How to Change Your Life: Character Development Makes You God’s Masterpiece

How to change your life by building your character

Building your character is the fastest and surest way to change yourself for the better. To develop our character we can use the best in human psychology, Sacred Scripture and the Catholic moral tradition. But the true power of character development is the power of grace. Our choices can cooperate with grace to transform us into the masterpiece God wants us to be. Grace teaches why, not just how to change your life.

The free will is part of what makes human beings in the image of God. Our free will gives us the power of self-determination. We can choose who we become. More accurately, we form our character progressively by our daily choices. But if we see this process as nothing more than “becoming the person that I want to become,” we miss out on something very important. God is calling us to cooperate with His plan for our lives. He doesn’t just want us to become better people. He wants us through his grace to realize his original plans for us. He wants us to become His masterpiece.

How to Change Your Life by Forming Your Character in Five Steps

Cooperating with grace means taking prayerful, conscious control over the process of our character development. Here are some steps for doing just that.

1. Pray about what kind of person God wants you to become. Give the Holy Spirit permission to work in your heart and to show you God’s plan for you.
2. Make a list of qualities of your personality that you like and qualities that you don’t like.
3. Look at the qualities that you don’t like and circle the ones that are directly within your control to change.
4. Look for patterns that may point to virtues that you need to develop.
5. Create a strategy to establish one virtue and to extinguish one vice at a time. It is best to establish a virtue that directly contradicts a vice.

The Importance of Character Development in God’s Plan for Salvation

Before I turn you loose on analyzing your character, I need to make one important clarification. There is a lot of confusion out there about the relationship between salvation and “being good.” I’m going to try to clarify this without going into a long dissertation on salvation theology.

1. Heaven IS an eternal relationship with God. The only way to get to Heaven is to have a personal relationship with Jesus.
   A relationship with God is made possible only by grace.
2. But Jesus invites us into a real relationship! That means that he invites us to be active participants in it.
3. Part of that relationship is our conversion away from sin and toward God in ever increasing devotion.
4. This doesn’t just mean doing good – and it certainly doesn’t mean earning Heaven through our actions. It means doing good so we grow in virtue. Virtue makes goodness part of who we are. Who we are is more important than what we do. But what we do – the choices we make that form our character – form who we become.

So while we don’t earn our way to Heaven by doing good. Forming our character by making good choices (which means making choices that are true to who God created us to be and which increase our love for God and neighbor) is an important part of participating in our relationship with Jesus. Without grace, any project of character development is just a natural attempt to “be your best.” But with grace, growing in virtue becomes a supernatural act – an act the cooperates with grace to transform us into the image of Jesus. That’s really how to change your life.

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