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,1 values,2 and beliefs3 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.
Footnotes
- 1. The Lord’s qualities include love, justice, faith, wisdom, and knowledge, each of which is substantial enough that it deserves at least its own book. ↩
- 2. If you want to be like God, you have to know both what God does and why he does it. It is one thing to describe what God does. It is another to know why he does it. To comprehend God’s qualities, you have to have ample examples of what he does and why he does it. What the Lord values and by how much he values it is so far beyond what we imagine that an entire book is required to begin to explain it. ↩
- 3. The Lord’s beliefs are the laws of cause and effect that explain and govern all of reality. Reality is complex enough that it cannot be expressed in more compressed terms than all of creation itself, but your model of it is something that is well worth building, updating, and applying as far as you can in life, and this will be the subject of a future book. ↩