The Sermon on the Mount_ The Key to Success in Life - Emmet Fox [10]
As a rule, it is only when health is broken down, and ordinary medical means have failed to afford relief, that people seriously set about gaining that spiritual understanding of the body as the true embodiment of Divine Life that is our only guarantee of overcoming sickness and, ultimately, death. Yet, if people would turn to God and acquire something of this understanding while their health is still good, they need never be sick at all.
Again, it is usually only when people are feeling the pinch of poverty very acutely, that is, when ordinary material sources of supply have dried up, that they turn to God as a last resort and learn the lesson that the Divine Power really is the Source of man’s supply, and all material agents but the channels.
Now this lesson has to be learned and thoroughly realized before man can pass on to any experience higher or wider than the present one. In our Father’s House are many mansions, but the key to higher mansions is always the acquiring of complete dominion over the one in which we are. It is therefore a very blessed thing for us that we should be compelled to get right on the supply question at the earliest possible moment. If prosperous people will now, while they are still prosperous, acknowledge God as their true Source, and pray regularly for still more spiritual understanding on this point, they need never suffer poverty or financial trouble at all. At the same time, they must be careful to use their present resources well, not hoarding riches selfishly but recognizing that God is the owner, and that they are only the stewards or trustees for Him. The command of money involves a responsibility which you cannot evade. Your must dispense it wisely, or take the consequences.
This general principle applies to every one of our difficulties, not merely physical or financial troubles, but all the other ills to which flesh is heir. Family troubles, quarrels and estrangements, sin and remorse, and all the rest, need never come at all if we will seek first the Kingdom of God and Right Understanding; but if we will not do so, then come they must, and for us this mourning will be a blessing in disguise, for through it we shall be “comforted.” And by comfort the Bible means the experience of the Presence of God, which is the end of all mourning.
The orthodox churches have too often taught a crucified Christ finishing on the cross; but the Bible gives us the Risen Christ Triumphant.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
On the surface, this Beatitude seems to have very little meaning, and what there is seems to be obviously contradicted by the plain facts of everyday life. No sensible person on looking about the world or studying history could sincerely accept this saying at its face value, and most honest Christians have passed it by in practice with a regretful feeling that no doubt that is how things ought to be, but that they certainly are not so in fact.
But this attitude will not do. Sooner or later the soul reaches a point where evasions and sophistries have to be discarded once and for all, and the fact of life faced squarely at whatever cost.
Now, either Jesus meant what he said, or he did not; and either he knew what he was talking about, or he did not. And so, if this saying is not to be taken seriously, we are driven to the position which no Christian will care to accept—either that Jesus was saying what he did not really believe, as unscrupulous people do, or that he was talking nonsense. We have to face up to this situation at the very beginning of our study of this Sermon on the Mount. Either Jesus is to be taken seriously, or he is not to be taken seriously, in which case his teaching should be dropped altogether and people should cease to call themselves Christians. To pay lip service to his name, to say that Christianity is the divinely inspired Truth, to boast of being Christians,