The Sermon on the Mount_ The Key to Success in Life - Emmet Fox [36]
But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.
Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.
(MATTHEW VI)
THE heart of this section of the Sermon is contained in verses 6 and 7, particularly the clause: Pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. The doctrine of the “Secret Place” and its importance as the controlling center of the “Kingdom,” is the essential factor of the Jesus Christ teaching.
Man is the ruler of a kingdom, although in most cases he knows it not. That kingdom is nothing less than the world of his own life and experience. The Bible is full of stories of kings and their kingdoms; of wise kings and foolish kings; of wicked kings and righteous kings; of victorious kings and defeated kings, of the rise and fall of kingdoms from every sort of cause. Jesus, in his parabolic teaching, will often take the same idea and use it as a simile. “There was a great king…” he often begins. Now each of these kings is really Everyman, studied in the various aspects of his mental outlook. The Bible is the book of Everyman. It is primarily a textbook of metaphysics, a manual of the soul’s development, and everything in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is really concerned with that development; that is to say, the spiritual awakening of the individual. You and your problems are analyzed from every possible angle, and the fundamental lessons of Spiritual Truth are put forward in all sorts of different ways to meet every condition, and every need, and almost every mood of human nature. Sometimes you are a king; sometimes you are fisherman; sometimes a gardener, a weaver, a potter, a merchant, a High Priest, a Captain of Hosts, or a beggar.
It is as a king, the absolute ruler of his own kingdom, that the Sermon on the Mount considers you; for this, after all, is the most complete of all the similes. When you know the Truth of Being, you are, as a literal fact and not merely in a rhetorical sense, the absolute monarch of your own life. You make your own conditions, and you can unmake them. You make and unmake your own health. You attract to yourself certain kinds of people and certain conditions—and others you repel. You attract to yourself riches or poverty, and peace of mind or fear—entirely in accordance with the way in which you govern your kingdom. Of course, the world does not know this. It supposes that the conditions of one’s life are largely made for him by outer circumstances, and by other people. It believes that one is at all times liable to unforeseen and unexpected accidents of one sort or another, any one of which may seriously inconvenience or even completely ruin his scheme of life. But the Truth of Being is just the contrary of all this, and, since mankind has nearly always believed the false version, we cannot wonder that history has been so full of mistakes and suffering and trouble.
Nothing but misfortune and confusion could possibly follow from the endeavor to conduct any business on false principles, or to carry out a train of reasoning from a series of erroneous premises—and this is naturally what has happened. Man has suffered because he has been deceived about the nature of life and of himself; and that is why Jesus—the Saviour of the World—said: “Know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free.” That was why he spent the years of his public life in teaching and explaining the Truth; telling us about God and man, and instructing us how to live.
If it is true, as it is, that our difficulties arise from our own wrong thinking, in the present and in the past, it may well be asked, considering the sublime level of consciousness to which Jesus had attained: Why did he have to meet difficulties from time to time—notably his terrible conflict with fear at Gethsemane, and his death upon the cross?
The