Oh Christian, learn this lesson, and do not force God to come to you as a roaring and ravaging lion. Learn to recognize the flutterings of the moth—those slight inconveniences, those little failures, that restlessness, that miscarriage of your plans—that warn you of God's displeasure at your present course of action and of His desire to turn you back to Himself. If you learn that, you will go on from strength to strength, and you will rejoice that He who hath begun a good work in you will keep on perfecting it until the day of Jesus Christ.
The final stage of God's work in perfecting the saints is to perfect them completely in the moment of their deaths. And, of course, it is this that transforms death for Christians. Death is an enemy; even the Bible calls it that. But it is also the portal to that total perfection that we shall never know in this life.
The second way in which God works to perfect the believer is to begin to perfect him more and more in this life. This too is necessary. It is true that the believer has been perfected forever by his faith in Christ in one sense, but it is equally true that he is far from perfect in another sense.
Now, of course, when we have said this we have also made it clear that no one lives up to the standard of the Lord Jesus Christ. For all men fall short of such perfection, and in doing so they show themselves to be sinners. This is what sin is. Romans 3:23 says, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."
I believe that this verse is the most important verse in the Sermon on the Mount. It is the climax of the first of the Sermon's three great chapters, and it is the midpoint, the pinnacle, from which much of the later teaching follows. I believe that if you can understand this verse, you understand the essence of all that Jesus Christ is teaching. And what is more, you understand the heart of the Christian Gospel and of the Bible generally.
