seek to learn more about him in all available ways. While every step in the path must be taken sequentially, there is no limit to how quickly you can take them.

There is a limit to how much God can reveal about himself to someone who doesn’t fully live up to all they already know about him. You have to forsake your sins in order to come to know God. While you continue to sin, or do anything that is contrary to his character so far as you understand it, you will remain ignorant of the aspects of his character that lie beyond your present understanding. A person cannot know God much better than they already do if they do not first obey what they already know about him. Why would you expect God to reveal more of himself to you if you still ignore or rebel against anything he has already shown you, when doing so would only increase the negative consequences that must follow willful rebellion against God? It is both dishonest and ineffectual to seek to know more about him before deciding to live up to what you already understand about him. Jesus frequently appealed to what his listeners already knew, but were failing to live. He knew that in order to progress closer to him, they first had to live according to what they already knew. In one particularly poignant exchange, he pointed out that the group of Jews to whom he spoke thought they had eternal life because of what the scriptures said, though they did not live what they said, particularly about him. He said their lack of belief in him was because they claimed to believe in Moses, yet didn’t do what he said.

When you reconcile to what you know, you receive more. When you ignore, resist, or reject what you know, you lose even what you have. Anytime you do less than the best you know, you make any additional revelation from him less likely until and unless you turn back to the invitation to improve that you refused before.

Deciding to live as you sincerely believe he would in your place best orients you to the experiences that will teach you more about how he is. If God was willing to reveal as much about himself as he already has while you were still estranged from him, how much more will he reveal to you after you align your life with how you understand him to be?

Light and truth are taken away through disobedience. If you are disobedient to your present understanding of what is best or how God is, your understanding of both will deteriorate, often without your recognition of the reduction. Every time you do less than your best, you reduce your ability to do what is best in the future. The greater the knowledge you sin against, the more difficult it is for you to see and correct your faults in order to obtain forgiveness.

Sanctification begins and continues as long as you are fully submitted to God. Sanctification requires continued obedience to all you know. Just one sin takes you out of the way. Those who turn away from new truth stand condemned by God until and unless they repent and return to him. Those previously blessed by God will be punished for new disobedience against him.

Eternal life requires diligently seeking to learn more about God and living everything you know as soon as it is revealed. In plain terms, you diligently search for more truth, and continue reconciling yourself to everything you learn. In order to remain in the stream of full blessings from God, you must continuously exercise full diligence in learning more about him and full obedience to all you learn.

Jesus reveals more of himself based upon an individual’s diligence in seeking to learn more and obedience to what they are taught. A person’s willingness to integrate present knowledge into their character and actions actually increases their capacity to receive greater truth. The Lord said that perception of his light is controlled by how well we live what we already know about him. In order for him to reveal more about himself to you, you first need to live up to what he has already shown you. God reveals more of himself to those who live up to what they already understand about him.

To walk with God, you must first stand with God. You begin walking with God by fully applying your understanding of his example to your life. As you increase in your understanding of God, you continue to walk with him by identifying new ways in which you differ from him and making the changes needed to remain reconciled to him. Until you are willing to reconcile yourself to how you believe God to be, you are not ready to learn more about how he actually is.

If you want to learn more about God, live up to what you already know about him. As you apply everything you know about God so far, he will teach you more about himself, enabling you to advance. You must be fully obedient to everything you know in order to obtain more knowledge from God. As you heed God’s influence within you and fully emulate it in your thoughts, feelings, and actions, he will expand his influence within you.

Too many Christians believe that they can endlessly learn more about God without actually living up to what they know. Gospel study is meant to be a battle plan, not a pastime. You are judged according to the law you live, not the law you like.

God will not reveal to us more about himself than we are able to obey. God has promised that he will not give us commandments beyond our ability to obey. This requires that he withhold from us any demonstration of himself that exceeds our present ability to emulate.

Greater truth is harder to perceive as true and harder to obey than lesser truth. There is no greater truth than how God is. You should expect greater revelations of the character of Christ to constantly test the limits of your capacity. Each individual has a different capacity, and God will only reveal himself to each individual up to their capability. The Lord has to step down truths to the magnitude and pace that you can bear. His willingness and ability to do this is a great blessing that allows you to receive as many blessings as possible as early as possible, but it does not create a way to receive a higher blessing while living a lower law. While many truths can be reduced in a way where at least some benefit can be enjoyed before you are ready to receive a fuller version, there are many things that cannot be revealed in an easier or partial way. God cannot reveal himself to us beyond our ability to fully implement what he shows us about himself in our own lives.

Your ability to obey is something that you can increase. Discipline is a muscle. The more discipline you exercise, the more capable you will become. You will find yourself with the strength to go and do whatever God will command by going and doing what God has already commanded.

God graciously reveals how he is to all people up to the absolute greatest quantity they can perceive and understand without becoming more like him than they already are. God can reveal a great deal about himself, even to those who do not know him at all or believe in him at all, because everything in life testifies of how he is, whether the individual recognizes it or not.

We are all endowed by our Creator with a great deal of internal light, including the ability to assess the relative value of different actions we can take in decisions big and small. Like a seedling sprouting of its own accord, we can progress a great deal in our character through feeding off our internal resources. A great deal of progress is possible even in an individual that does not know or believe anything about God if they choose the best they know of, according to their understanding of what is good. This includes doing their best in every aspect of their life from the seemingly mundane to the explicitly religious and everything in between. Unfortunately, even among the religious, few people apply this latent capability with enough fervor to reach the end of its utility. Instead, they are content doing less than the best they imagine, at least in some situations, cutting themselves off from anything still better.

The Lord is how he is because being that way is the best for all, but often what is best for all carries a terrible price for him. The Lord’s mortal life was full of suffering that dwarfed any positive experiences he enjoyed while here. He lived so as to maximize what he gave to all rather than what he received in return. His life was aimed at the greatest eternal joy, not the greatest present pleasure, and these two aims tend to point in very different directions. Human nature seeks to maximize temporal comfort and security. While neither of these things are evil in and of themselves, seeking them often works contrary to God’s purposes.

If you want to avoid hindering what God could teach you about himself, you’ll have to let go of the idea of temporal comfort and security. There is a limit to how much you can follow Jesus while insisting on a certain level of temporal comfort and security. When a certain man came to Jesus professing his desire to follow him wherever he went, Jesus replied by saying: “the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:20) All value derived from possessions is subject to loss while in this life. In order to gain eternal security, learning about and living more like Jesus must be a higher priority than maintaining temporal security, as in many cases, any preference for the latter will absolutely limit the former.

In any moment, what you learn or already know about Jesus may direct you to think, feel, or act in a way that causes you to lose temporal comfort and security. Each such moment is a critical test in which few people consistently choose well. Desires not specifically aimed at Jesus above all else will invariably fail to notice these tests and choose incorrectly even in the situations that are noticed.

True disciples of Christ will seem so differently motivated to others that they could be accurately described as blind or deaf compared to normal people. Though they are exposed to the same information as normal people, they do not respond to it in the same ways. They think, feel, and act differently—according to how they sincerely believe Jesus would in their place, according to their intentional calculation of what benefits all people the most for the longest time, and not according to what feels best for them right now.

One who operates this way will not just seem different to one who does not—they will seem worse. Those who consummately serve God are viewed as marred by those who do not. They are not typically seen as nice, loving, wise, just, or selfless. Because greater truth is difficult to see as good, they are instead seen by most as unkind, judgmental, callous, foolish, and cruel.

Those who see more of the truth because they are willing to submit to it will do things that other people can’t understand. They will seem to overreact to what others see as minor or non-existent issues.

They will turn over tables and whip people who are conducting what others regard as normal living. They will disrespect unfounded or harmful social norms that others regard as sacrosanct.

What the Lord reveals about himself enables you to become more like him. As you become more like him, you will not only enjoy more of the blessings he enjoys, you will also carry more of the cost he pays. The more you learn about and live like Jesus, the more the world will treat you as it would treat the Lord. The more like Jesus you are, the more you will be persecuted by those who are not like him.

Everyone has a limit in the degree of awareness they are willing and able to manage, and this limit determines how much God can reveal himself to you. You cannot learn more about God without learning more about everything else. All things are known to and present before God, and to the extent that you become like him, all things will be known to and present before you.

The bandwidth of revelation from God grows or diminishes as a whole, depending on whether you notice and live up to it or not. Greater understanding can be sought on specific topics and at specific times, but every increase in wisdom expands the bandwidth of general awareness. General awareness does not limit itself to the topics you explicitly ask about or the times when you are asking. It “bloweth where it listeth” at all times and in all places. If you fail to notice, process, and put into practice new information you have access to, you become less like God than you were before. Every new increment of information about and from God makes you accountable for being better than you were before. God’s light is an inexhaustible stream of information. God is always ready to show you what lies beyond what you presently see, feel, think, and do. At all times, in all places, and in every circumstance, God highlights what is best, explains why it is so, suggests what is better, and provides sufficient reasons to make it so.

Knowledge about God does not exist outside of a relationship with God, and relationships with God are living, not static. The longer you maintain a relationship with God, the more that relationship will grow. The closer to God you become, the greater the flow of information into your mind. If you learn to manage the information God provides to you, he will give you more. If you fail to manage the information God provides to you, he will give you less. God will hold you accountable for noticing and integrating everything he makes available to you as you strive to make everything as good as you can imagine it to be.

Managing information well requires you to seek, notice, and respond to it. This almost always includes recording and reviewing it. Do you seek more information? Those who are overwhelmed by what they involuntarily notice will not seek more. How intense or prolonged does new information need to be in order for you to notice it? Can you notice new information even in situations that are familiar? How often do you intentionally diminish the information around you through social media, headphones, or dulling substances? How well do you triage information, parsing it into prioritized plans of action? Do you make changes to improve based on constantly asking how things can be better, or do you train yourself to ignore what is less than ideal? The more you seek, notice, and implement the changes suggested by the information that God makes available to you, you will gain access to more.

Discovering and correcting the limits of your model of Christ

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.

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, but you should never be worried about what you can’t yet see or understand. 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.

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, values, and beliefs 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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.” 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.

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.

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. 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?

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.

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. 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, 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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? 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, 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. 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. 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, but he has something better to say about all things at all times. The will of God is to make all things in earth just as they are in heaven. Jesus Christ is the great high priest, and he stands ready to improve everything that can be contemplated, done, or experienced up to and including making it just like it is in heaven. 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. 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, studying the scriptures, praying, 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.

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. God’s power comes through faith, 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? 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.

Rules, principles, character

God’s commandments are instructions that help you better understand how God would live in your place and why. God’s commandments can be expressed as rules, principles, or character qualities, each expressing how God would live in your place with higher fidelity. Rules are extractions from principles, which are extractions from character. All principles are emitted from character qualities, and all rules are emitted from principles.

A rule is a fixed description of how to act in a certain situation. Rules provide a way to transmit the greatest possible blessing to people unwilling to learn and live more like God than rules provide for. Rules are easiest for people to perceive, receive, and obey, but they are the most limited in how much of God’s character they can describe.

A principle is a generalized description of a higher order purpose. Principles are emitted extractions from character qualities, just as rules are extractions of principles. Principles are more difficult for people to perceive, receive, and obey than rules, but they are capable of describing much more of God’s character than rules. Principles prescribe behavior in terms of motives, transcending the limitations of rules, which are only applicable in specific situations. Principles are a blessing because they provide greater access to better behavior for those who are not yet willing or able to adopt God’s character.

Character is the composite of a person’s purpose, qualities, values, and beliefs. Character qualities describe God in the greatest accuracy, depth, and breadth, but provide a standard beyond what almost anyone is willing to perceive and live. Character provides the only way to merge principles that overlap or define a priority order between principles that conflict. The fullest description that of God comes in the form of living examples of his character, but these examples are the most difficult for people to perceive, receive, and obey. Those few who manage to understand, obtain, and live the character of God become most like him and can act as he does with great fidelity and extremely fine resolution in all situations in which they are placed.

Since the dawn of time, it has always been the case that almost everyone knew of another person who was more like God than they were. From Adam until now, God has painstakingly arranged for almost everyone to know of some other living person who had some character quality that was superior to the corresponding quality in themselves. While God’s character is most often demonstrated through someone more like him than you are, it is least perceived, received, or valued this way, due to the limitations of human nature. While the greatest demonstrations of God’s character leads to the greatest and longest lasting joy, they are also the hardest to see, as holiness is almost always far different than what people expect.

Much more of God’s character is learned from principles rather than examples of it in other humans. While it is easier to learn God’s character from principles than from human demonstration, it is much more difficult to learn as much in this way, as principles are a lower resolution channel than character. Principles are easier to perceive, receive, and value than character, but doing so still requires unusual virtue. While character is learned from the top down, through examples of those who already possess it, principles are typically learned from the bottom up, through abstraction from the rules that are emitted from them. People learn principles from observing common patterns across rules and formulating generalized representations of them. In order to extract God’s rules into principles, a person must be more intentional, honest, and alert than most people are. It is because so few are willing or able to receive commandments by character or principle that most people are most familiar with commandments given as rules. While rules reveal the least content about the character of God, they are the easiest to perceive, receive, and value.

You keep different tiers of commandments differently. Rules are obeyed, principles are fulfilled, and character is embodied and lived. Rules are the letter of the law. You obey a rule by following it exactly. Principles are the spirit of the law. You fulfill a rule by learning the principle from which it was derived. You keep a commandment of character by becoming like the one who gave it. Those that keep commandments of character think, feel, and act as the one who demonstrated the example to them at all times and in all things.

A rule is a description of behavior under a specified circumstance, an instance of an applied principle. Rules are meant to assist us in initiating our understanding of God’s character. Rules are waypoints on the path to similarity to Christ. Rules provide a beginning of a description of Christ’s character, but they can’t completely describe it. The objective of the gospel is to produce people who are actually more like Jesus, not just people who follow a list of rules. The point of rule-based commandments is to bring us to principles and on to the actual character of Christ.

The more you rely on rules for your understanding of God’s character, the less accurate your understanding of his character will be. God’s character cannot be described only by rules, because he lives by character qualities and principles. Each of God’s rules provides a low resolution encapsulation of some aspect of his character. While they provide greater specifics than principles, rules do not cover all situations, nor do they provide the necessary hierarchy of importance required to sufficiently allow for modeling what God would do when two rules conflict. A person who only has rules cannot accurately describe God, know what he would do in all situations, or why he would do it.

There are many blessings available from God that are not obtainable by those whose morality is based on rules. As all good stems from the character of God, each lapse in fidelity to the character of God created by the shortcomings of rules corresponds to a lack of blessings from being like him in that way. As long as your knowledge of him is limited to rules, you cannot say you know him. Because eternal life is to know him, rules-based morality or religion cannot provide you with eternal life.

A rule is a specific instruction for a specific situation. Unfortunately, rules do not usually come with a description of the situation under which they apply or exclusions to indicate when they do not. God’s pattern is to provide universal rules with personal exemptions or exclusions. For example, the commandment “thou shall not kill” did not specify the difference between human, animal, and plant life, nor did it differentiate between self-defense, the application of justice, or murder. It did not come with a description of times when it did or did not apply, but when God told Moses to kill whole nations, he did not argue.

Rules cannot describe how to live like Jesus outside of the limits of their scope. A rule applied outside of the situation it is designed for will describe and lead to behavior different than how Jesus would live under those circumstances. In any case where the limits of rules apply, the purpose of the principle will be best served by behavior other than the rule.

Upgrading from rules to principles provides you with better tools to achieve the best possible outcome independent of the particulars of the situation. While rules describe optimal behavior in specific situations, principles describe optimal behavior across specific situations. While rules are useful and helpful in the endeavor to learn more about God’s character, greater progress requires that we transcend situation-specific rules through adopting and living by principles.

God’s commandments cover all situations, but his rules can’t. God’s commandments are instructions indicating his will. His will in any situation is how Jesus would think, feel, and act in that situation. There is no situation where Jesus’ thoughts, feelings, and actions are undefined. However, there are many situations where you will not be aware of a rule from God that prescribes what your thoughts, feelings, and actions should be. A list of rules that covered every possible situation would need to be as infinite as reality itself to cover every circumstance. For example, what color would Jesus paint the walls of your living room? What kind of car would Jesus buy? What would Jesus eat for breakfast? These questions and a seeming infinity of others remain unanswered by the rules-based commandments found in the scriptures. However, they are covered by the principles provided there.

While God can prescribe ideal behavior to anyone in any situation and provide the solution to any problem, the specific nature of rules makes it impossible to provide a sufficiently large list of rules to describe all possible situations.

Rules describe preexisting solutions to previously seen problems. Rules are ill-fitted to adapt to changing circumstances. The more complex life becomes, the less likely existing solutions are to apply to present problems. As complexity increases, conditions change, new details emerge, and constraints change. Any change in circumstance makes it less likely that the prior rule still describes the path to the ideal outcome. The more complex life becomes, the more the limitations of rules become obvious, and the more principles and character are needed to thrive in and overcome that complexity.

Rules often become traps for those seeking to excuse themselves for doing less than their best. Rules-based religious paradigms look at life through the filter of minimum requirements instead of maximal potential. God’s rules are meant to help us understand what he is like and become like him, but instead of using rules to answer the question “what would Jesus do?” many Christians only ask “what can I get away with?” They don’t seek to do the best they can, only the minimum they absolutely have to do.

The wicked will resist new and better ideas that violate their rules, because those ideas identify the areas of their character that aren’t aligned with God, removing their ability to be wicked without feeling guilty about it. An unfortunate number of people remain in and venerate rules-based morality simply because it provides them with the ability to pursue what they know is less than best while feeling the least guilt—though few realize it.

It’s common to hear complaints about how difficult rules-based moral systems are to keep. The real challenge isn’t the difficulty of the system, but the difficulty of following it while maintaining your desires for anything else. Perceived difficulty in rules-based systems comes from a double mind and continued choice to sin. Rules-based systems are excellent at plainly manifesting limitations in submission to God, and until those limits are removed, no person is prepared to live commandments of principle or character.

Rules-based morality requires very little energy or thought. All you have to do is keep a list of rules that someone gives you. No matter the length of the list of rules, it will always be limited to a subset of life, and therefore easier to live than any principles- or character-based morality. Observing rules-based morality has a very high likelihood of giving someone an unrealistically high estimation of their own righteousness. Rules-based morality provides unrealistically high confidence. Unlike anything else known in reality, a rules-based moral system presents only two possibilities: everything is 100% correct, or nothing is. Finally, rules-based systems provide massive self-esteem for an exceedingly low price. With a rules-based moral code, there is no need to actually become a good person or provide others with actual value; if you keep the rules, you are as good a person as anyone could ever be, and you are better than anyone who doesn’t.

While the ease of conveyance and obedience of rules makes them more accessible to more people than principles or character, each of their properties also makes it more difficult to ascend beyond them. The packaged, finished nature of rules makes the transition towards actively thinking about and testing what you believe all the more difficult for those who live such rules-based systems. Rules-based people have little practice with critical thought and feel overwhelmed in doing so. They are often taught that to question their rules is to betray God. It takes them a great deal of faith to learn to segment their beliefs and assess individual confidence measures for each of them, based on specific reasons. Their binary confidence assessment doesn’t help, as it deprives them from any subtle onramp to a better way of thinking; in order to abandon their 100% confidence, their system tells them they must accept 0% confidence, and that is something that most people are not willing to do. Finally, anyone abandoning a rules-based moral code will likely have to accept a drastically downgraded self-worth, as they will need to face the reality that their rules probably failed to make them any better than those without them, failed to help them overcome significant challenges in reality, and may have actually made them significantly worse than they would have been without them. The only way to recover lost self-worth is to actually become the kind of person you assumed you were before.

Professed Christians often present the Lord’s way as easier than anything less. For example, many believe that the principles Jesus taught during his mortal life are easier to live than the law of Moses. Principles will only seem easier than rules to those who inconsistently live them. Principles are more difficult to live than rules are to keep. A person unable to perfectly live rules is unable to live by principles.

The main difference between principles and rules is that a rule applies only to a specific situation, but principles scale and transfer across contexts. It is because principles are more generally described than rules and can be applied across any situation that they are much more difficult to keep than rules. There are infinitely more opportunities to break principles than there are to break rules.

To learn and live up to principles requires greater virtue than rules. Most people are not willing to become as good as they would need to be in order to live by principle.

Principles require a pure and noble motive. While you can obey a rule without understanding why it is necessary, principles specify action as the application of a motive. Principles specify what to do from the perspective of why to do it. Those who hold multiple motives will struggle to live by principles, because they will alternate between competing motives in response to challenges. The greatest motive is love, which is dedication to the benefit of others independent of the benefit to self. Love is a motive that cannot co-exist with any other.

Principles require honesty. Dishonest people will apply principles only when it serves their selfish interests, greedily maintaining a false nobility. Meanwhile, they use principles to justify whatever their arbitrary emotions have enticed them to do.

Principles require knowledge. Unlike obedience to rules, living by principle requires consideration of outcomes. The calculation of what benefits others the most requires knowledge of cause, effect, and value. What benefits the most cannot be stipulated with rigid rules for all, because what benefits the most differs between people and situations.

Greatest net benefit is not the same as the greatest number of people that receive some benefit.

Principles require understanding. Principles require the individual to interpret and apply them. When you upgrade from rules to principle, what is right can no longer be discerned merely by blindly following something or someone; You actually have to query the light that God has given you, researching your options and evaluating the long-term cost and benefit of each. You actually have to study God's word, pay attention to the world, and actually think critically about the choices before you. You have to ask questions that identify your blind spots and crack open your preconceived notions with greater understanding from God.

If a person were honest, intelligent, and benevolent, the following would be sufficient to guide them for all eternity: always do everything you can to improve all things as much as possible. Unfortunately, honesty, intelligence, and benevolence are all rare qualities, and even less abundant in combination. Most people have none of the three, and those who have any of these qualities do not have very much of them. A shortage of these three qualities make the full, plain truth much harder to see and seem less desirable to obtain. In his mercy, God presents the truth in reduced quantity and quality, adapted as needed to hearer’s preparation.

To cater to those who are less honest, intelligent, or good, lesser representations of this same truth must be given. In practice, this usually means by providing a rule. When a person can’t handle a principle, a rule is the next best thing.

A primary benefit and drawback of rules is that you do not need to understand their intent in order to follow them. While this enables more people to follow the rule if greater understanding were required, it also makes possible the exercise of the rule against the intended outcome.

The greatest example of using rules to argue against their intent is the treatment Jesus received at the hands of ruling Jews. The crimes they charged him with and most of the arguments they offered against his teaching and works were stipulated in the law of Moses, whose rules he indeed broke, but whose purpose he perfectly fulfilled.

Once people forget that the purpose of God’s commandments is to instruct them in becoming more like him, it becomes all too easy for religious practice to corrupt to the point that it turns the hearts of people away from God rather than towards him, makes them less like him rather than more like him, and makes them hate rather than love those who are more like him. The Lord chastised the Pharisees for developing traditions so obviously against his purpose, but many Christians do the same or worse today.

It is possible to keep God’s rules without ever learning his purpose, and this is precisely what happens most of the time, even in the rare case that people actually keep the rules at all. God’s rules are meant to teach you about his principles, but this will only happen inasmuch as you actively question the reasons for his rules and pay attention to their consequences (see John 7:17).

God does not want you to be an animal that unthinkingly follows his rules. He wants you to learn how he is and choose to be like him. As you live by the rules you receive and pay attention to their consequences, you will develop a greater understanding of God’s principles in ways you can’t when you are already satisfied with judgment based on the unthinking acceptance of rules alone.

Wherever a principle exists, you will find situations where keeping the principle requires breaking the rules. Rules are generated from principles, but they can never adequately replace the principles they were emitted from. Where contradictions between rules and principles exist, the spirit of the law requires you to violate the letter of the law.

Knowing when a rule violates a principle requires you to understand the principles a rule comes from. Never break a rule whose purpose you do not confidently understand. Your lack of understanding for why a rule exists is not the same as or an adequate substitution for understanding the principle it is based on! Until you understand a rule well enough that you would gladly bear the consequences of breaking it, you shouldn’t do so.

Keeping principles is always more important than keeping rules. On several occasions, Jesus broke rules from the law of Moses in order to keep the principles of the law of Moses. For example, the Lord taught that the purpose of the Sabbath was more important than the rules given to govern it. When confronted by the Jews because his disciples had broken the law of Moses by harvesting and eating grain from the field they walked through while preaching, he replied: “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28) The principle of the sabbath wasn’t that man should not work that day, but that on it he should exclusively pursue God’s work. The eating of the grain furthered God‘s work as it allowed the Lord and his disciples to continue their preaching and walking.

How could Jesus break God’s rules and still not sin? To be “perfect” isn’t to live all of the rules all of the time, but to always live the intent for which they are given. Jesus only ever broke the rules in the law of Moses when it was required to keep the principles in the law of Moses. Whenever there was a conflict, Jesus lived the higher law—the law that more accurately described how the Father would live in his place.

Sin consists of doing less than the best you know. It is a sin to live a lower commandment when you know of a higher one, as higher commandments will always bring greater good. No commandment can excuse you for doing less than the greatest good that you know of. This is why Jesus spoke against the priest who refused to help the beaten man left for dead in order to preserve his ceremonial worthiness in the parable of the Good Samaritan (see Luke 10). The Lord used the commandments to help identify the best course of action, but never used them to excuse himself for doing less than what was best.

Principles concentrate on conveying intent, allowing the individual to figure out ideal behavior in any situation instead of overtly prescribing it in every particular situation. You can imagine commandments as a signal coming from God with a slider that modulates between intent and means. The more you describe the intent of a commandment, the more the commandment becomes a principle. The more you specify the means of achieving the intent, the more the commandment becomes a set of rules.

Principles are richer and more succinct than the rules derived from them. Because principles apply over every circumstance and at every scale, a single principle may subsume many rules without any loss of information. Principles are succinct because they only describe intent, while rules describe a means to accomplish that intent in a specific situation. A rule contains everything you need to know to obey it, but obedience to a principle requires knowing its intent. The spirit of the law cannot be applied without understanding why the law was given, including the cost and benefit of obedience, disobedience, and any alternatives.

In order to live a principle, you need to understand more about reality than you do with rules. A principle is implementable across the full spectrum of awareness of reality. The more about reality that you correctly understand, the more effectively you can pursue a principle.

The power of a principle is in how many rules it can absorb. Jesus demonstrated the brevity of principles by collapsing the more than 600 rules in the law of Moses down to 44 verses of principles in the Sermon on the Mount, and then condensing those down to the two great commandments. Jesus said that the entirety of the law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets emitted from the principles “love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind,” “love your neighbor as yourself.” On another occasion, he said all of the law and prophets are answered by the principle “treat others as you wish they would treat you,” showing that you fulfill the first great commandment by living the second great commandment. Every instruction God has ever given or will ever give aims to this supreme end: We are to be like Jesus is, which is like the Father is, by loving as he did.

The fact that principles scale and transfer to adjacent applications can be a powerful way to screen your life for hypocrisy, which is a form of dishonesty caused by a mismatch between what you do and why you do it. Principles scale, and if you violate your principles in small or large things, you are not a principled person.

Some people are not intelligent enough to realize when they violate their own principles. Others are smart enough to detect inconsistency, but too careless to notice. Still others know their hypocrisy well, but find sufficient comfort hiding behind the pretense of principle, having seared their conscience so thoroughly that their only source of shame is found in the negative opinions of others.

Jesus frequently pointed out the hypocrisy of others by identifying the principles the people pretended to keep, then measuring the consistency of their actions against them. For example, he pointed out that the Jews who attacked him for working miracles on the Sabbath didn’t actually oppose working on the Sabbath, since none ceased caring for their animals that day. The principle of the Sabbath is to provide a full day to dedicate to God’s work. Had they been living the principle, they would have celebrated Jesus’ work and not opposed it. You can detect hypocrisy through measuring the consistency of your intent across your actions. As an exercise, consider your actions in a specific area or timeframe. For each action, ask yourself why you do it, and then whether there is a better way to accomplish your stated intent. Pay particular attention to mismatches between seemingly big and seemingly small situations. You are a principled person when you continuously make any changes needed to bring your intent and actions into mutual alignment.

Rules, principles, and character are all susceptible to the error of using a less important commandment when a more important, mutually exclusive commandment is available. You should never allow a less important commandment to displace a more important commandment. Each commandment type also has unique potential sources of error.

Rules are the easiest type of commandment to equivocate. Rules can be applied to the wrong situation, or be wrong altogether. In either case, if you are observant and honest, you will notice that the intended outcomes do not occur, do what you can to correct for the damage done, and learn from your mistake. Of course, those who have an affinity for rules are the least likely to notice or learn from this kind of error, as they are likely to think that keeping the rule is its own reward, and might even consider it a mark of faith to live a rule in spite of obvious negative outcomes.

Principles are more difficult to equivocate than rules, primarily because their generality prevents applying them to the wrong situation, but they can still be applied poorly. Principles can still be badly implemented in ways that counter the intent of the principle. For example, it is good to save up money and invest, but it might be very bad to make a particularly poor investment.

Character qualities are the hardest to equivocate. Unlike rules or principles, character qualities do not require the formulation of a definition or the application of it, just an example. Character qualities are embodied in people, and all that is required to minimize error is to follow the example of the person who has the quality. For example, you might attempt to embody the quality of love, but if you detach it from the example of Christ, even if you live it perfectly, you will likely live the world’s corrupted version of it instead of the best version demonstrated by the Lord. The world’s version of love will do things like allow an adult child to live with you for free indefinitely without any improvement, but God’s love will not.

It is easy to get a rule wrong. It is harder to get a principle wrong— there are a lot more examples that you can use to fine tune it from thinking and the experiences of others before having to make the mistake with your own experiences. It is harder still to get a character quality wrong. Even if a potential character quality passes the gauntlet of thinking about it or applying the experiences of others to it, the moment you embark on living true to a character quality, you will be barraged by evidence of whether it is worth it or not.

Rules are never as important as the principles they come from. The most beneficial time to keep the principle rather than the rule is precisely when keeping the rule seems to yield the greater outcome. In fact, this is the correct version of the mistaken idea that it is righteous to keep a rule even when it causes obvious net-negatives.

Reality is designed with laws of cause and effect that are intentionally obfuscated in order to provide an opportunity to exercise faith. This means that you will definitely find specific situations where better short-term outcomes are obtained through following a rule that violates applicable principles. However, you will never find a situation where better long-term outcomes are obtained through following a rule rather than a principle. This isn’t just because long-term outcomes of good decisions tend to far outweigh their short-term costs, but also because living by principle will spare you a lot more pain than it costs.

Understanding and living by principles can increase your ability to see the shortcomings of a given rule. You can leverage the fact that principles describe ideal behavior across all situations by abstracting the rule to a principle, applying it to other situations, and analyzing the results. The consequences of the rule in other applications may be more obvious or more extreme to you than in the original situation, suggesting that the rule isn’t as good as you thought. For example, it might seem like a good idea to criminalize certain statements because they can be so offensive, but the benefits of the principle of free speech across all circumstances far outweigh the costs in any particular.

The closer you become to how God operates, the better off you will be long-term. God’s laws of cause and effect are most fully described by character. Principles are a lower fidelity representation of those laws, and rules are a still lower fidelity. If you ever have the choice between keeping a principle or a rule, always keep the principle.

Character supersedes principles and rules precisely because it is held and demonstrated by a living being. While learning God’s rules and principles teaches you about him, you can’t learn God’s character without coming to know him.

Rules, principles, and character each provide a mechanism for coming to know God better. While rules teach you how God behaves in certain situations, and principles teach you why God behaves as he does across all situations, only character teaches you who God is all of the time.

The purpose of God’s commandments is to teach us more about him and persuade us to be the same way. His character does this more effectively than any other mechanism.

If God’s character is so much more important than principles and rules, why does God spend so much effort teaching them to us rather than just teaching us his character directly? If all of the commandments trace back to love, why did God speak so many words, send so many servants, and even come down to die in order to convey the gospel to us? Why not simply reduce all of this down to “love one another, as I have loved you?” (John 15:12) The answer to these questions is found in the magnitude of the distance between how we are and how God actually is. God’s love is so far above human nature that nothing less than what was done and is still being done could be sufficient to begin to understand the depth, breadth, and motive of his love for us. Human nature is so much worse than most admit or care to know. Very, very few people would respond well to God directly teaching his character to them, even if this were possible. The results would be disastrous, as the brightness of the light turned away from determines the amount of light lost by doing so. If God were to teach his character more directly, so many would rebel against it that they would destroy their ability to draw nearer to him. Instead, he provides a gradient of options for getting to know him, more closely matched to the willingness of each individual. Those that come to know him through the initial means he offers them are given greater demonstrations of how he is as they live up to what he’s already given.

There are circumstances in which God’s rules will seem to conflict with one another. For example, while each rule prescribes ideal behavior under some circumstance, circumstances can combine in ways that make those prescriptions mutually exclusive. Alternatively, new rules that come from God can displace prior instructions with an advanced idea of what he would think, feel, or do in a certain situation.

You should only ever violate one commandment for the purposes of obeying a more important but mutually exclusive commandment. When Satan tempted Jesus with scriptural commandments, Jesus countered with other scriptural commandments, not ideas he made up in his head. Your own ideas are not sufficient to counter God’s commandments. There is a massive difference between saying, “I think there is a better way” and “I need to choose the better of two of God’s commandments.”

In all cases, apparent conflicts between commandments are not a license to disobey God, but rather an invitation to more fully take up his purpose and follow his example. Choosing to obey a greater commandment isn’t the same as choosing not to obey any commandment. Breaking rules isn’t a question of setting aside submission to God, but of choosing submission to God in something more important rather than submission to God in something less important.

All commandments are ultimately given to help us learn more about and live more like Jesus. New commandments reveal more of God, providing the next increment of instruction beyond former commandments toward the fullness of the character of the Father. The Lord taught that learning and living higher commandments in preference to lower commandments doesn’t break them, but fulfill them, attaining the intent for which they were given.

In the event that any two commandments aren’t possible to keep at the same time, keep the more important of the two. The intent of all commandments is to enable people to be as much like God as they are willing to, but not all commandments equally contribute to this end. The most important commandment is always the one that most accurately describes how God would live in your place.

The most important metric for selecting the most important commandment is by measuring it against the crowning character quality of God, which is love. God’s love is different than how the world would define it. God’s love is his willingness to suffer all things for the maximal benefit of all people. In all things, Jesus would choose what most benefits all people for the longest time. In order to rank commandments according to net benefit, you have to understand the options available to you, and the cost and benefit of each, which is no small feat given the complexity of reality. As you learn more about reality, your morality will increase in similarity to God’s.

It isn’t always possible to keep all of God’s commandments all of the time, but it is always possible to always keep every commandment that doesn’t displace a more important commandment. This is one and the same as living the best way you know of at all times.

You should change your belief in a rule when you discover the rule is false, notice limits to it, find a better rule, or discover and live the principle that it came from. The best way to ensure you have the best set of rules is to always live the rules you believe. By doing so, you will quickly gather evidence for or against the rule, learn its limits, and gain motivation to exert greater effort in finding something better.

One barrier that prevents people from living principles is their willingness to change their principles in the moment as a result of an increase in cost for the living the principle or increased desire for something that violates it. You cannot be a principled person while violating your principles when they are tested. The benefits of living by principles are gained precisely by living them at all times and in all places. Principles can change, but you should view those changes as intentional and outside of the scope of what happens as a part of daily life. Changing your principles isn’t something you do when you are in the middle of something else. They should be changed through intentional thought and during set aside time.

Shifts to character qualities are done through looking for and finding examples of people with better character than you. You can assess your character qualities, choose qualities that are better than your own, and intentionally apply them in daily life. An effective strategy for making these changes is given in the author’s book Joy on Purpose.

It is easy to pretend that you are willing to submit unconditionally to God by claiming you live at the principles level. Your willingness to obey a set of rules serves as a test against using principles as an excuse to avoid obeying rules. A person capable of living by principles is more than capable of living by rules. Unconditional submission to God never occurs in a person unwilling to first submit fully to a set of rules.

While a willingness to submit fully to a set of carnal rules is a useful tool in measuring your willingness to submit unconditionally to God, perfect obedience to a set of carnal rules does not indicate unconditional submission to God. It is possible to be fully obedient to a set of carnal rules without being willing to learn or obey principles. In the time of Jesus, there were many Jews willing to live the letter of the law of Moses, but unwilling to live the spirit of the law of Moses. Many baptismal candidates have willingly subjected themselves to initial rules, only to fail to continue to obey God as he taught them more about himself.

Unconditional obedience to God, in its fullest sense, is only possible at the level of character. At the rules and principles levels, obedience to God is based at least in part on your appraisal of value in what God is asking of you. Unconditional obedience to God at the character level occurs when your decision to follow his instructions comes fully from your belief in the merits of God rather than your belief in the merits of the particular instruction. When you truly believe that because God is more loving, wise, and benevolent than you, you have no reason to hesitate to gladly obey him in all things, no matter how difficult, painful, or bad the effect of doing so may seem in the moment.

Servants and sons

Christians presumptively refer to themselves as children of God, assuming the continuation of a relationship with him that all have severed and very few have reestablished. You are here to establish a.

relationship with God, not to maintain or grow one you already have. Every person alive today chose to use the agency God gave them to rebel against him, and in that rebellion severed their title as his children.

Human nature uniformly opposes God. You were born as an individual with desires so strongly opposed to the character and purpose of God that it is not an embellishment to describe you as his enemy. The gospel is an elaborate process designed to remediate and reverse your nature, but it is neither quick nor easy.

The gospel provides a means for you to traverse from being an enemy to God to being his servant, friend, and son. Each type of relationship with God is characterized by a different level of knowledge about God and obedience to him. A servant is primarily defined by a role or function of obedience to specific commands, a friend by their intimate knowledge of God, and a son by similarity to God and their right of inheritance from him. Servants do not need to understand the commandments they receive or the purpose of the master they serve. A friend knows everything he needs to be a son, but has not yet achieved the dedication required to become a son. Friends understand the purpose of the master they serve, and are expected to obey him, but their fidelity to God can be intermittent. Sons of God search out his will, develop a model of his character, and proactively apply it to advance his purpose. Sons of God always live as they believe Jesus would live in their place.

Each type of relationship with God differs in the degree of interaction with God. Servants of God interact with God when God reaches out to them. Friends are invited to dwell with God, but sometimes choose to leave him. Sons of God seek to continuously dwell in his presence.

God’s servants are those who receive and obey God’s instructions. In order to become a servant of God, you need to learn something about God’s will and seek to bring it to pass.

To serve God is to prioritize his interests above your own. You cannot serve God if anything else in your life holds a higher priority than his purpose. Service to God requires singleness of purpose and your full intensity.

Those who claim to serve God yet do not obey him are not his servants. If you disobey God’s instructions or work against his purposes, you are not his servant. You can occupy your time in seemingly religious duties, even with fervor and true intent, and still not be a servant of God if you don’t actually obey what God says and do what he would rather you do.

A servant of God is distinguished by their obedience to God, not a title or office held in a church. Church office is not required to serve God, and church office is not an adequate replacement for actually serving him. You can hold a position in a church without serving God. An appointment to a church office does not magically confer power or holiness onto the occupant, as it does not force them to adopt the purpose of God or become more like him. Church offices are meant to be occupied by those who are already like Christ, not those who hope to one day become like him.

You are the servant of the master whose will you pursue. It is incorrect to interpret the choices we make as free autonomy. While every person has full autonomy in every choice they make, we neither create the options available to us nor the value of each. All choices are not equally good or acceptable in the eyes of God. God has a preference in every decision you make, and your choices determine your allegiance to or rebellion against him.

In any decision, the best option is the will of God, the will of God is the best option, and all other options are the will of the devil. Though some bad choices are worse than others, everything less than what is best achieves the purposes of Satan and works against the purposes of God.

You don’t get to choose whether you are a servant or not, only whom you will serve. Those who do what is best at all times and in all places, as far as they understand, are servants of God. Those who do anything less are the servants of Satan. You cannot serve God and the devil. You can’t serve two masters, because serving the interests of one requires prioritizing it over the other. You will most desire what you most value.

Submission to God is the sacrifice of making God’s purpose your singular desire and highest priority. You cannot follow Jesus without fully and exclusively adopting his purpose. If you adopt God’s purpose, you are in his kingdom; if you don’t, you can’t be.

You have either forsaken your sins and fully submitted to God, or you remain captivated by the spirit of the devil. Those who still allow themselves to think, feel, or do less than the best they know, even on occasion, remain servants to the devil. All negative feelings in response to greater light and truth reveal rebellion against God.

There is absolutely no good or valid reason to serve Satan. No good result can come from serving Satan, and everything that seems good will either evaporate in perceived value or otherwise erode into something far worse than imagined.

The quality of your service to God is a question of how ardently you seek to learn about him and how valiantly you live like him. Your qualifications for being a servant of God are completely based on your choices, not things you didn’t choose and can’t change or things that other people do or don’t do.

The more you learn about and live like God, the more you will be able to contribute to God’s purpose. While even the most minimal knowledge about God provides a person with the ability to serve him, the greatest service to God can only be accomplished by those who know him the most and are most like him.

Servants become friends through faithful service to God over time. As you learn more about God, you gain the required knowledge about him to become his friend. While all that is required to be a servant of God is to receive and obey at least one instruction from him, a friend of God knows what he is actually like.

Popular depictions of Jesus portray him as a friend to all. While Jesus invites all people to be his friends, very few accept the invitation. Even his closest friends during his life abandoned him in his time of greatest need, in spite of his warning them that they would do so.

Most supposed friendships are based on mutual perceived benefit, but a true friend cares more about you than they do themselves. You can’t be a friend of Jesus without pursuing his purpose above your own. To be a friend of God, you must be consistent in your submission to his purpose.

Enmity against God is the natural state of man, and only those who fully submit to God overcome this state. While our modern language artificially raises the criteria of being an enemy to intentional, constant, and extreme enmity, all you have to do to be an enemy of God is not actively and consistently advance his purpose to your full ability. As long as your purpose is different to God’s, you are no friend of God, but his enemy. Those who do not consummately serve the Lord are treated by him as wolves and will be destroyed, even if they consider themselves sheep.

A son of God is one who knows and lives the character of Christ and proactively pursues to implement the Lord’s will in the world.

In the ancient languages, son can mean a male child, but is widely used to denote other relationships, including: an heir, a representative, and one who fulfills the potential or calling of another. Each of these relationships has special meaning in the kingdom of God.

A son has legal claim on everything that is his father’s. While earthly princes inherit their father’s kingdom by being the oldest surviving son, heavenly princes inherit kingdoms by becoming like their king. A throne in God’s kingdom is based on righteousness, established by the character of the person who sits upon it.

A representative of God is someone who not only has the authority to act in the place of God, but one who knows how and why God would act in his place, and who only does what God would in his place.

A son can exceed their father by fulfilling the potential or calling that he had. For example, David fulfilled the birthright of his ancestor Judah—a wicked man—and surpassed his father Jesse by becoming king of Israel.

Jesus is a son in all of the above senses, as shown by his roles as the Son of God, Son of David, and Son of Adam or Son of Man.

The Lord is the Son of God. He is the heir, representative, and demonstrator of the Father. Jesus had authority from the Father. He knew how the Father would act in his place. He only ever did what pleased the Father. He only ever sought the will of the Father.

The Lord is the Son of David. Jesus is the king of Israel and Judah, and the fulfillment of everything David could have been.

The Lord is the Son of Adam or Son of Man. Adam was created by God in his physical express image, and was called to live in his express character. Jesus is the fulfillment of the potential of mankind, the demonstration of what Adam was called to be.

While the Lord’s roles as the Son of David and the Son of Adam are not open to the general public, all of us are called to become sons of God. You are called to be the light of the world, to be one with the Father, to manifest his will here on earth, and to be so much like him that others learn more about him by learning about you.

Sons of God are those who seek, find, and follow God’s example. To become a son of God, you have to learn and live the character of God. You learn and live the character of God by being a diligent servant and faithful friend of God. You learn and live his purpose. The more you serve God, the more you can learn about him, and the more you can proactively implement his example.

Not all teaching about God can come through scripture study and prayer. Limits of understanding, honesty, faith, and other virtues necessitate the ministry of others in helping you learn more about God.

You become a son of God through seeking, recognizing, and learning from those more like Jesus than you. God’s kingdom is a vine with many branches, and grafting into it is a matter of finding and adopting the purpose of one who is already there. Scriptural examples of this pattern abound. For example, consider how Jonathan and his son Mephibosheth took upon themselves the role of sons of David. Though Jonathan was the heir to the throne of Israel, he adopted the purpose of David, knowing that David was more virtuous than he (see 1 Samuel 20). Jonathan’s disabled son Mephibosheth acted as a son by preferring David’s welfare and presence over his own fortune and reputation (see 2 Samuel 19).

Sons of God love everything that is from and like God, including teachings and people that those who love him less would find offensive. Sons of God seek out, recognize, and respond to God’s invitations to improve, whether those invitations come by his words, the words of his servants, or life itself.

While the phrase “only begotten” is used literally in some scriptural instances, it is also used to mean the best of more than one son, specifically the son most like the father. For example, Paul referred to Isaac as Abraham’s “only begotten son,” but Isaac was neither Abraham’s only nor first son. While whatever portion of the Lord’s title as the Only Begotten comes from before his birth is beyond our reach in this life, all of us can and should reach to become his “only begotten son”—or person most like him—in every sphere in which we inhabit, up to the limit of our abilities.

Becoming more like God requires you to learn more about how God is. What inhibits learning more about God isn’t just a lack of obedience to what you understand or desire to learn more, but also your reaction to new truth. You can’t learn much more about God than your already know without being confronted with ideas and people that are much better than those already in your life. The natural reaction to things of much greater value is to feel worse about what you presently value, including your present beliefs, your present associates, or even yourself. Many respond to this bad feeling by turning away from greater good.

If you want to get to know God, you have to learn to seek, receive, and apply correction. Those who receive the most correction from God limit him least in duration, intensity, and topic. They are willing to be corrected in any way, on any topic, by any person or situation. They desire it more than others, respond to it better than others, and share what they learn more often with others.

The process of getting to know God is called being loved by him. Just as Jesus “loved” the rich young ruler by showing him that he was less righteous than he thought, you are loved by God as you seek, receive, and apply his correction. God chastens those who he loves. Those who are most loved are those who have accepted the greatest correction from God. One who abides in the love of God is one who has received chastisement from God and responded by implementing the suggested improvements while seeking for more.

The more of God’s love you receive in the form of correction, the more of God’s love you will receive in the form of affection and blessing. While God is willing to love all of his children equally, God does not value all of his children equally. God does not value those who profess to believe in him or say that they love him above those who do not. Rather, he values those who are more similar to him above those who are less similar to him.

Those who seek, receive, and apply the most correction from God are known as “beloved sons.” The Greek word translated as “beloved” in the New Testament is agapétos (Strong’s 27) is a measure of reconciliation to God and worthiness of eternal life. Agape is the highest form of love, the kind that God has. It is not something God has for others except through their similitude toward him. His love for sinners consists of paying the price for them to receive forgiveness on condition of forsaking their sin, but he hates those who refuse to repent.

You become most like Jesus by receiving the most correction from Jesus. John was “beloved” by Jesus because he was the person most like Jesus during the Lord’s ministry. John did not become the person most like Jesus by birth or accident. He became most like Jesus through seeking, receiving, and applying the most correction from him.

The Lord became a “beloved son” through continually living in full alignment with the Father as the Father taught him better ways of being. According to John, Jesus was filled with “grace and truth” (John 1:14) one step at a time, learning more about the Father as he continued living in full alignment with what he was taught about him. The Lord did not receive a fulness of how the Father is at first, but received it through incrementally learning and living more like the Father, becoming “the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

God provided us a record of this process specifically because we are all capable of following it. This is the unified message of God’s servants throughout time: become as God is by following his example, living for the benefit of others, just as God would in your place.

All of God’s power and authority comes from similitude to him. Wherever there is a difference in similarity, there must be a difference in power and authority. Servants, friends, and sons of God all possess power and authority from God to the extent that they know and are like him.

The power and authority of a servant comes from the commands of God. They are on the errand of the Lord, having been told what to say and what to do. The Lord’s command is the Lord’s authority, and the Lord’s command is the authority of his servants. The presence of the power of God demonstrates the presence of his authority. Without demonstration of the Lord’s power, presumed servants prove to have no authority, and are mistaken or lying about having received his commands.

The work of God’s servants is to help others become more like God. They do not tell people what they want to hear. What they have to say shows people their hidden sin—flaws they ignore, flaws they minimize, and flaws they don’t yet know about. They warn people of the consequences of their present actions and point out to them a better way.

We are commanded to do many good things of our own volition, and you can only do this to the extent you know and live the character of God. The power and authority of those who only possess stated instructions is limited to the fulfillment of those instructions. To the extent that you correctly understand the purpose of God, your power and authority expands to meet its accomplishment.

Friends of God know him better than his servants, and therefore possess greater power and authority. Sons know God better than his friends, and therefore possess greater power and authority.

The scriptures refer to both sons and daughters of God. The Greek term translated as son ( huios, Strong’s 5207) is actually neuter, and could be translated as “son,” “daughter,” or “sons and daughters,” depending on the context of its use. Most of what is written in this chapter about sons of God also applies to his daughters. However, there are some important distinctions.

Women and men both become children of God through finding and establishing a relationship with a man who is already a son of God. If you are a man, this is done through finding a man more like the Lord than you are and becoming his “son” by adopting his purpose. If you are a woman, this is ideally done through finding a man more like the Lord than you are and adopting his purpose by becoming his wife.

Many women are already married when they learn about the magnitude of consequences that follow from their choice of man to marry, and some wish they had chosen someone else. For those already married, the Lord has been very clear: treat your husband how you would treat the Lord, no matter how he treats you, and the Lord will reward you accordingly.

The benefits that marriage provides to women in drawing nearer to God do not preclude their ability to do so outside of marriage. However, there is no relationship a woman can have that is likely to provide the same benefits of marriage. Marriage is the only relationship in a woman’s life where someone sees her how she really is, and her husband is meant to provide the most valuable feedback she can ever receive. Furthermore, marriage is meant to provide a woman with a lifeline of greater reason through her husband, backed by a sufficient backlog of evidence of his wisdom and his love for her that cannot be replicated in any other way. Finally, the experience of bearing, birthing, and raising children is designed by God to teach a woman more about him, herself, and godly love than anything else she can do. All of God’s children have access to him through the same sacrifice of heed and diligence, but women have advantages available to them in marriage that are not available to them without it.

Seeking God’s face: Preparing for his presence by adopting his purpose

Some have conflated knowing the Lord with seeing him. While seeing someone is a component of knowing them, it by no means is the same as knowing them or even the most important part. Anyone who has cultivated a real friendship with someone they’ve only met online, and never seen in person, can attest that it is possible to know a great deal about what someone is like without ever seeing them in person. Meanwhile, you can see someone many times without even knowing their name, such as a person at work.

Knowing someone is not a question of knowing what they look like, but knowing what their character is like. To truly know a person requires you to accurately anticipate how they will think, feel, or act in all situations.

There is a broad range of depth of character, ranging from extremely shallow to exceptionally deep. The deeper someone’s character, the harder they are to know. With most people, you can come to understand a great deal about them in a short amount of time. While it is easy to learn the character of a simple person, you cannot know a deep person simply by meeting them. As God is the deepest being, it is astonishing that anyone believes they can know him just through meeting him.

How well you know the Lord has little to do with whether you have seen him or not. Our relationship with God is a function of how much of his character we have learned, which is determined by how thoroughly we live according to the portion of his character we already know about. While seeing him is something that has either happened or not, you can know him a lot, a little, or not at all.

The scriptures are full of rich words and phrases that conveyed much more information to those who wrote them than they do to those who read them today. One such word is “face.” In modern English, the noun means the front part of a head and the verb means to confront or orient oneself towards something. Such narrow definitions make it nearly impossible to extract the power and clarity of ancient phrases that describe our relationship with God, his relationship with us, and even the purpose of life.

The Hebrew and Greek counterparts extend beyond the English definition of face in interesting and important ways. To face something is not just to turn or pay attention to, but also to return to, to approach, to dawn, to clear away, and to prepare for. The noun form is not just used for the front of someone’s head or a surface, but also someone’s.

expression, attitude, attention, presence, aura of presence, direction of travel or progression, and priority in time or attention. While these extended meanings are intriguing in and of themselves, they have clear, interesting, and important overlap with the concepts of desire, purpose, motive, and character.

A more accurate and expanded definition of “the face of God” provides practical next steps in our progression towards God. A key example is found in the idea of “seeking the face of God.”

Many have been inspired by God’s promise that those who forsake their sins, come unto him, call on his name, obey his voice, and keep his commandments will “see my face and know that I am.” Few are willing and able to read the conditions provided beyond the ambiguous but inapplicable familiarity with which we tend to endlessly rehash scripture. The conditions of the promise are to learn and live the Lord’s character. If you understand that Jesus is one with the Father because he has learned and lives the character of the Father, and that he is “the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” you know that the only way to obtain this promise is by learning and living the character of Christ. By doing so you won’t just know that he exists, but “that I AM.” You will see as he sees and know as he knows, even if you don’t see his literal face. You will know how he is, even if you don’t know what he looks like.

You seek the face of God by finding and emulating the examples of those who know him better than you. Since the beginning, God has carefully arranged creation such that all people always have access to whatever human or heavenly messengers may be required so that each person can learn as much about God as they are willing to live. The Lord’s messengers help you prepare for the Lord’s presence by walking ahead in and turning others toward the path that leads closer to him.

Seeking the face of God is not an overtly religious practice, but rather an activity that spans every domain in your life. To seek the face.

of God is to seek improvement in yourself, others, and the world itself. The path toward God’s face is the path of improvement. You seek the face of God by learning more about the potential and relative worth of all things, and working toward helping everything be as good as it can be.

Recall that one of the meanings of “face” is to adopt a direction of travel or progression. To face God consists of more than just turning toward him, but actively moving toward him in the same direction he is traveling. To seek the Lord’s face is not about obtaining an outcome, but about following a process. The process of facing the Lord consists of adopting everything you know about him as he continues to teach you more about himself.

You draw nearer to the Lord by becoming more like him. As you become more like him, you encounter more of everything that is good, including new or better information about how he is, enabling you to grow still more like him.

Everything of worth is found in the path toward God. The more like him you become, the more you will ask what he wills and the more you will receive what you ask. Greater and more enduring peace and joy are found in increasing intensity the nearer you draw toward him.

To fall on your face is a phrase that means to prostrate yourself in total submission to another, crouching down as low as you can on the floor. There are multiple scriptural references to falling on one’s face. For example, Joseph’s brothers prostrated themselves to him after finding out who he was, Abraham prostrated himself to God as God spoke with him, John prostrated himself before the angel who showed him the vision he recorded, the chief steward of King Ahab prostrated himself before the prophet Elijah, and the people prostrated themselves before God when Elijah called down fire from heaven.

As with the face, the forehead carries metaphorical significance as the location of your understanding. The surfaces upon which we walk are known for their uncleanliness, especially in the street, and even more so in ancient times when they were the dumping areas for human and animal waste. Falling on your face is a visceral admission of submission that physically acknowledges that your best understanding is as dung compared to the one to whom you bow. It is unfortunately and exceptionally rare for anyone to come to feel this way, even with God, and even for the moment required to signify it by falling on their face.

It is rare for a person to be willing to exercise the humility required to fall on their face before God, let alone anyone else. The importance and process of submitting to God is discussed in the chapter Submit to God by learning and living his presence and elsewhere in this book.

Repentance means to turn toward God. To turn toward God obviously includes more than simply feeling sorry for being turned away from him in the past. The Hebrew and Greek words related to repentance are not limited to regret, emphasizing the need to change one’s desires and actions toward God. To turn toward God is to learn more about and adopt his purpose, qualities, thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Repentance is not a limited or partial action, but corresponds to an active and total adoption of his character, as far as you understand it, at all times and in all places. It is to share his motive, value what he values, desire what he desires, and use your attention and other resources as he would. You can’t “face” God while “facing” anything else. You must either serve God or someone else, but you can’t serve both.

The opposite of repentance is rebellion, which is turning your face away from God. You might believe that rebellion against God requires an active choice. This is not so. Our nature is so inclined against God that we rebel against him by default. The very absence of active turning toward God is rebellion against him. Any rebellion against God increases your distance from him, dimming his light within you, making it more difficult to see what is best and easier to turn further away from it.

God’s will is that you remove the differences between you and him. Jesus has already provided everything necessary for you to have the power and reasons to reconcile your known differences with him. He will continue to provide everything necessary for you to continue to align with him as you learn more about him. The steps towards becoming more like God consist of iteratively perceiving more differences between how you are and how God is and reconciling yourself to how you now perceive him to be. The bridge from where you are to where God is necessarily begins where you are.

The more you repent of the differences you know of between you and God, the more additional differences will be revealed to you. The more you approach the light of God’s presence, the more of your remaining faults will be exposed. The fire of his presence will both illuminate ways you can improve and assist you in removing what cannot endure a greater relationship with him. Repentance is a dawning of a new approach to God that includes adding what is required for a closer relationship with him and clearing away anything that prevents it, preparing you to continue this process as you learn more about him.

God’s relationship with you is filtered by certain protocols designed to protect you from the negative effects of accessing more of his glory than you are prepared to bear.

The existence of these barriers becomes more evident by describing what it is like to have them removed. This degree of relationship with God is referred to in scripture by the phrase “face to face.” “Face to face” can be interpreted as a measure of intimacy. In this sense, to see God face to face is to see him as fully as he sees you, to communicate with him as you would another person, and to have him communicate with you as your closest friend would. This would include the ability to ask him about anything, and have him fully explain it to you, up to the limits of your understanding.

The artificial distance imposed between us and God includes, but is not limited to, frequency of his contact with you, manner of his contact with you, breadth or depth of what he says to you, and formality of his contact with you. God desires the reduction and eventual removal of these barriers between you and him. God places these barriers between you and him for your benefit, and they are removed as soon as you are capable of bearing more of his glory.

To reduce the barriers between you and God.

Reduce the differences between you and God. You will never see much more of him than you live up to. Learn to value holiness based on how much better it is, not artificial qualities such as the popularity or recognized authority of the messenger or the riches or comfort provided by the message. Learn to notice holiness even when it is not presented loudly or with pomp. Those dependent on specific settings, rituals, or clothing are not ready for greater familiarity with God.

It is possible for you to come to stand in the presence of God and speak with him face to face as plainly as you would another person. Until you are ready to do so, the Lord will continue to do all he can to teach you the next increment of how he is, providing you with continual incremental invitations to improve, forming an unbroken ramp towards how he is that you can travel as fast as you are willing to notice and implement them. This path is exemplified by Jacob, who met the Lord face to face. While Jacob’s famous wrestle with the Lord was an event that happened in one night, it was just the next step of a process that had been unfolding his whole life—a life of facing challenges that lay beyond his limits and incrementally overcoming them through learning more about and living like God.

Isaiah provided a prophetic description of the torment the Lord would face during his ministry when he wrote.

The shame inflicted on the Lord was not limited to physical spit in his literal face—which was the worst possible insult of his time—but, more significantly, included ignoring the inestimable gift of his demonstration of the character of the Father.

All who learn and live the character of Christ will face similar treatment as he did at the hands of those who are not like him. The scriptures provide examples of the Lord’s servants being rejected and persecuted just as he was. The more like Jesus a person becomes, the more people will treat them like they would treat him. If you fail to notice his servants, you will fail to notice him. If you reject his servants, you will reject him.

It is imperative to notice those who know Jesus better than you instead of ignoring them. It is essential to heed their teachings rather than rejecting them. It is important to support them instead of persecuting them. The Lord said that how we treat his servants is how we treat him.

If you turn your back on the Lord, the Lord will turn his back on you. This isn’t because he doesn’t love you, but precisely because he does. To bless those who rebel against God would be to encourage them and others to increasingly do so.

As we refuse to change based on the teachings and examples of others, he is left with only one remaining way to persuade us: pain. In order to best assist those who continue in rebellion against him, the Lord increasingly exposes them to a greater share of the consequences of their choices. This is symbolically described as both his “setting his face against you” and “hiding his face from you.” The Lord’s face is “set against you” when his perceived role changes from being the provider of blessings to being the provider of punishments. The Lord “hides his face from you” when he withdraws from you the merciful unearned blessings he provides to those who seek him.

The Lord turns his face back towards those who turn back towards him. Life features a myriad of ways to increase our appreciation for options for improvement. Those who continue to buck against life’s lessons are exposed to ever greater measures of the consequences of doing so, while those who turn back to God begin once again to enjoy the blessings of his countenance.

Many Christians have grown the size of their families based on interpreting God’s injunction to Adam and again to Noah to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.” Far fewer Christians have improved their families based on what that injunction actually meant. The mistaken oversimplification of this instruction to mean that parents are meant to have the largest possible families is a terrible mistake that can actually lead to the polar opposite of God’s intent, creating unnecessary misery and children who are least likely to reach their potential instead of maximizing joy through making all things as good as they can be.

God’s purpose in creating the earth was to provide an opportunity for people to learn and live more like him. God’s charge to Adam and Noah was not simply to reproduce, nor to reproduce abundantly, but rather to advance his purpose through all means at their disposal.

We have well established that God’s face does not just mean the forward part of his head. In like manner, the earth’s face doesn’t just mean its surface. To “multiply on the face of the earth” (Genesis 6:1) doesn’t just mean to produce posterity on the earth’s surface, as there is no alternative location to do so. Rather, it means to develop families according to and in advancement of the plan and purpose of God. Remember, one meaning of “face” is the direction of, flowing through time or in increasing intensity or other progression.

The Lord’s improving influence is what demarcated a difference between what was “in the beginning” and what came to be through the various stages of creation. It was his influence on the raw materials that preceded the earth that yielded what would become the earth, with each interaction consisting of inputs from God and responses from matter, then plants, animals, and humans. In our phase of God’s continued creation, we operate under the instructions to make things on earth more like they are in heaven. The task of mankind is to obtain the image of the Lord in themselves, and to act in the world so as to bring about his image in the earth. In short, we are charged to align the face of the earth with the face of the Lord.

There are bounds within which the purposes of the earth can be achieved. When a person operates outside of those bounds, God makes the necessary changes to prevent them from impeding his purposes. When a person’s rebellion from God is sufficiently extreme, God can end their life. The same occurs when a group, city, or country violates God’s constraints: he warns them through messengers and mercifully minimized consequences, and if they continue in their rebellion, he destroys them. In the days of Noah, mankind as a whole had become so corrupted that it was no longer possible for the earth to fulfill its purpose, and God destroyed everyone except Noah, his three sons, and their wives.

With a better understanding of the concept of “face,” you can understand the purpose and necessity of the flood better than you ever have before. Read the KJV version of Genesis 6, where the italicized words are all the same Hebrew word for “face:”

Now read this clearer rendering.

The destiny of the earth is for God to dwell upon it. When he returns, everything that cannot dwell in his glory will be destroyed from off the face of the earth. In Noah’s day, the Lord swept the earth clean with water. When he returns, he will do so with the fire of his glory. Until then, it is the duty of his servants to flood the earth with truth, offering persuasive arguments towards the next increment of improvement to all people, such that every person has everything needed to become as much like Jesus as they are willing to.

It is critical to recall and consider the many good things God has done for you and others. Those who recount the Lord’s good works will find themselves with greater trust in God and greater willingness to submit to him. Proclaiming the good God has done for you and others will help more people receive these same benefits.

Failing to give God credit for the good things he has done for you and others is a form of turning away from God. Those who refuse to credit God for what he has done will find themselves with less gratitude, less joy, less trust in God, less willingness to help others, and less willingness to obey God.

Seeking the face of God is the path of eternal life. Those who seek his presence will find themselves continually striving for and benefiting from the best possible situation in their circumstances. We read.

There is much more to this scripture than modern translations indicate. Here “before me” is one of the several words we have analyzed in this chapter relating to the presence of God. Coupled with the idiom of the right hand, the author is stating that he always acts as he believes the Lord would in his place. The accompanying promise is also richer than it might otherwise seem. The word “moved” here is translated from a Hebrew word that means to be carried away, cast out, turn out of course, fall into decay, or fall down. Here is a clearer rendition.

The way of God is the way of growth, and his way is narrow. To turn away from the Lord is to turn away from what is the very best. Any path that leads away from God leads to decay. Turn toward the Lord’s face and enjoy his favor.

What are the words of eternal life, and how are they obtained?

The gospel definition of word extends far beyond the limits of its English equivalent. The word is the set of all ideas that pertain to how Jesus is, what Jesus is, and why Jesus is. The word obviously includes spoken or written words describing Jesus in some way, but also includes much more. Because all of creation testifies of God in some way, everything that exists in creation is part of the word; everything we experience or learn about in life—every person, object, or situation—provides us with opportunities to learn more about Jesus. While the word includes all of physical reality, it also extends beyond it. Because God’s ideas exceed our own in breadth, depth, accuracy, sincerity, and power, the word extends beyond the bounds of human language. Through our thoughts and feelings, we can access ideas that exist beyond the limits of our language and understanding.

The words of eternal life are any idea that leads to learning more about and living more like Jesus. Like all other ideas, the words of eternal life can be expressed at different levels of breadth, depth, accuracy, sincerity, and power. They are obtained incrementally as one learns more about Jesus while living up to what they already know.

There are two components to the words of eternal life, and both of them are conditioned on the individual. The first portion of the words of eternal life is a person’s sincere idea of what is best. If a person believes in Jesus, what is best ought to be how they imagine Jesus would be: what he would think, feel, and do in their situation. If they do not believe in Jesus, they will still have an idea of what is best, and this idea is, to them, the words of eternal life. Note that the person may be living their lives in full alignment with this ideal, partial alignment, or no alignment. The second portion of the words of eternal life is the next increment of improvement over the individual’s present understanding of what is best. By definition, they will not yet know about this portion of the words of eternal life until someone or something makes this increment known to them, at which point it becomes part of the first. It is important to note that this increment becomes a part of the first portion of the words of eternal life to an individual based on whether they have sufficient reasons to believe it, not on whether or not they actually do.

As should be readily apparent, the words of eternal life are individual because they are specific to what information the individual presently understands, has access to, and the capacity to evaluate and receive. Any idea that helps an individual learn more about and become more like Jesus than they presently are is part of the words of eternal life for them.

The words of eternal life are not synonymous with the truth. The truth is objective and exists whether you are aware of it or not and whether you possess the capacity to identify it as true or not. Therefore, while the words of eternal life intersect with the truth, only the portion of the truth of which a person is aware and capable of recognizing and living could be considered the words of eternal life. The words of eternal life are the portion of truth a person already knows and lives, combined with the next increment of truth that they are capable of receiving. They consist of the best feelings, thoughts, and actions a person knows of and the path to what lies just beyond that.

The words of eternal life are the path of life, or the process of obtaining a more abundant life. The process of eternal life consists of an unbroken chain of continuous growth and improvement. The defining quality of the words of eternal life is not what they are (because they can consist of anything), or where they come from (because though they come from God, they can come through anything or anyone), but what they result in, which is improvement. All good things come from and are found in Jesus Christ, and it is important to understand that the words of eternal life include the set of ideas that improve, spanning all domains. Applying this definition makes it exceptionally easy to recognize, obtain, implement, and even generate the words of eternal life. Each person can imagine the ideal state of themselves, others, and the world, and each has the capacity to devise actions they can take to bring all things closer to their potential. It also makes evident how far from God most professed Christians are, as they artificially separate improvement from their practice of religion.

Any idea that leads to improvement over the present state of a person is part of the words of eternal life to them. The words of eternal life cause improvement from how a person, situation, or thing is toward how it could be. The words of eternal life include everything that makes anything better than it is—even if it isn’t purported to be from God, and even if it does not pertain to “religious” contexts. To turn away from opportunities for improvement is to turn away from God, as improvement comes from and leads to him.

We are surrounded at all times and in all places with opportunities to make things better than they are. In fact, opportunities for improvement are so numerous that the only way to ensure that you are paying attention to and prioritizing them is to explicitly capture, rank, and work on them. Without intentionally addressing opportunities for improvement, you can guarantee that you are living your life with less joy, less meaning, and greater exposure to unnecessary suffering than God intended.

The Lord has promised to give the faithful the continual guidance needed to guide them directly in the path to him. The words he provides are “living,” or continuously flowing. They do not end. One of the strongest indications of our current relationship with God is the incidence of improving ideas, whether new or recalled from before.

Those who find themselves with insufficient instruction from God ought to immediately and honestly examine their heed and diligence to him, as he has indicated that this will not be the case with those who live up to what he has already provided. The more you follow the instructions God has given us, the more instructions he will give you. The rate at which you improve is the rate at which you draw nearer to the Father. All able-minded adults have a sense of discernment that enables them to perceive the actions available to them and the relative value of each. The more you live up to the best you know and the more you seek to learn, the more God will teach you.

Until you live up to the best that you know, you should not expect greater opportunities. It is only to those who are making the best use of what they have that God gives more. Living up to what God has taught you thus far is essential to being prepared to notice, receive, and follow additional instructions he will send. The word of God you live up to will illuminate the next steps in obtaining more of the word of God. You will see what lies beyond your present position only as you become the best person you can be. If you reach for what lies beyond the improvements of which you already know, you will fall behind where you presently are.

Incessantly ask God what he would do in your place, and unfailingly do it. Search out and live what is best. Make everything as good as it can be, starting with yourself and your family, and flowing out through your entire sphere of influence.

It is only to those who are living up to their understanding of how Jesus would live in their place that the Lord reveals more about himself. The Lord will make available more of his word to those who live up to what they know, even if it requires sending some person into their lives who can provide it. Often, these opportunities are missed by those who assume that what they are looking for will come in some other way.

When you perceive and live the words of eternal life, you become better than you were before. This is the definition of holy: different and better. By obtaining and assimilating God’s word, you are made holy, or sanctified.

Receiving the words of eternal life means learning what he is actually like and living like him, not just memorizing scripture or living certain rules. As we live according to our sincere idea of how God would in our place, he will regularly teach us more about himself.

As you receive more of the words of eternal life, you will become more like God in the same way the Son became more like the Father: Incrementally, as you learn more about what Jesus is like and continue to live as your increasing understanding indicates he would in your place.

Jesus was more like the Father than anyone else before this world was created, and he came to the earth to demonstrate how the Father would be in his place. He showed the world what the Father is like. You are called to become more like Jesus than you were before so that anyone who gets to know you will get to know Jesus more than they did before. Jesus was everything the Father would be if the Father were in his place, and this is exactly what you are called to be—to follow the example of Jesus Christ in your own situation, thinking, feeling, and doing what he would in your place.

Jesus was the embodiment of God’s word. You must be, too. While the injunction to be like Jesus is dismissed by many as impossible or too difficult, Jesus showed it was possible through his own example in life, and argued that it was easier than any alternative when the true costs are considered.

The words of eternal life are worth obtaining because of what they yield hereafter, but they also carry worthwhile benefits in this life. Life is full of challenges that can overcome you. Life’s challenges can steal from you the joy you presently have and even rob from you the joy you experienced in the past. The words of eternal life increase the joy you experience and keep in spite of the challenges of life. Those who search for the character of Christ and apply all they learn as they learn it will increasingly obtain greater power to obtain and keep peace and well-being.

The words of eternal life include the wisdom, beliefs, and skills to overcome what presently overcomes you. As you contemplate how the words of eternal life are sequential and hierarchical steps from how a person is and how they see everything else to how God is and how he sees everything, you can begin to see how the stream of the words of eternal life form a layered foundation, each with the ability to solve increasingly difficult problems. One component of the words of eternal life highlights the fact that the foundation is already built. As you live the best you know and do all you know to keep learning, you will be protected from what would otherwise overcome you. The other component of the words of eternal life highlights the process of continuous growth, where you are trained to be able to overcome what overcomes you.

Jesus is the living conduit through which we perceive, receive, and value the word. Jesus is the embodiment of the word of God, or the word made flesh, or the character of the Father as a man. Eternal life can be thought of as the process of perceiving, receiving, and valuing the word.

Popular translations of John’s gospel open with a reference to Jesus Christ as “the word,” but without a description of the meaning of the phrase. Here is a more explanatory rendition.

The words of eternal life existed before the world was created. We do not create them, but rather discover them. We receive them from the Son, who already has them, having received them from the Father.

The Lord operates through the spirit of God and messengers under its influence to incrementally mete out more knowledge about himself. Jesus brought down the words of eternal life by making himself known to Adam, others after Adam, to those he ministered to in the flesh, and by making himself known to others after his resurrection. Those who know him more provide the words of eternal life to those who know him less. However, the sources of the words of eternal life are much broader than most would anticipate.

The words of eternal life are information suggesting how things could be better than they are. Anyone who can form a plausible path to something better than what is has the words of eternal life. The words of eternal life come from God, and God can “speak” to anyone —whether through visitation, voice, life experience, or quickening their thoughts. God can speak to those who don’t even believe in him, including in ways that they will not recognize. He can even speak to those actively attacking him, such as he did to Caiaphas as he was in the midst of proposing that Jesus should die.

Those who have the words of eternal life exist in a hierarchical tree, each with a differing capacity to help a specific person improve from where they are. In one sense, the work of the End Times is to repeatedly connect each person to the one who has the words of eternal life to them until they learn and live all the words they are willing to receive.

The one who can form an effective path to the greatest improvement is the one who has the greatest words of eternal life. Jesus has the ultimate words of eternal life, because all improvement comes from and leads to him.

The words of eternal life are information about how Jesus would think, feel, and act in your place. Anyone who is more like Jesus than you do has the words of eternal life. It should be immediately obvious that one can only lead people to be like God to the extent that they know the way, and that they only know the way as far as they have travelled it themselves. Someone who can correctly explain what Jesus would think, feel, or do in your place further or more persuasively than you can provides you with invaluable information to enable you to draw nearer to him by becoming more like him.

The process of climbing the tree of the kingdom of God entails finding and learning from those who know Jesus better than you, learning all you can from them, and proceeding to repeat the cycle. In one sense, the work of the End Times is to repeatedly connect each person with someone more like Jesus than they are, from whom they can learn more about him, until they have met the person most like Christ they are willing to learn from and follow the example of. Jesus has the ultimate words of eternal life, as he knows each change needed to render a person into how he is, no matter how they presently are. While each individual’s understanding of the Lord is different, as individuals live what they understand about Jesus, their understanding of him will merge towards his actual identity.

Present day churches fail to produce the qualities they claim Jesus has in their adherents. The true gospel contains the power to produce people who reconcile to how they believe Jesus to be. By the Lord’s standard, any church that fails to produce people more like him cannot be his. Where do today's churches go wrong?

Believing that the words of eternal life can be found in an institution is a grave mistake. The words of eternal life are never in a church, except through individuals who actually.

1. Live as they believe Jesus would in their place.
2. Seek to learn more about Jesus.
3. Accept and live better ideas whenever and wherever they find them.

Becoming more like God requires the removal of anything less than he is. Those who fail to become more like God do so because they are unwilling to improve their idea of who he is and what he wants. In order to grow towards God, it is necessary to cut away anything that can’t co-exist with a greater understanding of how he is.

We are naturally inclined to refuse voices from God whose words do not meet our preconceived notions or fulfill our carnal desires. We interpret invitations for improvement as arrogant criticism, dismissing as hateful what is actually the greatest channel of love that can be expressed. The greater the invitation to improvement, the greater the love that is demonstrated, the harder it is to find, and the more likely it will be responded to with extreme harm to the giver. People much prefer those who tell them what they want to hear, namely that they are wonderful as they are, and that they will receive wonderful things without the need to change.

In place of God’s voice, we are naturally inclined to attribute to God voices that are not his: churchy actions (outward, designated actions that are often disconnected from the heart, as betrayed by their absence from daily life), churchy thoughts (rehearsing the same canned ideas given to you in your sect's traditions rather than actively searching for and reasoning about God for yourself), and churchy desires (seeking salvation as an escape from the vicissitudes of life instead of consecrating the challenges of life for the benefit of others).

You cannot receive the words of eternal life simply by reading them or hearing them spoken. Those who think they are improving their situation simply by reading or hearing God’s word are practicing a particularly harmful form of dishonesty.

Receiving the words of eternal life is about what you become, not what you hear. There is an immense difference between knowing what someone is like and only knowing what they look like. Those who live the words of eternal life know how Jesus is because they are like him, not because they have heard how he is from someone else. Receiving the words of eternal life begins by perceiving them, but the benefits do not begin until and unless you actually make the improvements they suggest. Familiarity with God’s word does not make you righteous; Living it does. Those who “hear” the word of God with their ears without improving their actions are not his children, but hypocritical liars.

What would it be like to have the spirit flow into and through you at all times and in everything you do? God has given a tremendous promise to all who will declare what they declare in his name in solemnity of heart and in meekness.

To declare does not just mean to speak. The Hebrew definitions of words translated as testify and declare also mean to demonstrate, and the Lord explicitly defined what you say as your desires, thoughts, and actions.

What you say and do should align fully with what you feel and believe. When what you feel, think, and do are fully aligned with each other, you maximize the conduit through which the light of God can flow in and through you. To the extent your feelings, thoughts, or actions are out of alignment with one another, you can be assured that you are experiencing less than the full measure of joy, peace, and growth that God wants for you.

During his mortal life, the Lord walked in the full power of the spirit because everything he said, did, and felt was the full measure of his sincere belief of what the Father would do in his place, based on everything he had learned about him.

To speak the words of eternal life is to seek, know, and do what the Lord would in your place. He calls us to learn and live his purpose, just as he learned and lived the Father’s purpose.

What is the name of Christ?

We use names to refer to people and things. God uses names differently. To God, a name is not just a title describing who someone is, but a description of how they are or could be. While parents name their children based on trends, tradition, or hopes of how a child will turn out, God perfectly knows each person’s actual and potential qualities. Names given by God can refer to past, present, or future circumstances—whether promised or potential.

The way God names people is much closer to the way the world bestows titles than how people name their children. In the world, titles are bestowed by authoritative individuals or groups as a recognition of prior achievement or as a call to future performance. While God uses names and titles to recognize a person’s past achievements, he also uses them to invite them to develop otherwise unseen potential qualities, forewarn them of danger, and to promise outcomes that would otherwise seem impossible. God’s names can combine any or all of these purposes. For example, God renaming Abram as Abraham was an example of recognition of his past accomplishments and present properties as well as an invitation to further develop his potential with a promise of an otherwise unlikely outcome.

Appellations given by God are a call to action. Every name or title is either an invitation to do something or a record of it having been done. They can remind the recipient or those who know them of past actions taken or charge them to achieve certain accomplishments in the future.

Some seek names and titles from God to inflate their ego or improve how others treat them. Authentic names and titles from God always come with an increased sense of one’s nothingness, and are more likely to result in others hating you rather than loving you. God’s names and titles aren’t a pathway to greater honor than you deserve. While worldly appellations are often given for reasons other than merit, those given by God are only ever given in truth and justice. God will never describe you as something you aren’t, suggest you could be something you can’t become, or promise you something you can’t obtain.

God’s names and titles aren’t a way to extract more from others. Those in the world seek names and titles to increase the honor and privileges they receive from other people, but those in the kingdom of God receive names and titles in relation to increases in how much they provide to others. Christians tend to pursue their faith as a way to increase what they receive from God, even though Jesus said that the way to do this was to increase what you give to others.

Because they are rooted in present or potential reality, God-given appellations distinguish one person from another. They enumerate the differences between people who might otherwise be indistinguishable. In the world today, pointing out the differences between individuals is seen as exceedingly rude, if not a gross moral violation. However, intentional improvement is impossible without first identifying the.

difference between how things are and how you would like them to be, and identifying the differences between two individuals is necessary in order for one to intentionally change to be more like the other. Names and titles describing past achievements call others to consider possibilities beyond their present achievements and to rise up to obtain the same.

The glory of God can never be received outside of actually becoming more like him, so every honor given by God reveals some additional aspect about him, both to the recipient and those who interact with him or her. Those who have lived up to the designations given by God provide an example of the character qualities and decisions needed for anyone else to do the same. Anyone fulfilling the role described by any name or title becomes worthy of it because God is impartial in how he treats us. You seek and receive the God-given appellations possessed by others by seeking and living their character qualities and living your life the way they have.

The Lord has well over one hundred known names and titles. These appellations, like all others given by the Father, both describe how he is different from us and how we can become more like him. You take upon yourself a name or title by adopting the character qualities that correspond to it, changing the choices you would otherwise make to match those someone with those qualities would make. You take upon yourself the names of Christ by adopting his character qualities and living as he would in your place.

Many of today’s professed Christians would consider the ability for any other person to obtain the same titles as Christ to be blasphemous in the same way and for the same reasons that the Jews crucified Christ. Here, two key distinctions might reduce the controversy.

First, there is a big difference between reducing God down to man by diminishing his character and raising man up to God by rising up to his character. It is not blasphemous to suggest that God gives men the capability, opportunities, and reasons to become more like him. Showing how man can be more like God is, in fact, the epitome of glorifying him. Like any good father, God’s greatest glory, principal purpose, and utmost joy is the advancement of his children beyond where they would be without his continual, consummate sacrifice on their behalf. Every individual improvement that brings any person closer to being like God increases the evidence of his goodness and power.

Second, even when names and titles are the same, they can feature gradations. Appellations can have multiple levels of fulfillment, just as some military awards do. In the gospel, two people who have received the same name will overlap in at least some qualities, and yet can have notable differences as well. For example, consider the differences between the various men called Elijah/Elias. John the Baptist was an Elijah/Elias even if he wasn’t the Elijah/Elias who had come before him or would come after him.

The scriptures are replete with examples of titles popularly thought of as unique to the Lord being given by God to others. His shared titles include even the most seemingly exclusive. Consider just a few.

God. As offensive as it is for mainstream Christians to acknowledge, Christianity is unavoidably polytheistic even beyond the three individuals that form the godhead (or, more accurately, head of the gods). This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has bothered looking up the word God in Hebrew. Though the definition of what it means to be a god lies beyond the scope of this book, a sufficient argument that this is a title that God applies to some men exists in the story of Moses, whom God appointed to be a god over Israel, Aaron, and Pharaoh.

Messiah. The title messiah literally means “one who has been anointed by God.” Many prophets, priests, and kings have been anointed by God, both literally and figuratively. For example, God commanded that all priests in Israel were to be anointed with consecrated oil as part of their setting apart. God commanded his prophets to anoint at least some of Israel’s kings, including Saul, David, Solomon, and Joash. Elijah anointed Elisha figuratively by covering him in his robe after the Lord commanded Elijah to appoint Elisha to take his place. All of these actions were symbolic gestures pointing to the overflowing outpouring of God’s spirit upon the recipient. Not all people are kings and priests, but all people are called of God to receive the anointing of his spirit through learning about and living up to the example of Jesus Christ. As Moses said, “would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!” (Numbers 11:29) Why hasn’t he? Because those called prefer the honors of men and treasures of the world above the honor of God and the treasures of eternity (see D&C 121:34-36).

The Son of God. There is more than one son of God mentioned in the scriptures. God specifically referred to Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and others as his sons. The apostle John explained that God empowers everyone who receives God by believing on his name to become the sons of God. The apostle Paul explained the process as becoming different from the world by rejecting what deviates from God.

The Lamb of God. God’s many lambs include anyone who continuously obeys God’s voice. They “follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth....” (Revelation 14:4)
Savior. A savior is someone who saves someone from something from which they could not save themselves. Examples of temporal saviors abound in the scriptures. They include Noah, who saved the entire human race, Joseph, who saved the known world from starvation, Moses, who saved Egypt from slavery, and Samson, who saved Israel from the Philistines. Human saviors are not limited to temporal circumstances. For example, Abraham obtained a covenant for the whole world, Moses obtained a covenant for Israel, and anyone who “converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins.” (James 5:20) Prophecy indicates that the Lord will continue to use people as saviors in his work.
King. Jesus is the King of Kings, and therefore there are other kings in God’s kingdom besides him, over whom he rules and reigns.
Lord. Jesus is the Lord of Lords, and therefore there are other lords in God’s kingdom besides him.
The Alpha and Omega. Besides Jesus Christ, at least one man—Adam—will fulfill the title of Alpha and Omega in this creation. He is the first man and the last man. He governed in the beginning, and he will govern in the end, receiving his kingdom from and returning it to the Alpha and Omega above him—Jesus Christ, who alone came down before Adam and will come down after Adam.

The Word. All who become like the Lord also become the Word (this topic is more fully expounded in the Chapter: What are the words of eternal life, and how are they obtained? ).

The Son of Man. The Lord called himself “Son of Man” to demonstrate the Father in fulfillment of the mission Adam failed to achieve. The title is no less applicable to anyone who strives to fulfill their potential as a human being created in the image of God, as we all are. For example, the Lord called Ezekiel “son of man” many times in the Old Testament.

Light of the World. The Lord said to his disciples: “Ye are the light of the world....” (Matthew 5:14) The Lord is the light in men and was the light of this world while he was living here. He calls all of us to be the light in the world until he returns.

If none of the aforementioned titles refer only to Jesus, by what name can he uniquely be described?

It would seem that the easiest way to find out the name of the Lord would be to ask him. It turns out that it is not, in fact, that easy.

We have records of several people asking God what his name is. When the father of Samson asked him, he replied: “Why askest thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret?” (Judges 13:18) A better translation would be: “Why do you ask my name? You are incapable of comprehending it.” Moses, who was much more clever in persuading the Lord to divulge his name, was told.

There has been some argument over the meaning of the Hebrew words translated as “I Am That I Am,” but consider this rendition: “I am what I have done, what I do, and what I will do; I am why I have done it, why I do it, and why I will do it; I am how I did it, how I do it, and how I will do it.” These attributes form the character of an individual, and this is precisely what the Lord’s name is: It is what he does, how he does it, and why he does it. This should come as no surprise.

Though perhaps lost to most in modern times, the ancients understood that there exists a link between a person’s character and their name. In fact, the Greek noun translated as “name” in the New Testament (Strong’s 3686, onoma ) means the manifestation or revelation of someone’s character. In this sense, a name is an attempt to circumscribe the essence of a person’s attributes within a single term or short phrase.

The breadth and depth of the Lord’s character explains his apparent reluctance to tell others his name when asked: it isn’t that he won’t, but that he can’t.

God is extremely limited in his ability to convey to us more about how he is. On several occasions, the Lord introduced himself to others. Most notably, he came down from heaven and lived a mortal life among the Jews. He also vocally introduced himself to some, as well as face-to-face to others. He has introduced himself face-to-face to some individuals throughout history. In every case, he was immensely limited in what he could convey about himself to those he spoke to. For example, to the twelve best men he could find during his mortal life, with whom he had spent three years, he lamented: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.” (John 16:12)

Words are powerful tools. To those who know them, they provide ready handles to easily describe more ideas with greater clarity and less length than otherwise needed. To those who do not yet know them, words provide an invitation to improve their ability to think and communicate, while their definitions provide the means of coming to comprehend and, hopefully, use them. An interesting property of a dictionary is that all words are defined by other words. If there were a purely novel word, the dictionary would have no ability to define it. How would one define such a word? This is the challenge of defining the name of the Lord.

No textual description can sufficiently describe God. While the character of the Lord can be referred to with a name or title, it cannot be adequately described in words. How would you describe everything that God does, how he does it, and why he does it in words? The apostle John said it couldn’t even be done if all the books in the world were dedicated to that purpose.

Every word we have at our disposal means something less than Jesus. To adopt any understandable adjective in attempting to describe him would be to describe him as less than he is, and yet stringing together these inadequate adjectives is the best we can do. To one who knows him very little, these words provide an invaluable basis from which a more accurate understanding can grow, but there is an absolute limit in the ability of words to fully describe God. God must be experienced to be known.

It is not possible to come to know God through simply reading about or hearing about him. The more part of God’s character can only be discovered incrementally, through many interactions with him over time. However, his name gives us a convenient way to refer to him, providing a placeholder that can be extended and corrected as we progress in our understanding of how he is. More importantly, whatever details may be lacking or flawed, descriptions of the Lord serve the invaluable purpose of providing something we can emulate, opening the door to further revelation.

While there are many who get quite hung up on which single word they should use to address the Savior, it turns out that, whatever the merits of any of the several options, they are all so vastly inadequate that our effort would be much better spent learning how he is and living that way rather than arguing over what to call him. The label you use to address the Lord matters much less to him than the description you attach to that label and how fully you follow it in your own life. What you call him matters less than whether you call on him, and the most important part of that tends to be your decision to change as a result of it. Rather than being partial to one title for the Lord over another, we ought to recognize that all names are equally insufficient for him. The only sufficient description of God is God himself.

The process of defining the name of God is one and the same as the process of becoming like him. You learn God’s name through assuming all his qualities as you understand them so far, which will result in him revealing more of himself to you as you become more like he is.

Comprehension of the Lord’s name is incremental and subjective. The extent to which you learn God’s name depends on how well you know what he has done, is doing, and will do, and why. Your understanding of each point of God’s character will increase commensurate with your effort in learning more and your diligence in living up to what you know. Because people exert different levels of heed and diligence in their acquisition of knowledge about God, they come to know him differently.

The most generally accessible repository for knowledge about God is the scriptures, where the testimonies of many people who knew him to a greater or lesser extent can be found. While written words are invaluable and necessary resources in coming to know God, it is essential to remember that they are only valuable because they were written by those who know God better than you.

Our words are as incapable of demonstrating the glory of God as man-made temples are of housing it. Human beings, made in his image, provide the best way of doing both. The Lord explained that he has built the only temple that can adequately demonstrate his glory by creating us in his image—or capable of learning and acquiring his character. No word can be made in God’s image, but a person made in his image can become the word. Only in mortality can a person demonstrate or learn substantially more about God’s character. Jesus came to earth to obtain and demonstrate the character of the Father.

He has sent and will send others to do the same within their scope. The Lord told Moses.

As you study the character of God as revealed in the scriptures and reconcile yourself to it, you will be increasingly prepared in the event that you meet a living individual who knows him better than you do. Whether in print or in the flesh, sources of information about the character of God increase the quality of a person’s direct relationship with Christ.

To take upon yourself the name of Christ is to reconcile yourself to your understanding of how he is. Taking upon you the name of Christ means learning more about what he is like and living what you learn. It is to think, feel, and act in complete and constant accordance with your understanding of God’s character. You take the Lord’s name upon yourself by reconciling your desires, beliefs, and actions to your sincere current understanding of his, and then doing all you can to learn more about him while instantaneously applying it.

The Lord commands us to be just as he and his Father are. Just as Jesus “subjected the flesh to the will of the Father” (Mosiah 15:2) by assimilating the qualities his “name” described, we are called to subject our flesh to the will of the Father by taking upon us his name.

The scriptures are not ambiguous in defining “taking upon you the name of Christ” as the complete cessation of everything contrary to your understanding of God, the complete emulation of everything aligning with your understanding of God, and the totality and constancy of both.

There is a totality of expression in taking the name of Christ upon you that is so distant from common Christianity that it turns the idea of following the example of the Lord at all times, in all places, and in all things from being the most basic doctrine to something only an assumed extremist would consider. In reality, the idea of thinking, feeling, and doing as Jesus would in your place is so basic that it is the message of what many consider to be the very first ordinance received in the gospel: At baptism, you promise to follow Jesus’ example “at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death...that ye may have eternal life.” (Mosiah 18:9)

In tribes around the world, initiation rituals exist in which boys are instructed to take upon themselves the identity of the tribe’s mythical hero. The idea of a boy patterning his life on an exemplary figure of story—or prophecy—wasn’t as rare historically as it is today. At the time of Christ, all young Jewish boys would have been raised to live so that they could qualify to be the prophesied Messiah. Though most believe that Jesus was raised from birth by his knowing mother as the literal Messiah, there are significant lessons provided by the idea that he differed from his childhood peers only in the fact that he did not deviate from the pattern given.

Most assume that Jesus knew his identity and details of his mission as a child. They point to his comment when his parents found him teaching the elders in the temple: “How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49) Whether Jesus meant this as an assertion that he was the Son of God is not clear, as Jews in his time would have all referred to God as their Father.

What is clear is that Jesus followed the pattern all Jewish boys should have of living up to the calling their tribe bore to produce a boy worthy of being the Messiah. As a boy, Jesus had access to the scriptures that described how all people should be, just as everyone else in his nation could do. Young Jesus, hearing the scriptures that described the promised Messiah, did not think “this is who I am as the Son of God,” but rather, “this is how the Father wants us all to be.” His realization that he was different than others came as he noticed that the way he was living was different and better than what others had done, were doing, or would do.

The Lord’s example is exceedingly valuable to all of us. In learning what the scriptures said about human potential and living his life as prescribed, he followed the path to eternal life available to all from the beginning. Jesus did not create the name of the Father. Rather, he discovered and lived according to more of it than anything else in creation had, helping others to improve the extent and accuracy of their understanding of the character of the Father.

Jesus took upon himself the name of Christ just as all of us can and must. Jesus learned who he was by following the same commandments the Father gives to everyone. He looked and realized he was the only one who was doing what he was doing, in spite of the fact that everyone else had the same access he did. He learned who he was by reading the scriptures. Though he himself had given them, he had no way of remembering that. He relied on what others had written from and about him. Without them, he never could have assumed his mission.

You are called by the name of Christ any time you are invited to live a greater share of his character in your life. The Lord “calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.” (John 10:3) The call of Jesus consists of an invitation to become more like him.

You do not need to believe in Jesus to be called by him, or to recognize or heed his call. The call of Jesus consists of the next manageable increment between your choices and his character, whether you know or believe anything about him or not. Most people who claim to believe in Jesus do not heed his call.

Answering the call of the name of Christ requires much more than simply claiming to believe in him. Answering God’s call requires you to become a disciple. A disciple doesn’t just profess to believe in Jesus, but actually follows him in feeling, thought, and action. They know the name by which they are called, recognizing the Lord’s voice and following it wherever it leads, no matter the earthly consequences. They have a model of how the Lord is, can confidently predict how he would think, feel, and act in their place, and proactively and intentionally consult that model before making any decision.

A popular reason why God’s voice is ignored or only partially followed is because what he says is not attractive to those who do not yet love him—including many of those who say they do. A central purpose of our lives is not just to discover God’s ways, but to increase our desires for them. There is no promise that the call of the name of Christ will be attractive to you. In fact, the promise is quite the opposite. The natural man finds the ways of God repugnant, and a person will only be attracted to God’s ways inasmuch as they have become like him. Answering the call of the name of Christ requires you to change what you value and by how much you value it. You will desire and think about what you value the most. By nature, people most value the maximization of their earthly comforts rather than prioritizing the purpose of God. As you choose to prioritize the purpose of God, you will increase in your understanding of why doing so is superior to all other alternatives.

God’s calling is not limited to a few select people from the scriptures. His calling is to all people. You do not need to be spoken to by Jesus or his servants to be called by him. Every situation in life presents all people with the opportunity to choose to live up to the best they know or not. Whether or not they respond is a different matter. While the call of Christ is universal, the response is extremely limited. Among those few who acknowledge his voice, most answer it only temporarily or partially. God blesses those who respond valiantly to his call, whether they say they believe in him or not, and he punishes those who ignore or lethargically reply to his call, whether they say they believe in him or not.

The most common reason that Christians fail to answer the call of Christ is that they fail to notice it. The more you believe that your religion spares you from the need for improvement, the less likely it will be that you notice and act appropriately in the situations that provide an opportunity to do so. Many who proclaim to be staunch atheists do more to improve themselves and others than many professed Christians. Those who artificially filter their actions in life by whether it falls under religion or not are doomed to an extremely limited relationship with God and far less joy here and hereafter than they would otherwise have. While the Lord’s invitations can come in the form of an established church teaching, or something you notice while reading your scriptures, or an idea you receive during prayer, most of them come in the form of a situation providing an opportunity for improvement.

Rather than see improvement as something different than or only a part of the calling of Christ, it is more correct to invert this— invitations to improve are precisely what show us how Jesus is. Jesus calls you in his name by providing you with an opportunity to change how you think, feel, or act after a better option is made known to you.

The voice of the Lord is the voice of improvement. Because all good things come from and lead to God, all invitations to improve are a call in the name of Christ. All of God’s creation is designed to invite us to become better than we are. All people are called by the name of Christ: in every problem they face, every question they have, every example of improvement they see, and every choice better than those they have hitherto made. The desires you have, the challenges you face as you fulfill them, every interaction you have with everyone else, and all things besides are all designed to lead you to recognize and make use of opportunities for improvement.

The primary purpose of the church of Christ is to help others become more like him. The church of Christ reveals more of what he is like and invites others to change to be more like him. The church has the responsibility to invite others to take upon themselves the name of the Lord by demonstrating more of how God is and providing persuasive reasons to follow his example. The church of Christ consists of those who have taken his name upon themselves by living up to what they believe him to be. They testify of how God is from their own personal experiences with him.

Modern churches have misappropriated, diluted, and adulterated the name of Christ through pretending their activities serve God’s intended purpose while watering down the truth and teaching false doctrine. Churches not of God do not demonstrate more of his name or persuade others to become more like him. Instead, they make people worse than they were before by teaching false ideas about the character of Christ, insisting it is not necessary to be like him, or even arguing that it is impossible to follow his example. Most attendees of supposedly Christian churches are hell bound, having never taken upon them the name of Christ.

There are only two churches. The church of Christ is led by Jesus and contains the few people who are “baptized in his name,” or who actually follow him by living their lives at all times and in all situations as they sincerely believe he would in their place. Everyone who isn’t in the church of Christ is in the church of the devil, whom they continue to serve by failing to live up to the example of Jesus.

The Lord defined his church as those who repent and follow his example. You cannot be in the Lord’s church without forsaking sin. Those joining his church are required to obey God fully, demonstrated through their obedience to his commandments. The Lord said that those who refuse to forsake sin are not to be allowed to join his church, and that those who willfully sin after being admitted should either immediately repent or have their membership revoked.

All people can join the Lord’s church through learning something about what he is like and making whatever changes necessary to follow that example.

The challenge of learning the otherwise unknown name of God is a central purpose of life. You learn more about God’s character line upon line as you live what you already know about him. Solving the mystery of God’s character by learning more about him, living what you have learned, and discovering why his character is better than any alternative is symbolically described as having his name written upon you. The Son has the name of the Father written on his forehead, and has declared that he will write that name on the foreheads of all who pass the trials of life through learning and living as Christ would in their place at all times and in all places.

The Lord progressively engraves his name upon you as you continuously choose to learn more about and live by his example in each choice you face. As you reconcile to how you understand him to be, the Lord leads you to and through situations that expose the differences between you and him beyond the prior limits of your understanding. Knowing Jesus is an iterative process in which you continually receive new invitations to be more like him through recognizing and responding to those you already received. As you seek his purpose completely in all things, you incrementally become more like him. As you become more like him, you receive the incremental increase in the blessings that derive from how he is.

It is through being iteratively engraved into the image of God that you become sealed to him, or sealed up to eternal life. Jesus became sealed by and to the Father through learning and living the character of the Father, and it is through learning and living the character of the Son that we become sealed by and to him. The high priest under the law of Moses was commanded to wear a golden plate “like a signet” (otherwise known as a seal) on his forehead to symbolically invite all to receive and live the name of the Lord in order to become holy and be bound to God by becoming like him.

Contrary to what some churches have taught, being sealed to God is a process, not an event, because it consists of learning and living like him, which happens over time, through increasing information, and against increasing opposition. The only way to make your relationship with God permanent is to overcome all things that could cause you to turn away from him. While you have yet to face the greatest possible challenges in mortality, you have no assurance that your relationship with God is eternal in nature. While you are not yet indistinguishable from God, there is still more to learn and grow, and blessings to obtain that you cannot have in any other way.

The idea of baptism in the name of Christ is comprised of two idioms: baptism and the name of Christ. What was an exceptionally clear one line description in ancient times is a jumble of confusion in ours due to the loss of a correct understanding of either of the contributing ideas.

Baptism means immersion. Ancient believers knew that baptism by water consisted in you being immersed completely in water. Baptism in the name of Christ is also immersion, but you are immersed in his character rather than water. You are baptized in the name of Christ when you obtain and fully submit to an understanding of how the Lord is. To be baptized in his name is to immerse yourself in the example of Jesus, consistently living as he would in your place, as far as you understand, at all times and in all places. In place of the baptizing priest is your idea of Christ, as far as you understand him (which comes from those who know him better than you).

Valid baptism by water always includes baptism in the name of Christ, because a baptizing priest will require you to take upon yourself his name by following his example, as far as they are able to teach you, before you are baptized in water.

All people must be baptized in the name of Christ if they will be saved. Very few professed Christians have immersed themselves in the name of Christ. Those who do not reconcile to their understanding of Jesus at some level cannot dwell in his kingdom. However, not everyone who is baptized in the name of Christ knows that they are baptized in his name.

The Lord provides the opportunity to be “baptized in his name” to all people, whether they explicitly believe in him or not. It is through subjection to what a person understands to be best that they are baptized by his name. While the fullest understanding of what is best requires explicit belief in Jesus, a person’s understanding of what is best might come from a different religion or secular understanding of morality.

Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. His example clearly defines the process, possibility, and result of salvation. The only way to be saved is to take upon yourself the name of Christ.

You are forgiven as you live up to the example of Christ as far as you understand it.

When you completely adopt all of Jesus’ teachings as far as you presently know them, you are washed in his name. As you incrementally learn more about him as you live up to all you know, you are sanctified in his name. Through this process, Jesus will justify you (forgive you of your past sins) before the Father.

There are many who claim to be Christian who think they are saved while freely admitting that they are nothing like Jesus. Unfortunately, they await a rude awakening. You can’t be saved without first becoming like Jesus. You can’t come to be like someone you never knew. You can’t come to know Jesus if you do not serve him. You can’t be saved while you continue to actively rebel against the example that Jesus provides us with.

The Lamb’s book of life contains exactly one name: the name of Jesus Christ. His character is exactly what one needs to be in order to obtain a fulness of eternal life.

Though each person who seeks to know and live like Jesus will understand him differently, all will be judged according to whether they fully live up to what they understand and blessed in accordance with how much they learned about him.

To have your name written in the book of life means to attain the character of Jesus Christ, or learn what Jesus is like and become like him while in this life, as far as you understand him to be. Your name is “written” in it when you learn about and live like Jesus, and “blotted out” when you cease to live up to his example as you understand it.

In the resurrection, you will be judged by your similarity to Christ, as far as you understood him to be. You must be fully obedient to everything you know in order to be saved.

Those who have failed to become like they understand Jesus to be will be cast into a lake of eternal fire. Those who have lived as he would in their place, as far as they understand, will be blessed up to the accuracy of their idea of how he actually is.

Acting in the name of the Lord

The scriptures are full of the injunction to “call on the Lord’s name.” All too often, this phrase is interpreted as a synonym for prayer. To call on the name of the Lord means more than to pray to him, especially given that most prayers are focused on asking for what we want instead of finding out and advancing what God wants.

To call on the name of the Lord is to actively seek additional understanding and application of the Lord’s character in your life. To call on the name of the Lord is to fully live and apply the name of the Lord in every aspect of your life while fully expecting him to reveal more of himself to you. It is to seek to see yourself, others, and the world more like God does in order to enumerate changes you can make to more fully think, feel, and act as he would in your place. Calling on the name of the Lord is the means of obtaining outcomes through faith by actively recognizing situations in yourself, your family, and the world that are out of alignment with his character and doing all you can to reconcile them to his will. Calling on the name of the Lord means more than simply praying and asking for what you want. To call on the Lord is a matter of studying the scriptures, considering your experiences with God, and even asking those whose relationships with him exceed your own in order to.

1. Find out the will of God.
2. Make a plausible path to advancing God’s will, and.
3. Patiently, joyfully, and fervently work in a systematic and consistent way to advance God’s will.

We are instructed to continuously call upon the Lord for blessing in all that we do. We should do nothing without first calling on the name of the Lord by comparing our options for action against our model of what Jesus would do in our place. We are instructed to call “on the name of the Lord daily,” proactively considering God’s goodness, our own nothingness, and pursuing his purpose in all we do. Subjecting our choices to God’s will is not arbitrary compliance; long-term wellbeing is a function of alignment with the will of God. Calling on God’s name will result in universally better outcomes compared to any alternative.

When you call on the name of the Lord, God will answer you, and through obtaining and living up to the information he provides in interactions of increasing frequency and intensity, you will come to more fully know the abundance of his peace and the value of his truth.

Prayer “in the name of Jesus” does not mean ending a prayer by saying “in Jesus’ name.” Instead, it means that you know something about the Lord’s will and your prayer is focused on advancing it. Asking in Jesus’ name requires proactively seeking to discover and achieve his will on earth. Asking in his name means learning everything you can about what Jesus wants, then doing everything you can to bring his will to pass in all things. To ask in the name of Jesus is to ask God for what will advance his purpose.

Most Christians treat prayer as if God is a genie standing ready to fulfill any wish they might contrive, and then wonder why God does not answer their prayers. When we focus our prayers on what we need to accomplish the purpose of Jesus, we are much more likely to receive what we ask for. God answers prayers that pursue the purpose of Christ.

When you fail to receive what you ask in prayer, there are only a few possibilities.

You are failing to live up to God’s character as far as you believe it to be in your life.
You lack sufficient reasons to believe God will grant what you are asking.
You have not done what you can yourself to obtain it.
You do not desire what you are asking for enough for God to give it to you.

In each case, more work on your part is needed before you comply with the conditions God has set for giving what we ask.

You can’t pray in Jesus’ name while living in a way that contradicts his character. You can vastly increase your confidence in what you pray for by always thinking, feeling, and doing as he would in your place. Those who serve God the most know him the best. You cannot get to know God except through spending a great deal of time and effort developing a deep love for him through perfect obedience to him. The more you learn about Jesus and immerse yourself in his purpose, the more accurate your idea of his will becomes, and the more confident you will be in what you ask for. God does not grant special requests to those who are not living “in his name,” according to how they understand him to be, any more than he does to the wicked. However, he answers the prayers of those who have learned about and live like him. Jesus said: “If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” (John 14:14)

The Lord will answer the prayers of all who are abiding in his purpose, but this obviously presupposes that they know what his purpose is and that they are asking in accordance with it. You can’t pray in Jesus’ name when you ask for something other than you think he would or for reasons other than you think he would.

Effectual prayer requires a reason to believe that what you are asking for is according to God’s will and in alignment with his righteous purpose. Doubtful prayers are seldom answered. The power of asking in the name of Jesus comes from having confidence in your idea of God’s character and your similitude to him, as far as you understand.

You can’t fulfill the requirements of asking the Father in the name of Jesus without confidence that what you are asking for accords with God’s will. When you pray, you ought to first focus on discovering the will of the Lord. Until you have high confidence that what you ask for in prayer accords with God’s will, your requests should focus on finding out more about God’s will for you and those for whom you pray.

You can’t pray in Jesus’ name if you have not yet done all you can to bring to pass what you are asking for. A fundamental attribute of the Lord’s character is that he always does the best he can, not the worst he can get away with. Asking in the name of Jesus is how you engage in your part of his work: you find out what he wants, and you work to help it come to pass. When you merely “ask” God vocally for something, you are engaging in far less than he intended when he commanded us to ask him for things. Asking in the name of Jesus requires a full effort to obtain what you request, not just a vocal effort to ask God to obtain it for you. Asking in the name of the Lord is a joint effort akin to calling for air support during an infantry mission: assistance is given to supplement your efforts, not to take their place.

Asking in the name of the Lord requires you to focus your whole soul on what you are asking for. The Greek word translated as ask, aiteó (Strong’s 154), means more than to vocally make a request. There is a strong internal connection in this word that combines the meanings of English words “beg,” “request,” “crave,” “desire,” and “require.”Asking in the name of the Lord results in a prayer with so much sincerity and fervor that it bears no resemblance to the rote and thoughtless routines practiced by most Christians, in particular at prescribed settings.

The power of God flows “in his name,” or according to and from his character. The more a person knows about God and the more fully they live their lives as God would in their place, the more of the power of God they will experience.

The ancients knew that asking God for blessings in accordance with his character was the key to receiving miraculous outpourings of his power. Abraham knew that God would not destroy the righteous with the wicked. He invoked God’s characteristic of justice to spare Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction. David invoked the Lord’s characteristic of mercy when God gave him three choices of punishment for having numbered Israel contrary to God’s command. Moses frequently leveraged God’s reputation to intercede for Israel. He reminded God that if he destroyed the Israelites, the surrounding people would think less of him, but if he saved them, he would show how merciful he was with his people and how powerful he was to save them.

If you do not know the character of God, you can’t do miracles in his name. God’s power comes through serving him, but serving him requires you to know what he desires, why he desires it, and how he intends to get it. Those who attempt to exercise God’s power without ascertaining the Lord’s desires, reasons, and plans are more likely to work against him than for him. The key to receiving more information about his will lies in living up to what you already know about him.

Your ability to call down miracles from heaven is directly proportional to the completeness of your reconciliation to God. If you have things in your life that are contrary to his will, as you understand it, you will not have his power in your life, and you will suffer unnecessarily. Every aspect of your life that is out of alignment with the character of God increases the impedance of the flow of his power through you. The more fully you live your life as God would in your place, the more God will reveal about himself to you, and the more of the power of God you will experience. Only those who fully dedicate themselves to the will of God through living as they sincerely believe he would will experience the greatest possible measure of God’s power in their lives. As God reveals more of himself to you, God’s power will only be limited by the accuracy of your understanding of how he is and your obedience in living that way yourself. The difference in the magnitude of God’s power revealed in the lives of those who fully dedicate themselves to his will and those who do not is incomparable.

Too many Christians foolishly assume that God will give them magic power to do mighty miracles while they do not yet know him, and have not yet obeyed him. Mighty miracles do not come to those who merely ask God for them. The powers of heaven only operate in accordance with the character of God. Who among us would not like to see the sick healed, the dead raised, the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, and every other manifestation of God’s power in our lives? Yet, there are few miracles today. This is a critical problem, for “if these things have ceased, then has faith ceased also; and awful is the state of man, for they are as though there had been no redemption made.” (Moroni 7:38) Redemption works by the same faith and at the same time as manifestations of God power. If you don’t have the latter, you don’t have the former. The shortcoming in both cases is the same: falling short of full adoption of God’s purpose. The mechanism of miracles—the name of Jesus —explains why there are so few miracles today. People do not know the name of Jesus very well, and they do not take upon themselves the portion they do know. God’s power works through faith. If you do not live as Christ would in your place, as far as you know, you don’t have faith, and you will not have power to work miracles.

Often, miracles fail to materialize because they are sought for according to the desires of those who ask rather than the desire of God. The purpose of miracles is to advance the purpose of God, not to fulfill the desires of men. When the apostles asked Jesus to help them have more faith, he told them to stop being so concerned with their own will, and start being more concerned with God’s. The same advice applies today.

Many people have heard of the commandment God gave against taking his name in vain, but far fewer understand what it means. To take the name of the Lord in vain is to profess to be a believer in God while feeling, thinking, or acting contrary to how God would in your place. It is not about saying names of God, but about failing to live up to his character while pretending to believe in him. The Hebrew word used in the phrase “take the Lord’s name” (Strong’s 5375 nasah ) does not mean “speak,” but (among other things) accept, bear, desire, marry, magnify, raise up, respect, wear, and swear. The description of what it means to take the Lord’s name upon you given in the prior chapter should seem obviously relevant to these synonyms.

You take the Lord’s name in vain when you fail to live up to the Lord’s example in front of others, profaning his character instead of helping them see more of his goodness. One reason that God grants his children what they ask for in prayer is to manifest his name to people who otherwise would not know it. As you gain knowledge of and power with God, you increase in your capability to more fully demonstrate how God is to others, helping them increase the goodness they perceive in him. The Lord punishes those who profane his name to preserve the reasons his children have to believe in him.

You take the name of the Lord in vain when you end a prayer in the name of Jesus, when you lack sufficient information to suggest God’s will, when you know his character or will is opposed to what you are saying, when you have more you can do to bring to pass what you are asking him for, or when you are living differently than you believe he would outside of your prayer. When your prayers are vague, weak, or ineffectual, you make the Lord seem capricious, aloof, and weak, when you could be showing others how to communicate sincerely with God and how doing so results in the outpouring of his peace and power.

When you mindlessly “testify” of something being good or true without actually researching or testing it against alternatives, you are taking the Lord’s name in vain and bearing false witness.

Taking the Lord’s name in vain is a serious sin carrying strict penalties. God considers taking his name in vain so seriously because of the harm it does to those who do it and to those in front of whom they do it.

In former times, it was common to indicate the seriousness of a commitment by swearing an oath. Both Jesus and James spoke against this practice. When you make a specific promise, you are trapping yourself in the event that the conditions under which you made your promise change. You can find yourself in a situation where keeping your promise requires you to do less than your best.

A better approach to making specific promises is to promise that you will always do what the Lord would do in your place, subject to your understanding of his will. By committing to always live as the Lord would in your place, you fulfill an ancient and still valid commandment to serve, cleave to, and swear by the name of God. To always act as he would in your place as far as you understand him to be is referred to as the oath and covenant of the priesthood.

Part of being a Christian is to conduct yourself to the same standards you believe Christ would. When you act differently than God would in your place, you profane his name. While the stalwart honest example of faithful believers makes a powerful argument in favor of Christianity, lackluster examples of professed Christians make it difficult to take the faith seriously. It causes great harm to God’s cause and makes him angry when professed Christians lie, cheat, or steal.

What does it mean to come in the name of the Lord, and what does it mean to “say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord”?

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, crowds of people lined the streets to greet him.

Just a few days later, Jesus lamented over their rejection of him.

Someone who comes in the name of the Lord is someone who is in the character and purpose of the Lord, doing his works in so far as they are able and understand. All believers in Christ are called to come in the name of the Lord through living as Jesus would in their place. Taking the name of God upon you is represented symbolically through accepting robes indicating you are an emissary of the heavenly king. High priests demonstrated this lesson by wearing robes representing God’s glory and even wearing the engraved name of God draped upon their forehead.

Most people—particularly professed Christians—incorrectly believe that they would rejoice at the opportunity to know God better. Most people—including professed Christians—would respond to Jesus the same way the people in his time did if he lived here today. These people respond the same way to his servants as they would to him: by ignoring, rejecting, and even persecuting those more like Jesus than they are. The principle error made by those who rejected Jesus during his life was appraising his worth in terms of what they thought they already had. What they failed to recognize was that Jesus possessed power, wisdom, and love far beyond their limits. Instead of drawing near to him for what was better than what they already had, they rejected him for differing from it. Do not make the same mistake.

If you truly desire to learn more about how Jesus is, it is absolutely essential that you get better at correctly identifying those who come in the name of the Lord and improve how you would respond to one if you were to meet them. The best way to achieve both outcomes is to fully live up to what you presently believe about Jesus. When you live up to what you know about Jesus, not only have you chosen to value his character and purpose, as far as you understand it, more than anything else, but you will have the clearest possible picture of your ongoing limitations and lack, and will be best suited to recognize and value the opportunity to learn more about the Lord when he sends you someone who knows him better than you.

The importance of belief in Jesus is attested to by countless scriptures about it and that, for most Christians, belief is the defining quality of whether you are a Christian or not. Unfortunately, Jesus does not define belief this way, nor do the scriptures pointed to by those who do.

Belief in Jesus is not the same as believing in his name. Belief in Jesus can be anything one defines it to be, as attested to by the diversity of beliefs held by those who claim to. Most people who claim to believe in Jesus have no idea what he is like. They’ve never met him, and they don’t bother seeking to learn about him from those who know him, such as by reading the scriptures. For these people, Jesus is a catch-all cosmic idol constructed to be whatever they hope he is like.

Belief in his name is uniquely defined by how he actually is. To believe in the name of the Lord, you must actually find out what he is like, and actually be the same way. If you do not act, think, and desire as he did and does, according to the example he gave, you do not believe on his name. You might be able to claim you believe in Jesus while not actually following his example, but you can’t believe in his name while intentionally ignoring and living differently than the example given in the scriptures.

The degree to which you believe in God is the degree to which you follow his example, as far as you understand it. If you believe on the name of Jesus, you will act, think, and desire as he did and does, as far as you understand him to be. It is through belief in his name, and not in his mere existence, that remission of sins comes. If you believe on the Lord’s name, you believe that God is “mighty to save and to cleanse from all unrighteousness.” (Alma 7:14) If you believe on the Lord’s name, you believe that, through him, you can do anything he shows you he would do in your place: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” (Philippians 4:13) You believe that, in him, you can do all things he commands. If you believe on the Lord’s name, you believe he can show you how and why to be sinless. If you believe on the Lord’s name, you know that those who do not follow his example are damned.

If you believe on the Lord’s name, you will do mighty works by following his example in all things. You believe that when he said, “he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also” (John 14:12), he meant it. You believe that when he said, “greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father” (John 14:12), he meant that if you believe him enough to seek and obey him, he can put enough of himself into you to do everything he ever did here and more. When you believe in the Lord’s name, you believe all of this in spite of all your weakness, and all your ignorance, and all of your problems, because you know it is about him and how he is, not you and how you think you are.

What is God’s glory? While God’s name is his character, God’s glory is the effect of that character. God’s name describes and dictates his actions, motives, and means, while his glory consists of what results from them. God’s name and his glory cannot be separated. His name causes his glory.

To glorify God means to increase how much of God’s goodness is seen by ourselves and others. To glorify God is to increase understanding and valuation of who, how, and what God is and why he is that way through learning more about him and living more fully as he would in your place.

To magnify the name of Christ or to glorify the name of Christ or to sanctify the name of Christ all refer to slightly different ways of helping others increase the accuracy and depth of their perception of the goodness of God. Nothing you do can make the name of Christ better than it already is. However, you can help others to see more of the greatness of God than they did before.

The Son glorified the Father by learning and living his character as a man on earth. You glorify the Son by learning and living his character in this life. You glorify the name of Christ by learning and living it yourself and by doing all you can to help others to do the same.

Justification and sanctification as the horizontal and vertical

One of the most solemn instructions Jesus gave was: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24) This instruction wasn’t given only to special people, nor expressed as something that would only rarely or intermittently apply, but as something for any believer, all of the time. One reason readers limit the scope and application of this instruction from the Lord is that they do not understand what it means to take up his cross and follow him.

The cross provides a two-dimensional metaphor for discipleship through alignment with God: justification and sanctification. Justification—the complete reconciliation of your character to how you believe God to be—is represented by the horizontal bar of the cross. Sanctification—the degree of your similitude to God—is represented by the vertical bar of the cross. In terms of the Lord’s instruction, justification answers the question of whether you have taken up his cross or not, and sanctification answers the question of how accurate your understanding of God’s character has become.

As you live what you understand about God, you will learn more about him. Living what you understand about God is akin to being stretched across and fixed to the horizontal bar of the cross. Learning more about God is akin to being raised higher on the cross, coinciding with a widening of the horizontal bar to which you must live up to in order to repeat the cycle. You move “up” the cross as you learn more about Jesus while remaining reconciled to all you know about him.

Several words are used ambiguously in the scriptures to refer to the horizontal and vertical bars of the cross, including staff, bar, rod, scepter, tree, arrow, and bow. The meanings and uses of each figure are overlapping. For example, the shepherd’s staff can be used both as a tool to lean upon vertically, or a tool for goading sheep horizontally. For clarity, each scriptural reference usually includes enough context to identify the horizontal and vertical components.

For example, when Balaam prophesies that “there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel,” “come” gives the “star out of Jacob” away as the horizontal component, as it is the same Hebrew verb used to describe shooting an arrow, and the scepter rising gives it away as the vertical component.

One of the most famous psalms is another example of the cross imagery.

In addition to meaning what it does in English, the word translated here as “comfort” also means “to cause to repent.” The rod “comforts” horizontally as you are chastened for your known shortcomings until and unless you improve beyond them, while the staff “comforts” vertically in at least two ways: First, by reminding you how far you’ve come, and second, by revealing how you could be even better.

The horizontal bar represents your understanding of what is best. It is your model of the character of Christ. It consists of what an ideal person would think, feel, and do in every situation, according to your present understanding. It is the standard to which you are held accountable.

The bar of justification can be thought of as akin to a finish line, in the sense that your relationship with God begins a new phase as soon as you reconcile to what you know about him, albeit that finish line is itself the start of the path of learning more about him. As you learn more about God, remaining justified requires you to immediately reconcile yourself to anything you learn, as depicted in Lehi’s vision of the tree of life, where pilgrims had to maintain a grip on an iron railing as they walked along it.

The Lord was literally lifted up on the cross at the end of his life, but everything until that point was a figurative fulfillment of the same as he progressively grew more like the Father. As you continue to learn about and live like the Lord, you will also be “lifted up.”

The “lifting up” of Jesus included his demonstration of the goodness of God at greater resolution and visibility than ever available before. The challenges that Jesus faced, the lessons he learned, the teachings he shared, and the miracles he performed all demonstrated the goodness of God beyond the limits of what could be known without them. The Lord’s entire life was a demonstration of the goodness of God to a greater extent than it could have been shown in any other way, culminating with crucifixion and resurrection.

Every person is on a path where they are either growing toward or falling away from God, and each person’s trajectory and pace is unique to them, with each of these variables determined by the heed and diligence exercised by the individual. At all times, in all things, each person is exposed to demonstrations of the character of Christ, and according to their response, blessed for their faithfulness and shown more about him, or punished for their unbelief and shown less about him.

Special concentrations of God’s character are available in his servants who, like shepherds, wield staffs both as indications of what they have to offer and as the tool by which it is received. Moses gave literal examples of both purposes of a vertical staff. Moses demonstrated the authority of God as he performed miracles with a staff empowered for that purpose and helped the people lift their focus to Christ by raising a serpent on the end of a staff. Other shepherds fulfill these purposes symbolically, through showing the content and effects of greater similitude to Christ in how they are. The staff of the shepherd indicates his role and provides his power. The similitude of the servant to Jesus indicates his role and provides his power.

Those who seek, perceive, and live greater portions of the Lord’s character are “lifted up” after him, becoming more and more like him in the process. As you become more like him, you will demonstrate more of his character and goodness to the world.

God holds you accountable for what you understand about him. As you think, feel, or act differently than you believe he would in your place, you will lose some of your understanding about him. Disobedience causes you to reduce the width of the horizontal bar and the height of your vertical bar. The decay of your understanding about God protects you from the moral responsibility of knowing as much about him as you did before, but removes you from the blessings that would be yours for living more like him, but won’t preserve you from the temporal penalties of having a lesser understanding. Descent down the cross also brings with it an increased difficulty in regaining your prior position, as your ability to recognize, value, and receive more will diminish along with your understanding of God.

The pattern is inverted when the cross theme is applied to the wicked. The wicked have their own understanding of how reality works, and they expect to get gain through following their wicked ways. But just as living righteously leads to growth, living wickedly leads to decay. Consider this description.

Here, the sword is the vertical component, and the bow is the horizontal. Though the psalm applies literally, the figurative application is much broader and perhaps more important. The moral code of the wicked will lead to the diminution of their power and cause their own harm.

The scriptural symbols of the plummet and the line are closely related to the symbolism of the cross. The plummet is a weight attached to a line used by builders to measure vertical lines. The line is a tool to measure whether a surface is horizontal. Each tool projects the ideal, against which the actual progress can be measured.

In the scriptures, the line is justice, or the measure of how closely you match your understanding of the ideal, and the plummet is righteousness, or how much you know about God while continuing to live like him.

For the Lord to stretch the line and the plummet over a person, group, or nation is for him to hold them accountable to what they ought to think about him given their opportunities to learn about and obey him.

In the beginning, God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a place free from any knowledge that would exceed their willingness and ability to remain reconciled to God. In their aligned state, they were able to freely interact with God face to face without feeling any guilt, in spite of the fact that they were flawed (as revealed by their nakedness) and that they were capable of sin in environments with more knowledge (as revealed by their imminent fall). Satan exposed them to a greater increment of knowledge, Eve succumbed to his enticements, and Adam succumbed to her enticements, causing both Adam and Eve to be exiled from the presence of God. They received and obeyed commandments from God, reconciling themselves to him, culminating in Adam regaining the presence of God prior to his death.

Adam and Eve provided us with an example of the pattern to which all of us are exposed. They.

1. Were aligned with God, enjoying his presence at the level of knowledge they had access to.
2. Were exposed to greater knowledge.
3. Chose to rebel against God, leaving their state of alignment with him.
4. Realigned themselves with God through forsaking past sins and remaining faithful as additional knowledge was given to them.

Access to the Tree of Life comes through justification. When you reconcile yourself to how you understand God to be, you are redeemed from the fall and gain access to his presence. Access to the Tree of Knowledge enables sanctification. A justified individual cannot become more like God than they already are without access to additional knowledge. The goal of mortal life is to regain access to the Tree of Life while retaining greater exposure to the Tree of Knowledge. In greater detail, the goal of mortal life is to become eternally reconciled to God with greater knowledge than was possessed prior to this life, which is the only way for the individual to become more like God than they were before, which is the only way for the individual to have more eternal joy than they had before.

The ark of the covenant was a stylized box that contained, among other things, the tablets of stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments. The lid of the box featured two angels whose wings joined each other, called the meeting place of God or, alternatively, the mercy seat. The design given to Moses specified rings on the side of the ark into which long staves were slid in order for priests to bear the ark on their shoulders as they traveled around the desert. While Israel remained encamped, the bars were removed from the box, a veil was drawn over the Holy of Holies where it abode, and the glory of the Lord abode on the ark. When removed, the bars of the ark were long enough that they protruded slightly into the adjacent room, called the holy place. They could be seen by the priests who ministered in the holy place, but not the public, who could not enter. When the glory of God withdrew from the ark, Israel took down the tabernacle and carried it and the ark until they reached their new destination.

The bars of the ark are symbolic of your present understanding of the commandments of God. They are given to you through the priests who carry them. As you live them completely, God’s glory rests upon you.

In the present day, learning more about and living more like God is seen as an optional pastime suitable only for religious zealots. Modern life features so much prosperity detached from merit that people can convincingly adopt the belief that God’s law is merely moral, with implications that only matter after you die, if at all.

Those who do believe in God’s justice tend to limit it to the punishment of the wicked. God’s judgment is the restoration of what is deserved, resulting in the blessing of those who have fully lived up to their understanding of how God is in life, to the degree they learned about and lived like him.

Whenever God’s judgment is imposed, you will be held accountable for the choices you have made, subject to the limits of your knowledge and understanding. The standard you will be judged against includes everything you could have learned if you have sought for and listened to the servants God sends to demonstrate more about himself.

God’s justice is sometimes obfuscated and often delayed during mortality to facilitate the conditions necessary to grow and exercise faith. The payment of God’s justice is guaranteed at the judgment bar, but can be paid partially or in full during life, whether at the personal, group, or national level.

The establishment of the kingdom of God always comes with the enforcement of God’s law to a greater extent than we see today. There are multiple scriptural references that foretell a time to come when the Lord will govern the earth “with a rod of iron.” These references describe a time when the world will be held to a higher law, with consequences for greater good or greater evil poured out more directly than we presently experience.

The time will come, and is shortly at hand, when a significant difference will exist between those who have searched out and lived up to God’s example and those who have not. It is imperative that you do not delay making all necessary changes so that the rendering of God’s justice will result in your blessing, and not your punishment.

Justification and sanctification as obtaining the robes of righteousness

Learning about and living God’s character is often described as washing, putting on, or changing out clothing. The analogy fits well in several ways.

God’s character is received and put on, not created. God already is what you are trying to become. He provides the way by which you can become more like he is. That path is revealed from above, not invented down below. God’s character already exists and is better than anything you can devise yourself. God’s character isn’t something you can create out of whole cloth. Instead, you receive it by finding and learning it from those who already possess it. The scriptures are full of examples of people following this pattern. For example, Elisha spent as much time as possible learning from and living like Elijah. Having been true and faithful to everything Elijah taught, he received Elijah’s mantle as Elijah ascended into heaven.

Attempts to create God’s character ourselves will be just as ineffective as Adam and Eve’s attempt to hide their nakedness from God with the fig leaf coverings they made. The real protection came from the animal skin garments they received from God, not their juvenile imitation of the real thing. Note that in spite of the goodness of one’s intentions, counterfeiting what can only come from God is never sufficient for the task or commended by God.

Garments are put on all at once. You can add or remove items of clothing, but you don’t wear half a shirt or one leg of a pair of pants. You would not replace one portion of your present robe at a time, attempting to sew the new into the old. Your idea of how Jesus is will improve over time, but you submit to a single snapshot of how you believe him to be and must fully resubmit to any changes as they occur.

While it is possible to wear layers of clothing, at some point, you can’t put anything else on before taking something else off. It’s quite normal to change out one item of clothing for another, whether because the former is dirty or worn, or to make room for something better. Similarly, adopting new ideas about Jesus, yourself, others, and the world will frequently require you to let go of old ideas about them. You repent through forsaking your sins. You cover the sins of others by persuading them to abandon their former ways of living for better ways of living.

The robe of righteousness is the character of Jesus Christ. To put on the robe of righteousness is to learn about and live more like Jesus Christ.

There are many versions of the robe of righteousness, as each person’s understanding of how Jesus is differs, and many paths flow from that understanding to how Jesus actually is. Each improvement to a person’s understanding of the character of Christ could be considered another, better robe of righteousness, forming a chain of successively improving models of the character of Christ.

Each “garment” represents a level of understanding of how Jesus is, and as such, there will always be limitations in every garment, and a better garment still. No matter what we have sacrificed in our pursuit of God, at least some of what we understand about him will be incomplete or incorrect, and as the inadequacies of our model are revealed, we will feel as if our whitened robes of “righteousness are as filthy rags....” (Isaiah 64:6) As you live fully up to the character of Christ as you presently understand it, you will come to see shortcomings in your model of how Jesus is. These shortcomings are essential to providing you with the motivation and desire to receive additional teaching about how Jesus is beyond your present understanding, which almost always includes the difficult and painful task of abandoning at least some of the ideas you had about him before.

The growing nature of one’s understanding of God is one reason why the robe of righteousness can correctly be called a garment of light. While a garment of cloth or the skins of dead animals is fixed and can only ever wear out, a garment of light grows and flows. Though a robe is given to another all at once, the robes of righteousness are received as an unbroken series of individual lessons on the Lord’s nature that weave into an indistinguishable flow of constant and custom guidance. The incremental discovery and adoption of the character of Christ is akin to continuous development of a piece of software, where new portions are written, old portions are rewritten, most of it is reused, and sometimes everything needs to be scrapped and started over from scratch.

If you consider taking his name upon you as the decision to reconcile yourself to how you presently understand him to be, then you receive a robe of righteousness through the act of justification. If you consider taking the Lord’s name upon you as the process of learning more about him while remaining reconciled to how you understand him to be, then receiving the robes of righteousness becomes a process of wearing a robe of ever-increasing brightness, corresponding to your increasing understanding of how he is.

As you put on holier robes, you become qualified for holier places. God’s kingdom is organized into different levels of glory, each defined by the extent and accuracy of the model of Jesus which the inhabitants live according to. God will reveal more of himself to those who live what they already know about him. It is through obtaining and living successively more expansive and accurate models of Christ that you ascend in his kingdom. The task of mortality can be expressed as obtaining the kind of garment necessary to dwell in the highest level of God’s kingdom that we desire.

Two symbolic clothing items that frequently co-occur in scripture are the mantle and the girdle. A mantle is an outer covering. A girdle is a belt.

The mantle is a symbol of the power that comes from similitude to God. God’s power comes through the assimilation of his character. When you take upon yourself the character of Christ, you become more like him in character and in the power you wield.

The girdle is a tool to bind and constrict, symbolizing how one who serves God circumscribes their desires and actions to match those of the Lord. It is precisely through girding yourself with the righteousness of God that you receive his mantle of power.

As you gird yourself with each of God’s qualities, you receive a mantle in the form of that character quality and its associated power and blessings. The composite of God’s attributes is love. When you practice charity by living for the benefit of others without preference for self, you receive the blessing of truly becoming as God is.

In scripture, the preparation that God provides for future challenges by revealing more of himself to you is called the armor of God, the armor of righteousness, and the armor of light. God prepares you for coming challenges by exposing you to the limits of your present understanding and providing you access to something better. For example, God gave Adam and Eve instructions and clothed them in coats of animal skins after their fall but before their expulsion from Eden to protect them from the conditions they would experience in the fallen world.

God will not force you to notice or take up the preparation he provides. He will show you more about himself and give you every sufficient reason to choose to become more like him, but he will never force you to become like him. The preparation for what is to come is always reachable from where you presently stand, but you have to notice and make use of it.

One reason warnings from God go unnoticed and unheeded is because they often come in times of seeming prosperity to those who stop improving beyond what seems good enough for now. The only way to ensure you are as equipped for life’s challenges as you could be is to improve in all things at all times, to the full extent of your capability.

Even when a person strives to do the best they know of, they can reject God’s warnings when they refuse to adopt better choices when presented. Invitations of this type usually come through other people whose ability to see afar off gives them a different and more accurate perspective of the long-term consequences of your present course and the existence of another superior option.

When you ignore the warnings God provides, he allows you to experience the consequences of what you would have been saved from in order to persuade you to be more likely to listen the next time.

In ancient times, the task of whitening cloth was involved and valuable enough to be a full-time skilled profession. Those who did this work were called fullers, and their significance is attested to by the frequency and content of the multiple scriptural references to them.

The act of whitening cloth is referred to in terms of sanctification, God’s servants’ role in it, and the Lord’s glory on the Mount of Transfiguration. It was at the fuller’s field where Hezekiah paid a heavy tribute to the king of Assyria after the people rebelled and refused to keep the covenant given to Moses (see 2 Kings 18:12, 14-17), where Isaiah traveled to meet Ahaz, king of Judah, to tell him not to fear the oncoming attack of the new super alliance formed between the king of Syria and the king of Israel (see Isaiah 7:14), and where the emissary of the king of Assyria shouted taunts against those on the wall and God (see Isaiah 36:1-21).

Cloth was whitened anciently by soaking it in urine, requiring: 1) proximity to enough people to provide the required supply of concentrated urine, 2) enough distance from the same people to avoid the terrible smell, and 3) a substantial supply of running water to rinse the cloth after whitening. The fuller’s field outside of Jerusalem provided all of these qualities.

Fulling provides many rich analogies to elements of the gospel. Fulling was a step in the process of woolen garment manufacture, where a professional would endure putrid conditions to improve the garment beyond the quality it would otherwise remain in. It required interaction with the people who would receive the finished product, but only by contributing your bodily waste, which he would miraculously use to render your clothing more valuable than it would otherwise be. Whitening was performed by stomping on the soaking garments, just as wine was made by stomping on grapes. Fullers were closer to the water source used by city dwellers for drinking, and they used a lot more of it than anyone did for drinking in order to make high-value products for those who lived downstream. Some traditions consider the fuller’s field to be the same location as the Mount of Olives and the place where the sacrificial red heifer was burned.

Whitening cloth is not an event, but a process. The ancients repeatedly soaked garments in new batches of chemicals to whiten them. To describe the whitening of cloth with justification and sanctification language, the complete immersion of a garment into the whitening solution is a justifying event, but the subsequent whitening is a gradual sanctification process. The duration of the soaking and the potency of the solution matters.

You wash your garments in the blood of Christ by fully reconciling your life to how you understand God would live in your place. To have your garments made white in his blood is to choose to “repent and work righteousness,” by “bring[ing] forth fruit meet for repentance,” abhorring any deviation from Christ’s example in any way at any time.

You must remain sinless to keep your garments spotless. Only those who live as they believe Jesus would at all times and in all places keep their garments white in the blood of the Lamb.

As you live up to everything you know about Jesus and learn everything you can about him, your garments become even more white.

You receive new garments from time to time as you make those you already have as white as they can be by living up to your current model of Christ completely. When you remain fully reconciled to God and continually learn more about him, you make yourself worthy of receiving a greater understanding of how he is. Like a crustacean outgrowing its shell, you will reach the limits of your present beliefs, paradigms, and situations, and God will invite you to take up something better.

Answering trials with adherence to God’s character whitens your garments. When you respond to trials with insufficient trust in or obedience to God, you dirty your garments and cut yourself off from his blessing.

Trials are not just hard times. By definition, a trial is not just a time where you experience undesirable things, but a discovery of a more accurate idea of the worth of a thing. When you try something, you evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, its costs and benefits, and its relative value compared to alternative options.

Trials are opportunities to change your beliefs, feelings, or actions to reflect the new appraisal of value they bring. As you adjust what you value and by how much, and change your behavior to align with your new appraisals of value, you draw nearer to God in how you feel, think, and act.

Trials reveal the insufficiencies in what you previously considered necessary, adequate, or desirable. Reductions in perceived value can increase the urgency and benefit of finding something better, and this replacement is one way that God makes weak things strong.

All trials are an opportunity to grow towards God. When you are subjected to changes in the value of what you have, hope for, or give, you have an opportunity to adopt greater trust in and affinity for God. When you respond correctly, trials purge from you from what keeps you from ascending to a greater relationship with and blessing from God.

Righteousness can only be acquired through learning more about and living more like Jesus. In order to become more righteous, you have to sacrifice whatever would preclude you from learning more about and living more like Jesus. This sacrifice for God is often spoken of as buying righteousness from God. The Lord counsels us to.

The sacrifice required to obtain a garment of light must occur during this life. For example, in the parable of the Ten Virgins, the Lord explains how the groom’s arrival marks the point when it is too late to purchase more oil for the virgins’ lamps needed to go out to meet him (see Matthew 25:1-13). At another time, the Lord elaborated on this parable, stating that those who will be able to abide his presence are those who have sought for, received, and lived more information about him (see D&C 45:56-59).

The work required to purchase a garment of light can’t be performed after this life. The condition to abide with God after this life is to have reconciled yourself to him in this life. You cannot remain in God’s presence without remaining reconciled to him. If you have not received and implemented all that was available prior to that event, you are not prepared to receive what can only come from the presence of the Master.

The trials that yield the garment of light do not exist in heaven. Only in this life do you have access to the situations and people that can help you learn more about and live more like Jesus. These situations and people provide constant opportunities to learn more about Jesus, constant feedback on the value of your present character, and the opportunity to recover from mistakes.

Many professed Christians believe that all that is required to dwell in the kingdom of heaven is a vague idea of the existence of God.

In order to remain in the presence of God, you require a covering to protect you from his fiery glory. This covering is provided by learning about and living the character of Christ. You receive his covering by learning more about Jesus, removing from yourself whatever you believe to be offensive to his character, and adding into your life whatever you believe he would in your place.

Failure to live up to your understanding of how God would live in your place is akin to wearing dirty garments. All professed Christians believe that they will be welcomed into God’s eternal kingdom after death whether they live up to their idea of how God is or not. Anything about yourself that you believe to be impure will cause seething pain to you in the presence of God so great that you will do anything to flee from it. If you do not live up to your sincere understanding of how Jesus is, you will recoil from his presence so painfully that you would prefer being in hell.

Some professed Christians live up to an incorrect idea of how Jesus is. Some conflate the commandments of men with the commandments of God, and others invent their own imagined version of the Lord independent of and contrary to the eye witness accounts found in the scriptures and living persons.

While it is not good to be naked in the presence of the Lord, it is even worse to appear before him wearing a garment you made up for yourself. God is just as unpleased with those who wear garments he has not ordained as he is those who make offerings he did not command. Acknowledging your nakedness before God is essential in order to receive clothing from him, and you will never seek what you already think you have. Those who refuse to acknowledge their lack of the real thing will see a future day when what they thought they had is taken away.

There is precedent for the use of ceremonial clothing in the clothing of prophets, priests, and high priests in the Old Testament and in the peculiar garments worn by Jesus in the New Testament. However, like so many other gospel topics, the idea of special clothing has grown in some religious traditions to carry meaning independent to and greater than its original purpose.

While there is nothing necessarily wrong about inventing practices regarding clothing, it is wrong to promote these practices to the same importance as God’s actual commandments. There is value to wearing clothing as commanded by God in the conditions he has commanded it. It is not correct to impute the same value to clothing and conditions he hasn’t commanded, simply because other people at another time were instructed to wear it. In fact, impersonation can quickly degrade from flattery to blasphemy. Recall that impersonation of priests carried the death penalty in Old Testament times.

Whether commanded or not, there is no magic power in the clothing we wear. It does not impart special powers. It is, at best, an external example of an internal commitment, and even then is only worth the value of whatever improvements we make to how we think, feel, and act.

Conclusion

God is the source and destination of everything that is good, including salvation and eternal life. God’s goodness emanates from his character. What provides eternal value is maximally obtained, retained, and shared with others through learning and living his character.

As you discover the centrality of God’s character to all that is good, you will begin to see how fully it is woven into every aspect of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As you learn more about the Lord’s character and more fully apply it in your life, you will experience more of God’s intent for life, family, work, and religion. You will better learn how Jesus would think, feel, and act in each situation you face in life, and in following his example, you will enjoy more of the blessings he makes available to all as they become more like him.

Glossary of Key Terms

This glossary defines key terms as they are used in this book. Several of these terms carry specific meanings that differ from how they are commonly used in mainstream Christian theology. Understanding these definitions will help the reader follow the arguments presented throughout the book.

Authority. See Power and Authority.

Born Again. The event of choosing to stop sinning. Being born again is a choice, not a passive gift. It occurs when a person fully submits to God by deciding to cease doing what they know to be contrary to God and begins living according to their understanding of Him at all times from that point onward. The gift of the Holy Ghost follows this choice but does not cause it. (See Chapter 10)

Baptism. A symbolic ordinance that publicly confirms and commemorates the inward change of being born again. Baptism does not itself produce the remission of sins; rather, it is performed after a person has already ceased sinning and submitted to God. It requires behavioral alignment with God and a priest to certify that this alignment is complete and ongoing and to perform the ordinance. (See Chapter 11)

Character. The part of your identity that you choose. Your character is what you do, why you do it, and how you feel about it. It is the composite of qualities that describe how and why you will think, feel, and act under any given circumstance. Character is not defined by external circumstances, possessions, or attributes beyond your control. It is built, destroyed, and changed through decisions. (See Chapter 1)

Character of Christ (God’s Character). The complete description of how God thinks, feels, and acts—and why. The character of Christ is the central subject of the gospel and the pattern all people are meant to emulate. Knowing God’s character perfectly would require the ability to predict how he would act, why, and how he would feel about it in any situation. (See Chapters 1, 12, 14)

Eternal Life. The state one enters after being justified by forsaking all of their sins. Not merely living forever, but the quality of life obtained through becoming like God. Eternal life is acquired by degrees and is proportional to how fully a person has learned about and lived like Jesus Christ. It is a measure of character, not merely duration of existence. The degree of eternal life received corresponds to the accuracy, depth, and breadth of one’s reconciliation to Jesus. (See Chapter 3)

Glorify God. To make the divine qualities or their effects more apparent, or to bestow them upon someone more fully. You glorify God by thinking, feeling, and acting more like him, or by helping others to do the same. A person who becomes like God glorifies him more than any other act of worship. (See Chapter 1)

God’s Purpose. Everything God is and does is dedicated to enabling all people to obtain and retain the greatest joy they are willing to receive. God’s purpose encompasses the immortality and eternal life of man—immortality being to live forever, and eternal life being the quality of that immortality, obtained by learning more about and living more of the character of Jesus Christ. (Chapters 9, 4)

Gospel. The process by which God shows you more of how he is while providing you the opportunity, reasons, and capability to become the same way yourself. The word comes from two Old English words meaning “good” and “story.” The gospel encapsulates what is good, how to do good, and why to do good. It is not a static set of rules or beliefs, but a living mechanism for transformation. (See Chapters 1, 6)

Justification. The decision to submit fully to God as you presently understand him. Justification is an event, not a process. It is the choice to forsake everything you know to be contrary to God and to embrace all things that align with him. It is synonymous with repentance in the fullest sense. A person is justified when they are living up to everything they currently understand about God’s character. (See Chapter 6)

Model of Christ. A person’s present understanding of how Jesus thinks, feels, and acts. Everyone who believes in God has a model—an internal picture—of what he is like. This model is always incomplete and contains errors. The process of sanctification involves continually updating, extending, and correcting this model as new understanding is gained. (See Chapter 14)

Perfect / Perfection. In the ancient languages, not the description of a flawless outcome, but of a process that maximally flows and grows toward the intended end. To be perfect in Christ is to progress as quickly as possible in your understanding of how he is, by living exactly as you believe he would in your place given your present understanding. Perfection is alignment with your current knowledge of God, not omniscience. (See Chapter 1)

Power and authority. Power is the ability to achieve, obtain, and retain what you desire. God has all power because he achieves, obtains, and retains what he desires. God’s power comes from his character—it is the embodiment of his wisdom, mercy, truth, justice, and judgment that make him God. God’s power and authority are inseparable; valid authority is a question of what you can do and have done, not who you claim to be. Godly power is distinguished from the power of evil by its independence from the choices of others. (Chapters 4, 9)

Priesthood. Any information that extends one’s understanding of how God is, how he would live in your situation, the benefits of doing so, and the consequences of failing to. The priesthood is a conduit of information through which people who have adopted God’s character are linked, providing the power to do, feel, and think as God would in your place, as far as you choose to. Priesthood does not just require righteousness—it is righteousness, and does not exist outside of merit. (Chapter 4)

Remission of Sins. The state defined by the cessation of sin. Remission comes from the internal change of no longer willingly choosing to act contrary to one’s understanding of God, not from the performance of any outward ordinance. Baptism commemorates but does not produce the cessation of sin. (See Chapter 11)

Repentance. The event of choosing to forsake everything you currently understand to be contrary to God and embracing all things that align with your current understanding of him. Repentance is not a process but a decisive moment of submission. It includes the understanding that God will incrementally teach you more than your present understanding contains. (See Chapters 6, 10)

Robes of Righteousness. The character of Jesus Christ. To put on the robe of righteousness is to learn about and live more like Jesus Christ. There are many versions, as each person’s understanding of how Jesus is differs. Each improvement to a person’s understanding could be considered another, better robe, forming a chain of successively improving models of the character of Christ. One receives a robe through justification and wears robes of ever-increasing brightness through sanctification. (Chapter 22)

Rules, Principles, and Character. A three-tier hierarchy of understanding God’s commandments. Rules are fixed behaviors that describe specific situations (do this, don’t do that). Principles are the generalized purposes behind rules (the “why”) that apply across all situations. Character is the composite of qualities that produce both rules and principles. Most Christians encounter God’s commandments only at the level of rules. Knowing the Lord requires progressing from rules to principles to character. (See Chapter 15)

Salvation. The process of being saved from the consequences of sin and death through becoming more like God. (See Chapter 3)

Sanctification. The ongoing process of learning more about Jesus while remaining reconciled to him. Where justification is the event of deciding to submit, sanctification is the lifelong journey of growing in understanding and living according to that understanding. It is the process by which a person’s model of Christ becomes more complete and accurate over time. All blessings that God enjoys flow from how he is, and the more sanctified a person becomes, the more of God’s blessings they will enjoy. (See Chapter 6)

Servants, Friends, and Sons. Three progressive relationship types a person can have with God. A servant obeys specific commands with limited understanding of God’s purpose. A friend possesses intimate knowledge of God’s purpose and character. A son has achieved similarity to God and inherits from Him. Each level is characterized by a different degree of knowledge of and intimacy with God. (See Chapter 16)

Submission to God. Knowing and fully adopting God’s purpose as your own. Submission is not mere belief in God or obedience to a list of rules. It requires knowing God’s purpose—maximal joy for all—and making it your own without reservation. Very few Christians, by this definition, have actually submitted to God. (See Chapter 9)

Words of Eternal Life. Any idea that leads to learning more about and living more like Jesus. The words of eternal life can be expressed at different levels of breadth, depth, accuracy, sincerity, and power. They are obtained incrementally as one learns more about Jesus while living up to what they already know. The defining quality of the words of eternal life is not what they are or where they come from, but what they result in, which is improvement. (Chapter 18)

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