The Sermon on the Mount by Emmet Fox is a spiritual examination of Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7, where Jesus gives some of His clearest teaching concerning faith, prayer, forgiveness, judgment, provision, desire, love, the Kingdom of God, and the inward condition of the heart. Fox approaches these chapters not merely as moral commandments, but as practical spiritual principles intended to transform the person who understands and lives them.
This makes the book especially valuable for careful biblical study. Fox repeatedly searches beneath outward behavior for the inward reality Jesus is addressing, yet every interpretation must remain subject to the King James Bible itself. Scripture is the authority, Christ is the center, and the Sermon on the Mount must be allowed to say exactly what Jesus said without either weakening His promises or expanding metaphysical conclusions beyond what the text supports.
Listen to The Sermon on the Mount
Emmet Fox • Unabridged audiobook
About The Sermon on the Mount
Matthew chapters 5 through 7 contain a concentrated statement of the Kingdom Jesus preached. He speaks about the blessed, righteousness, reconciliation, purity of heart, love for enemies, prayer, forgiveness, treasure, anxiety, judgment, asking and receiving, spiritual discernment, and the difference between merely hearing His words and actually living them.
Again and again, Jesus moves beneath appearances. Murder is traced toward anger, adultery toward inward desire, religious performance toward motive, anxiety toward trust, speech toward the heart, and outward fruit toward the nature of the tree producing it.
The Kingdom Begins Within
Jesus does not describe righteousness merely as external conformity. He continually directs attention toward the heart from which outward life proceeds. A person can perform an outwardly religious action while the inward motive remains pride, fear, resentment, or desire for human approval.
This is why the Sermon on the Mount reaches deeper than behavior modification. Jesus addresses the source that eventually becomes visible as behavior.
The Beatitudes
Jesus begins with blessing. Before giving extended instruction, He describes people who are blessed even though several of their visible circumstances do not appear desirable. The poor in spirit, mourners, the meek, those hungry for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, peacemakers, and the persecuted are all addressed from the standpoint of the Kingdom.
This immediately challenges the assumption that visible circumstances alone reveal a person's spiritual condition. Someone can appear outwardly diminished while possessing something far greater inwardly.
Blessed Are They That Hunger and Thirst
Desire is present in the Sermon from the beginning. Hunger and thirst describe intense desire rather than passive indifference. Jesus does not condemn the desire for righteousness; He promises fulfillment to those who hunger for it.
Desire therefore can become a compass when its object is brought under the Kingdom. What someone continually hungers for reveals where attention and energy are being directed.
The Merciful Obtain Mercy
Jesus repeatedly reveals reciprocal patterns. Mercy moves outward and mercy returns. Giving and receiving, forgiving and forgiveness, judging and being judged all appear within the Sermon as flows rather than isolated actions.
The Kingdom therefore contains consequence without reducing God to an impersonal mechanism. The Father remains personal, while His creation contains real principles of sowing, measure, relationship, and return.
Ye Are the Light of the World
Jesus does not tell His disciples merely to seek light. He speaks identity over them.
Identity precedes instruction. They are called light, and then they are told to let that light become visible through good works.
The fruit does not create the identity. The fruit reveals it.
Jesus and the Law
Jesus makes clear that His teaching does not exist to destroy what God previously revealed. He brings the law toward fulfillment rather than contradiction.
Any interpretation of the Sermon that requires Jesus to contradict Scripture should therefore be rejected. Fulfillment takes the revelation deeper without making the earlier revelation false.
From Murder to Anger
Jesus moves from the outward act of murder toward the inward state of anger and contempt. The principle is important because outward violence normally does not begin with the physical act. Something has already been permitted to develop inwardly.
Jesus therefore addresses the energy upstream from the final manifestation. The heart matters because outward conduct eventually receives direction from what is cultivated within.
Reconciliation Before Religious Performance
Religion can become an attempt to perform correctly toward God while refusing to address what is broken between people. Jesus refuses that separation. Relationship with God should produce concrete changes in how relationships with people are handled.
The Inner Source of Sexual Sin
Jesus again moves from the external act toward inward desire.
The point is not that thought and physical action become identical in every practical consequence. The point is that unlawful conduct can already be growing at the level of desire before the body acts upon it.
The Sermon continually returns to source rather than waiting until fruit has fully matured before addressing the tree.
Let Your Communication Be Clear
Truth should not require elaborate manipulation. Clear speech reflects integrity because the word and the intention behind the word remain in agreement.
This principle reaches business, relationships, promises, contracts, leadership, and ordinary conversation. A trustworthy word has practical value.
Resist Not Evil
One of the Sermon's most difficult teachings concerns retaliation.
Jesus does not declare evil good. He refuses to allow evil to determine that the person encountering it must become the same thing. The attacker does not receive authority to manufacture hatred simply because hatred was sent outward first.
The believer can therefore confront what is wrong without allowing the wrong to reproduce its own nature within him.
Love Your Enemies
This may be one of the clearest demonstrations of spiritual freedom in the Sermon. If hatred from another person automatically produces hatred within us, the other person has effectively gained control over our inward state.
Love breaks that control. It does not require pretending wrongdoing is righteous, but it refuses to let another person's darkness determine what must flow through us.
The Father Becomes the Pattern
Jesus directs the disciples toward the Father's nature. God gives sunlight and rain without limiting every good gift only to people who have already behaved perfectly.
Sonship therefore expresses itself by increasingly reflecting the Father rather than simply reproducing whatever other people send toward us.
Be Ye Therefore Perfect
The context points toward the Father's complete love rather than anxious perfectionism. The command follows Jesus' teaching about loving enemies and the Father's generosity toward both evil and good.
The mature expression is therefore wholeness that does not become divided according to whether another person presently deserves kindness.
Do Not Perform Righteousness to Be Seen
Matthew 6 turns directly toward motive. Giving, prayer, and fasting can all be outwardly righteous while being inwardly governed by the desire for human recognition.
The same outward action can therefore flow from radically different inward sources. Jesus consistently judges deeper than appearance.
The Father Sees in Secret
The invisible matters. What no audience sees can still possess real spiritual consequence because the Father sees beyond public performance.
This frees righteous action from dependence upon applause. The work can remain valuable even when nobody recognizes it immediately.
Prayer Is Relationship, Not Performance
Jesus warns against praying primarily to be seen by men and against believing sheer repetition forces God to respond.
Prayer is not magic created through word count. The power does not come from producing enough syllables.
Your Father Knows Before You Ask
Prayer therefore cannot exist merely to inform God. The Father already knows the need. Asking becomes participation in relationship rather than transmission of missing information.
The Lord's Prayer
Jesus then gives the disciples a pattern that begins not with personal lack but with the Father, His name, His Kingdom, and His will.
Only after the Kingdom and the Father's will are established does the prayer move directly into daily provision.
Material provision therefore belongs inside prayer. Jesus does not treat earthly need as spiritually embarrassing.
Forgiveness Is Central
Forgiveness changes the flow between past and present. An offense may have happened once, yet resentment can reproduce the offense internally for years. The past remains active because consciousness keeps giving it present energy.
Forgiveness does not call evil good. It refuses to let the debt continually govern the present.
Treasure Reveals the Heart
Treasure reveals value. Whatever someone continually treats as the thing that must be possessed, protected, achieved, or obtained will naturally command attention.
Money can become treasure. Approval can become treasure. Reputation, pleasure, power, relationships, security, and success can all become treasure when identity is attached to them.
The Single Eye
A divided mind attempts to move toward opposing masters simultaneously. Singleness gives direction. Attention becomes less scattered because the person knows what governs.
This principle applies spiritually and practically. Concentrated energy produces different results from continually divided attention.
Ye Cannot Serve God and Mammon
Jesus does not say money cannot be possessed. He says mammon cannot become the master alongside God. Money is capable of serving human life, but it becomes spiritually disordered when human life begins serving it.
The distinction is between stewardship and worship.
Take No Thought for Your Life
Jesus immediately connects the question of masters with anxiety concerning provision.
Anxiety acts as though constant mental rehearsal is necessary to keep life secure. Jesus calls attention away from that system of fear and toward the Father.
Consider the Fowls
Jesus' argument rests upon value and Fatherhood. Provision is not presented as the result of an impersonal attraction mechanism. The heavenly Father feeds, and the disciples are told to consider what that reveals.
Your Father Knows What You Need
The need is acknowledged. Jesus does not pretend food, clothing, shelter, money, or physical provision are unreal. He simply refuses to allow them to replace the Father as source.
Seek First the Kingdom
The order is decisive. Jesus does not remove the things; He calls them additions. The Kingdom is first, while material provision occupies a subordinate position.
Take No Thought for Tomorrow
Fear continually attempts to live inside an imagined tomorrow. It borrows possible future trouble and spends today's energy reacting to something that has not yet happened.
Jesus returns consciousness to the present. Today's responsibility can be addressed today without requiring the mind to carry every possible future simultaneously.
Judge Not
Matthew 7 begins by confronting judgment.
Jesus immediately describes measure and reciprocity. The standard continually used toward others becomes connected with what returns.
The Mote and the Beam
Jesus does not eliminate discernment. He corrects hypocrisy by requiring the person judging another to examine himself first.
The final result is clearer sight, not permanent blindness toward every distinction between right and wrong.
Ask, Seek, Knock
Jesus then gives one of His broadest invitations concerning prayer and pursuit.
Each word contains movement. Ask speaks desire. Seek directs attention. Knock introduces action.
Passivity is therefore not the model. Faith moves.
Every One That Asketh Receiveth
Jesus deliberately uses expansive language. The passage should not be weakened by immediately inserting restrictions Christ did not state. It should be read within the relationship Jesus Himself gives: children asking their Father.
The Father Gives Good Things
This reveals the source behind asking and receiving. Faith is not attempting to manipulate an unwilling universe. The believer asks a Father whom Jesus describes as willing to give good things.
The Golden Rule
Jesus converts desire into action. What do you desire to receive from other people? Respect, honesty, generosity, patience, service, fairness, forgiveness, reliability, kindness? Begin becoming a source of the same qualities.
This does not guarantee every individual responds identically. It establishes the nature of what flows through you.
The Narrow Way
The Kingdom is expansive in promise but narrow in source. Jesus does not present every possible path as identical merely because all paths are sincerely chosen.
Truth gives freedom precisely because truth excludes what is false.
Know Them by Their Fruits
Jesus gives fruit as a practical test of teaching, character, and spiritual claims. Words may sound powerful, but what does the system actually produce?
- Does it produce love?
- Does it produce faith?
- Does it produce freedom?
- Does it produce integrity?
- Does it produce useful action?
- Does it produce dependence upon God or worship of technique?
Not Every Spiritual Claim Is the Kingdom
Jesus warns that spiritual language itself is insufficient.
Even extraordinary claims of spiritual power are not allowed to replace relationship with Christ and obedience to the Father.
Results alone therefore cannot become the final test of truth.
The House Upon the Rock
Jesus concludes the Sermon with an image that summarizes everything before it.
Hearing alone is incomplete. Understanding alone is incomplete. The teaching becomes structural when it is lived.
The storm reveals the foundation.
Faith Must Become Embodied
A foundation is most clearly revealed under pressure. It is easy to claim trust while conditions cooperate. Difficulty exposes what has actually become structural within the person.
This turns circumstances into a mirror without requiring every storm to have been personally created.
The Sermon and the Mirror Principle
Jesus continually uses outward behavior to reveal inward source. Words reveal the heart, fruit reveals the tree, treasure reveals value, anxiety reveals what is functioning as source, judgment reveals the measure being carried, and storms reveal the foundation.
The mirror is diagnostic. It shows what still requires renewal, forgiveness, faith, wisdom, or practical action.
The Sermon and Faith
Faith runs throughout Matthew 5 through 7 even when the word itself is not always present. Jesus continually asks the disciple to live from the Father rather than from visible appearances alone. The Father sees in secret, knows the need before prayer, feeds the birds, clothes the lilies, gives good things, forgives, and rewards.
The Sermon therefore presents a world governed by more than what physical sight can presently confirm.
The Sermon and Identity
Jesus continually speaks to the disciples from relationship. God is repeatedly called “your Father.” The hearer is not merely an isolated mind trying to master universal laws. He is being taught how to live as one whose source is the Father.
The Gospel later reveals this identity even more deeply through union with Christ.
The Sermon and the New Creature
The Sermon exposes how impossible true righteousness becomes if the project is merely polishing external behavior while leaving the inward source unchanged. The Gospel ultimately answers that problem through death and resurrection in Christ.
The believer does not simply receive a longer list of rules. He receives another life from which the righteousness of the Kingdom can increasingly become fruit.
The Sermon and Grace
The Sermon should not become another system of condemnation in which every imperfect thought proves the believer has failed completely. Jesus reveals the true depth of righteousness, while the Gospel reveals the grace through which new life becomes possible.
The mirror exposes what needs transformation. Grace prevents the exposure from becoming a new identity.
A Practical Way to Study the Sermon
Read Matthew 5 through 7 directly.
Allow Jesus' own words to remain the governing source before accepting anyone else's interpretation.
Look beneath outward behavior.
Ask what inward state Jesus is addressing through each command.
Notice every reference to the Father.
Prayer, provision, reward, forgiveness, love, and identity continually return toward God as source.
Observe reciprocal principles.
Mercy, judgment, forgiveness, giving, asking, seeking, and measure all reveal flows connecting inward and outward life.
Examine your treasure.
Notice what currently receives enough value that your attention naturally follows it.
Watch anxiety.
Fear often reveals where an external thing has begun functioning as source.
Ask specifically.
Jesus does not condemn desire. He commands asking, seeking, and knocking.
Forgive.
Refuse to allow yesterday's debt to continually reproduce itself within today's consciousness.
Judge fruit.
Examine what a teaching, belief, habit, relationship, or spiritual practice actually produces.
Do the sayings.
Build the teaching into conduct so that the foundation remains when storms arrive.
Reading Emmet Fox Through Scripture
Fox is strongest when he forces the reader to take Jesus' words seriously as practical spiritual teaching rather than reducing the Sermon to inspirational poetry. The Sermon unquestionably reaches into thought, motive, desire, expectation, forgiveness, faith, provision, and the hidden condition of the heart.
Scripture must still govern the interpretation. Human thought matters without becoming God. The Father remains the source of supply. Prayer remains relationship rather than mechanical technique. Jesus is not merely explaining impersonal spiritual laws; He is revealing the Kingdom and the Father while speaking with His own authority.
- Does the interpretation preserve Jesus' actual words?
- Does the Father remain the source?
- Does Christ remain central?
- Does faith remain relational rather than mechanical?
- Does the teaching produce love and forgiveness?
- Does it preserve grace?
- Does it lead toward useful action?
- What fruit does the interpretation actually produce?
The Central Principle
The Sermon on the Mount reveals that the Kingdom cannot be separated from the inward life. Anger, lust, motive, treasure, anxiety, forgiveness, judgment, faith, desire, and trust all operate beneath visible behavior. Jesus continually addresses the root so that the fruit can change.
The order remains clear. The Father is the source. His Kingdom comes first. Prayer enters relationship with Him. Faith asks, seeks, and knocks. Love refuses to reproduce hatred. Forgiveness breaks the continuation of old debts. The heart is purified, the mind becomes single, and outward fruit increasingly reveals what governs within.
Hear the sayings of Christ. Test every interpretation by Scripture. Build upon the rock. Then let the storm reveal whether the words have remained ideas or have become the foundation from which life is actually lived.