If you are to be perfected, there are criteria to be met. Through your resolve, your perseverance and your conscience, and through your pursuit, you will be able to experience life and satisfy God’s will. This is your entry, and these things are what are required on the path to perfection. The work of perfection can be done on all people. Anyone who pursues God can be perfected and has the opportunity and qualifications to be perfected. There is no fixed rule here. Whether one can be perfected mainly depends on what one pursues. People who love the truth and are able to live out the truth are certainly able to be perfected. People who do not love the truth are not commended by God; they do not possess the life that God demands, and they are unable to be perfected. The perfection work is only for the sake of gaining people and is not a part of the work of battling Satan; the conquest work is only for the sake of battling Satan, which means using the conquest of man to defeat Satan. The work of conquest is the main work, the newest work, work that has never been done in all the ages. One can say that the goal of this stage of work is mainly to conquer all people so as to defeat Satan. The work of perfecting people—this is not new work. The quintessence of the goal of all work during God’s work in the flesh is the conquest of people. This is like in the Age of Grace, when the main work was the redemption of all mankind through the crucifixion. “Gaining people” was additional to the work in the flesh and was done only after the crucifixion. When Jesus came and did His work, His goal was mainly to use His crucifixion to triumph over the bondage of death and Hades, to triumph over Satan’s influence—that is, to defeat Satan. It was only after Jesus was crucified that Peter embarked, one step at a time, on the path to perfection. Of course, Peter was among those who followed Jesus while Jesus was working, but he was not perfected during that time. Rather, it was after Jesus finished His work that Peter gradually understood the truth and then became perfected. God incarnate comes to earth only to complete a key, crucial stage of work in a short period of time, not to live long-term among people on earth with the intention of perfecting them. He does not do that work. He does not wait until such time as when man is completely perfected to conclude His work. That is not the goal and significance of His incarnation. He comes only to do the short-term work of saving humanity, not to do the very long-term work of perfecting humanity. The work of saving humanity is representative, capable of launching a new age. It can be finished in a short period of time. But perfecting humanity requires bringing man up to a certain level; such work takes a long time. It is work that must be done by the Spirit of God, but it is done on the foundation of the truth that was spoken during the work in the flesh. It is also done through His raising up the apostles to do long-term shepherding work to achieve His goal of perfecting humanity. God incarnate does not do this work. He only speaks about the way of life so people will understand, and He only gives humanity the truth, rather than continuously accompanying man in practicing the truth, because that is not within His ministry. Therefore, He will not be accompanying man until the day man completely understands the truth and completely obtains the truth. His work in the flesh concludes when man formally enters the right track of belief in God, when man steps onto the right track of being perfected. This of course is also when He will have thoroughly defeated Satan and triumphed over the world. He cares not whether man will have ultimately entered the truth at that time, nor does He care about whether man’s life is great or minuscule. None of that is what He in the flesh should be managing; none of it is within the ministry of God incarnate. Once He finishes His intended work, He will conclude His work in the flesh. So, the work that God incarnate does is only the work that God’s Spirit cannot do directly. Moreover, it is the short-term work of salvation, not work that He will carry out on earth on a long-term basis.

—The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. Only the Perfected Can Live a Meaningful Life