Baby Steps

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.
-Matthew 5:48

One of my favorite scripture study resources is scriptures.byu.edu. Some of the folks out at BYU have taken the time to cross-reference all the scriptures used in General Conference with the talks that use them going back to 1942, and fixed it up so that you can look them up by either speaker or (my favorite) by chapter and verse to see who has used the verses that you're studying in their Conference addresses and what they said about it.

As I was using this site tonight to get ready for my Sunday School lesson I realized that the New Testament is the most-often quoted from the standard works, even more than the Book of Mormon, so I went and browsed around in there. Turns out that Matthew is the most quoted book in the New Testament, and chapter 5 is Matthew's most used chapter. That seemed reasonable to me: the Sermon on the Mount is some good reading. Today's verse is the most quoted in chapter 5. I think it would be fair to say that it's one of the most commonly used verses (at least in the LDS faith) in all of scripture.

Be ye perfect. It's a huge goal. Even with the Greek sense of the word perfect meaning "finished or fully developed," it's a big job. But I find the fact that the Lord has commanded us to become perfect it encouraging: He always provides a way to accomplish the things He asks us to do! Perfection is possible! Not today, not tomorrow, and certainly not without a *whole* lot of help, but it is possible!