Train your model by learning about and explaining the past

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

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

Your first objective in modeling how the Lord would live in your place is figuring out how to explain how he lived in his own time and place. It’s quite difficult to accurately estimate what Jesus would do in your place if you aren’t even aware of what he did in his time.¹

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.²

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.³ 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.