Thoughts on Character

Let’s face it — we live in a society fascinated with image and style. What we look like, sound like, and live like on the outside is very important to us. It’s important to us because popular culture has convinced us that if we can “get it right” on the outside, all of our wildest dreams will come true, and as a result life will become more satisfying and adventurous. Three very popular reality TV shows reflect this unadulterated fascination: Extreme Makeover (what we look like); American Idol (what we sound like); and Extreme Makeover Home Edition (what we live like). There are many problems with our preoccupation with “style.” Perhaps the most detrimental one is that our preoccupation leads very quickly to a restless, insubstantial existence.

The greatest men and women in history have always been more preoccupied with substance (what’s on the inside) than style (what’s on the outside). Someone once said that the difference between image and character is just this: image is who people think you are; character is who you really are. In other words, image has everything to do with what’s on the outside (style), while character has everything to do with what’s on the inside (substance).

Os Guinness, a Christian social scientist, once defined character this way:

Character is the inner form that makes anyone or anything what it is — whether a person, a wine, or a historical period. Thus character is clearly distinct from such concepts as personality, image, reputation, or celebrity. Character is the essential “stuff” a person is made of.

Our fascination with image and style has nothing to do with being truly human. It has nothing to do with who we really are. A few years back even shock-rocker Marilyn Manson had enough sense to speak of how silly our fascination with image is in his song “Beautiful People.” Real life — true humanness — consists of so much more than what we look like, sound like, and live like on the outside.

We are, according to Psalm 139:14, “fearfully and wonderfully made.” The reason we move restlessly from one image to the next and one trend to the next is that deep inside we know there has to be more to life than style. Our souls cry out for substance. Because all human beings were made in the image of God, we know intuitively that we were created and designed for dignity, not vanity; substance, not style. “We were,” as the rock band Switchfoot put it, “made to live for so much more.” But in our pursuit of image and style, we have lost ourselves. And as a result, we are restless, characterless, and understandably unsatisfied.

The good news, however, is that we need not remain lost and unsatisfied. Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths.” This is where real life — true character — begins!