A.W. Tozer Talks

“Venerate All God’s Creation”

Venerate all God’s Creation

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 14, 1954

First Peter, the second chapter, the seventeenth verse, Peter says, honor all men, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king. Now he’s writing in a flowing rhythm of ideas, but what he says is so compact, so profound that I have to break it up into pieces, and I will simply break out verse 17 there, as though it stood alone, and let the admonition of the Apostle come home to us, honor all men, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king.

Now, we’ll never understand anything very well until we learn that the right understanding of existence is theological, that it’s only as things are seen from the sanctuary that they are seen in focus.

We can see bits of disconnected truth here and there, and call it by various names, botany, astronomy, geology, and several dozen others. They are the study of bits, shattered fragments of truth, broken off from the main sphere of truth. But we’ll never understand them, and we’ll never understand their relation to each other, or their relation to us, until we go into the sanctuary, and there in the presence of the Holy God, recognize that the key to the meaning of existence is a theological key. It is the Theos, the God who gives meaning to life, and to all things that we know.

Now, there are two very prominent and bold branches of study which have claimed to understand life, or at least have tried to understand it, and are trying to understand it. One is philosophy, and the other is science.

Philosophy is reason, searching for the answer to the riddle of existence in its own head. For that’s where men begin, you know, in their own heads. There are two, the philosophers have two ideas. One is that all ideas originate when inside your head, and that if you were born into a vacuum and spent your life in a vacuum, and never had any contact with your five senses with the outside world, you’d still generate ideas, because ideas generate inside your head. Now that’s one school of thought.

The other school of thought is that an idea never generated inside your head since the beginning of time. They only are there because they have been put there by something on the outside. You have felt something, smelled something, touched something, heard something, seen something. Your five senses have gotten in contact with the outside world, and so you’ll get an idea. If they can’t agree, I don’t know how they’re going to help me. They don’t even know where their ideas originate.

But nevertheless, they’re trying to understand, and I’m not speaking slightingly of them, because I suppose it’s better to sit down and try to think your way to an answer to the riddle of existence than it would be to attend a horse race or do something else that would harm you. But they, because they’re forced to go inside their own heads, they have never learned the answer to the riddle of existence.

And of course, the other major answer, or attempted answer, is science. And science is reason searching for the riddle of existence, the answer to it, not in ideas and in their own heads, but out in nature. It is knowledge obtained by observation and experiment. They do not begin with their heads; they begin with the nature outside. They weigh, and they measure, and they analyze, and they experiment, and they observe, and they put it down, and they check it against other observations and other experiments, and then they arrive at some kind of truth. And this, as long as it touches nature, it’s a valid truth.

Science gave us these lights, they had to know what they were doing. Science put your automobile on wheels, they had to know what they were doing. Science built the bridges across which you will go on your way home, they had to know something.

So, we’re not saying they don’t know, we’re only saying that what they know is a shattered fragment of truth, not the truth itself. The key is God. Hence, the godly man is the real sage.

I’ve said this before, but I must say it again, both for emphasis and because it fits in here like a hand in a glove, that you and I, as evangelical Christians, must get over a bad habit we have. And that bad habit is looking up respectfully to the man who is supposed to be very learned.

My friend, the wisest man in the world is the man who knows the most about God. And the only real sage worthy of the name is the one who realizes that the answer to life is a theological answer and not a scientific one or a philosophical one. It is a theological one. You begin with God, and when you begin with God, then you understand everything in its proper context, and everything fits into shape and form when you begin with God.

So instead of our humbling ourselves and looking up with meek deference to the man of learning, we should remember that he is only learned in shattered fragments of truth, whereas the simplest Christian that came into the kingdom day before yesterday is learned at the center of truth. He knows God. And in knowing God, he knows potentially more than all the teachers could ever teach us, because they’re on the outside looking in and he’s on the inside looking out.

Now, Peter wrote here some practical things, and I want to talk about them with the understanding that the understanding of it all has got to be a theological one. We’ve got to begin with God and put God in there and recognize that God belongs in the middle of all this, and that all doors must be opened with the key called God, faith in God, and that any understanding at all of life must be divinely given and must have God as the great central pillar that bears up the universe.

Peter gave us here four things to do, and I want, in order to get it before you, I want to prefix one which I draw from the entire Scripture. I will take the four that Peter has given us here, prefix one to have five for the reasons that will appear and talk to you about the five things that the Christian should do if he is to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. The five things are to venerate all things, honor all men, love all Christians, fear God, and honor the authorities.

Now, those are the five things. We’ll begin with the one that I borrow from the Old Testament, and I’m sure Peter wouldn’t care because he quotes from that Old Testament, too, venerate all things.

Now, the Old Testament is literally a rhapsody on the natural creation. You go to Moses and get away from the Levitical order and let Moses begin to soar, as he does in the Book of Deuteronomy, and you will find that Moses was acutely conscious of the presence of God in all creation. Go on to the Book of Job and go to the latter sections of the book of Job, and in the mouth of God they have placed language there that is sublime as descriptions of the world around us.

Then go on to the Book of Psalms, and you’ll find David literally dancing with ecstatic delight as he gazes out upon the wonder of God’s world. And go on into the Book of Isaiah, and you will find such lofty imagery there, and yet imagery that is not fanciful nor flighty, but that sticks very close to the natural facts as Isaiah observed them.

And come on into the New Testament and soar on through the Epistles and on to the Book of Revelation itself, and you will find a creation from the creatures and beasts and elders and angels around the throne of God, down to the simplest believer, all engaged in admiring God and the works of God.

Take for instance that 104th Psalm. I do not suppose that there is in all collected literature anything that is so rhapsodic, so ecstatic, so elevated, so glowing with religious rapture as the 104th Psalm, as the man of God contemplates nature. He begins, Bless the Lord, O my soul, O Lord, my God, Thou art very great, Thou art clothed with honor and majesty. Thou surroundest Thyself with light as with a garment.

Then from there on he begins to describe all in divine context with God in the center of it, like a shining light, he begins to describe all the world that he knew around about him. He said that God had planted the earth in the pillars of the earth deep, and that the waters had rushed up so high they had gone over the mountains, and God had rebuked the waters, and they had been frightened and fled away and collected themselves together into seas, and the dry land had appeared. And that water then had gone into the sky as mists, and those very clouds were the chariots of God in which He rode as He went round the earth, looking at His creation and admiring the works of His own hand.

And then up at the tops of the mountain and out in the blue, blue sky, the chill winds chill the mists, and they come down, watering the hills below from the chambers of God, pouring out the bottles of His refreshing waters upon the thirsty ground below. And that water then seeps away and little trickles and then into larger streams and then on out into rivers and out to the sea.

And beside those rivers, says the enraptured psalmist, the green grass grows, and the wild ass goes stomping in of a hot noon day and slakes his thirst in the moving stream and drinks of the cooling waters, and then gets up lazily and goes out to crop the succulent grass or lie by the hedge somewhere and just enjoy the works of God. But he doesn’t stop there. He tells us that and raises our sights until we see standing on the rocks in the hills yonder the wild goat, which is his home.

And we see him silhouetted against the sky yonder, standing majestic and alone, looking down like a monarch upon all the valleys and the little hills below. And then he lowers our sights and lets us see and we smile as we see the little tailless conies as they run into the rocks for their hiding place. Then he says that the pine tree grows and the fir and the cedar and in the branches of the cedar the birds build their nest and sing among the boughs and that the creatures get up at night.

When the moon rides high in the sky, the nocturnal beasts come out of their dens and move out and roar their defiance to the wide world and hunt their prey. And then when the moon goes down and the sun begins to come up like a bridegroom adorned, then the beasts slink back away into their cooled dens and lazily sleep away the hot day. But, he says half humorously, man ariseth and goes forth unto his work until the evening.

Then when the evening shades prevail, the moon takes up its wondrous tale, then man goes back and lazes away the long cool night and the beasts walk around and search for their prey. He gives us these pictures and then goes on to tell us of the creatures that cry to God and God gives them their food. The ravens croak and God gives them the grain and the young lions roar and God gives them their meat.

That 104th Psalm, I say, is a rhapsodic description of nature. The man who wrote it was intensely in love with everything around about him, the very leaf that quivers there on the branch and the very bug that lays eggs under its green fold, everything the man of God loved. And therefore, I say that the Old Testament would teach us, and we can properly introduce here this prefixed point, venerate all things.

My friend, it is a sad and lamentable fact that you and I are like zoo lions born in captivity and that we of this 20th century that are born in hospitals, walk on sidewalks, die again in hospitals, and are taken out by machinery and laid away in memorial parks by morticians. We never get our feet in the soil, we never get down where we can feel the impulses of nature getting into us, and we rarely lift our eyes to look at God’s city above, except when an airplane goes by or we wonder whether we ought to wear our overshoes, whether it’s going to rain or not. We have lost the capacity to wonder, and that is what’s wrong with us.

Do you know what I believe, my friends? I believe that if the Holy Ghost would come again upon people as of ancient times and congregations were visited by the sweet, hot, fiery breath of Pentecost once more, that we would not only be greater Christians and holier souls, but we would be greater poets and greater artists and greater lovers of God and of his universe. And instead of living in a zoo and eating out of a can, we would feel ourselves a part of God Almighty’s great universe, and we would enjoy the return of the birds and the cloud that sails across the sky. And like the simple, naive king of Israel, when we see the cloud, we would not say it’s going to rain, we would say there goes God riding in His cloudy chariot.

And when the blue sky shuts down, we would say He clothes Himself with a garment, and we would see God in everything. But we don’t see God in anything anymore, only Bible institutes and Bibles. We don’t see God in anything but the saints and the mystics and those who walked with God and wrote our great hymns and our great books of devotion and blessed mankind with their holy presences and left behind them trails of light and beauty.

They were all enraptured with everything around them. They venerated everything. There wasn’t a common bush that was anywhere. There wasn’t a common hill. They were all hills of God. There wasn’t a common mountain. They were mountains of the Almighty. There wasn’t a common cloud. They were the chariots of God. There wasn’t a common wind. It was the panoply where God Almighty walked, the vast beauty where God walked on the wings of the wind. We’ve lost it, and I tell you we ought to go back to it again.

I think what we need, ladies and gentlemen, is a compound of Quakerism, Pentecostalism, Methodism, and Calvinism. And I believe that if we had them all shaken together and took a good dose three times a day before our God, we’d be a better Christian than we are. But instead of our venerating all things, we take everything as something usable.

The utilitarian philosophy has grabbed the world. There lies that great hill out yonder, beautiful as can be. Down where below where I was born, you could see it from the little house and barn that were my little world when I was a little boy. And you could see those great blue hills there, and sometimes they would be blue and hazy, and other times the mist would lift and the sun would shine so brightly on them that you could almost make out the leaves across yonder hill and the green patches that lay between. Nobody ever paid any attention to it so far as I know. I don’t think anybody ever took a photograph of it.

In all my fourteen years of living around there, as a boy, I never heard one lone man say, isn’t that a beautiful thing? Glory be to God, never a man. I don’t think any artist ever painted it. I don’t think anybody ever wrote a sonnet about it. It just lay there in its green beauty and caught the moving shades and lights as the sun passed along in the clouds between.

And then one day they discovered that underneath that green carpet of beauty there was coal, and they could get that coal by stripping off the top. And so the strippers went in there, coal strippers, and with their huge earth-moving machinery that’s got so much attention in later times, they went in and stripped the whole top off the beautiful hills, knocked down the lovely trees and ripped up the green bushes and destroyed the birds’ nests and the rabbit warrens, and they turned into a huge desert, whole thousands of acres of beauty so beautiful, so gracious, that the heart of a Christian man ought to beat high by looking at it.

And if I were to go back, as the animal is said to do, to go back to the place where he was born to die, if I were to go back to the little farm above La Jose, Pennsylvania, the town that nobody knows, I would be forced to look not upon the green and brown beauty that once was the hills beyond the little creek, but I would be forced to look at a desert of obscenity and vandalism.

Man has only one interest in life, and that is utility. Can I use it? Will it turn into money? Will it mean money in the bank to me? Will it mean more money and property? And he’ll go in and violate the sanctuary of God together. He’ll send his machinery in and rip God’s beautiful world apart in order to get at some poor and low-grade coal that lies just below the surface.

Well, that’s only an example, and I’m not mad, I’m just grieved. And I don’t know there isn’t some indignation there, too. When God makes it, it’s lovely. When man comes in, he always turns it into a dump, because God Almighty puts it there first for its beauty and then for its usefulness. But man cares nothing for its beauty. He thinks only of its usefulness and ruins its beauty to get it.

But we Christians oughtn’t to live like that, and we oughtn’t to think like that. I don’t say it’s a moral crime. I don’t say that it is a sin to strip a whole countryside to get coal. But I do say that it is a symptom of a tragic lack of appreciation. Nobody’s wondering about anything. Nobody looks up in happy surprise.

As little as I think of Christmas, as we have degraded it in our day, it’s been a never-failing delight to me all the years to see little children on Christmas morning. Something that you bought and paid for and brought home and rather more or less took as a matter of course. It is a source of sudden spontaneous and wonderful delight to a child. And to see the incredible look on their face, the incredulous look, rather, on their face, it’s incredible that they should have a thing like that. Everything is full of wonder and beauty.

I wonder if Jesus might not have included that in His idea when He said, except you be converted and become as little children, you shall never enter the kingdom of God. There is the ability to wonder and worship. For worship is wonder, and wonder is worship. And when we turn our worshiping wonder toward God, then we’re worshiping God in the right sense of the word. O Lord, my God, thou art very great. Thou art clothed with majesty. Garment of the light is thy garment. Thou clothest thyself with light as with robe and rightest upon the wings of the wind.

So therefore, we Christians ought to live in a fairer land. We ought to live in a wonderful world. And as Thomas Traherne says, we ought to rise every morning in heaven and we ought to see the very dew on the grass as something of absolutely wonderful to behold.

Mr. McAfee and I were eating out here in the far south side after the broadcast yesterday and we saw a robin, a great big upholstered, beautiful, fresh robin with a breast as red as a tangerine or redder. And hopping around there just, I don’t know where she’d come from or whether she’d stayed all winter, but she sure had on her best Easter gown. And I got a lot of joy out of that. I said, now there’s so many things I can’t enjoy.

Playing games drives me completely to distraction. And many things that people invent that they want me to, “will you sit down and play Scrabble with me, Mr. Tozer?” No, of course not. I wouldn’t play Scrabble with you because Scrabble has been invented by, it is popped out of somebody’s empty head, I wouldn’t be bothered with it.

But I got relaxed and felt younger as I sat and watched that big bird. And then there were two gray squirrels and they also were fat, just, I suppose, ready for the spring and spring mating. And they chased each other like two kids, round and round and round. And one would run up a pole and literally spring out and lie on his feet and spring up. But he wasn’t doing anything. He was just exercising, letting off steam. He was delighted that God Almighty had ever made him. And he didn’t know enough to say so. He couldn’t have joined in singing a hymn. But in his little squirrelish heart, he was glorifying God the Father Almighty and Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.

So, we ought to venerate everything and walk around in the world as those who are in the palace of the King. And everywhere we look, everywhere we look, we see something new and fresh. God put it there, so venerate all things as part of the text.

Godless philosophies create godless worlds. And when we forget that God made us, then down we go. And we forget our second point, honor all men. For here we have it, honor all men.

Why do we honor all men? You say, I know men that don’t deserve any honor. Well, yes and no. They do and they don’t. Let me explain. We honor all men because they were originally made in the image of God. And faith knows their true value.

The godly chaplain who sees that savage, vicious, snarling killer, hard as nails, shut away there waiting the one moment when he shall go out to die a few weeks hence. If he had no faith, he’d turn his back in cold disdain and leave the snarling killer to turn in on his own heart and eat himself to death.

But the man of God, if he’s a true man of God, and thank God we have many of them as chaplains, the man of God knows what the poor, snarling man doesn’t know. He knows that even though his hands are stained with human blood, he was once made in the image of God. He knows that even though the dirt and silt and unspeakable filth of sin has washed over his soul and left its marks there, he was still made in the image of God.

And the chaplain honors the man about to die because he was once made in God’s image. And he was in the mind of God when God said, let us make man in our image and in the image of God made he him. I say the godless philosophies forget this and they make the state everything and the individual nothing. Christianity reverses the order altogether and makes the individual everything and the state to be the servant of the individual.

Honor all men, low concepts of humanity always turn us into beasts. Hitler never could have led his Nazi Germany to victory, temporary victory, if he had not first had his propagandists to instill into the minds of the people the thought that Christianity was false and that there was no God, or if there were a God, he was some ancient god of some Germanic Valhalla. And because they had no high opinion of man, they built their Nazi state, which thank God crashed down under the hammering guns of the West.

And now in communist China and communist Russia, and in her many poor slave satellites, we have the philosophy that makes man nothing and the state everything. That’s why they can invent the idea of the wave upon wave business. That is, because they have unlimited manpower in China and in Russia, and China was, but could be in Russia if we ever go to war, they forget those are human beings, they forget they were made in the image of God, they’re simply gunpowder, they’re bullets.

And so, they throw them in wave upon wave. And I’ve talked to those who have seen them, to one particularly who went through the hell and horror of it, and he said, I cannot describe the coming in of those Chinese soldiers in any other language than that of a snowstorm in a wind, a windy blizzard. There would be waves of them, thousands of them move in like a blizzard, and then a little in another wave move in.

And he said, our men with their machine guns mowed them down like grass, and they piled in the next wave over that pile, and they were mowed down, and the next over that, and the next over that, each mown down as they moved in. And the strategy behind all that grew out of the philosophy behind that. And the philosophy was, men are nothing. Pour them in and kill them. The idea that they were made in the image of God is ancient poppycock. And that’s the strategy behind all statism and totalitarianism. It is the individual’s nothing–he’s expendable.

But oh, what a difference. When our loving Savior took a little baby in his arm, a little baby, maybe with a runny nose and certainly with a drooling lip, I never saw one that wasn’t drooling, until he was a year old; Jesus took that little baby and patted his little head and blessed him. He was an individual. He wasn’t blessing humanity. To God there’s no such thing as humanity, they’re just people.

And people taken together is what we call humanity, and they’re people. And Jesus picked out the little fellows and blessed them. And the happy-faced, timid mothers brought them and looked at each other and grinned in delight as Jesus put his hands on their little bald heads and said, God bless you, sonny, or God bless you, daughter. He was saying to the whole world, people are worthwhile. I love people. God made people.

And every individual, whether he be red or yellow, black or white around the world, whether he be a poor Chinese communist or a man in a death cell waiting in the electric chair, whether she be a harlot walking the streets of the ghetto, or the colonel’s lady sleeping in her silken bed, she’s a microcosm, a little world all by herself, all by himself, man or woman, boy or girl, old or young, little microcosms, the sum of the world in that individual man. That’s what you’re worth to God. And that’s what they’re all worth to God.

And that’s why Peter said, honor all men. You don’t honor them because they’re liars, you grieve because they’re liars. You don’t honor them because they’re robbers, you grieve that they’re robbers.  You don’t honor them because they live for the world and gamble and drink, and you honor them in spite of it, but you honor them because they have in their souls, the little microcosm, the little world. Honor all men.

Communists can’t tell us anything about racial equality. Mrs. Roosevelt can’t tell me anything about racial equality. We Christians have known all down the centuries that there isn’t a deformed black boy lying half-starved in a mud hut deep in the Kisidugi regions of Africa, but what is more valuable than all the stars that shine? We’ve known that all the time. We Christians have valued the individual. We’ve honored men because God made them.

And they’ve turned on us because we have white churches. And they’ve said, you’re violating the teachings of your savior because you’re looking down on people. I look down on nobody. I don’t look up to very many either. I look out on everybody because God made them all.

And red or yellow, black or white, they’re God’s handiwork. But God’s helped me from ever looking down on a man because his skin is black or because his eyes slant differently from mine or because his hair is tight and curly. God forbid it. We’re all alike. And God has made of one blood all men to dwell on the earth.

And that’s why I always feel embarrassed when a maid, colored maid, comes in when I’m staying in hotels or when I come in unexpectedly and find a humble, cringing, colored maid telling me, she’s so sorry, she’s so sorry, she’d be right out, sir, she’d be right out, sir. Just a moment, sir, and she’d be right out. Why should she be sorry at me? Who am I? God made that colored maid too. She has much education. She probably lives in a hut someplace. She’s just as worthy as I am just as worthy as you.

And that’s why I can’t for the life of me ever feel good when I’m being served by somebody. A beautiful Spanish Mexican type of woman down in McAllen, Texas, in the Las Palmas Hotel, where I stayed for numbers of times, came to the door and I wasn’t ready to leave. And I tried to tell her I’ll be out in 10 minutes. And she said, no sabe, senor, no sabe, senor, no sabe, senor. And she went away embarrassed, and I was embarrassed too.

So, somebody said if they ever, she ever says no sabe again, say poco tempo, and that means a little time yet. And I remembered that, and I’m very prudent. Poco tempo. And they said, if you want a little time, just say poco tempo, senorita.

So she said, she’s going to come back later, so I have poco tempo the next time. I don’t know whether she understood or not with my Dutch accent, but anyway, I don’t feel good being waited on, and I don’t feel good waiting on anybody. Except, of course, as we in love wait on each other. That’s something else again.

Jesus our Lord waited on folks and ministered to them and loved them, and He knew in His deep holy heart that He was so exalted above them as exalted as the mountain peak above the lowly anthill below, and yet He stooped and washed their feet. So, if we serve, we do not serve because we think we’re beneath anybody. We serve because we love God and people for God’s sake.

And our fine missionaries from this very church, cultured, well-educated, fine people that have been brought up in good homes in this city, are over there washing sores, our Lois Benke, brought up in a fine Christian cultured home, washing sores over there.

Does she do it because she feels she’s beneath them? No, but because they were made in the image of God, and she loves them for God’s sake. And yet does she stoop, I wonder? I wonder if she thinks she stoops. I don’t think she does. I believe she considers, as I’ve said this morning, that we’re all one, and God has made of all blood men to dwell on the face of the earth, and it’s a privilege in Jesus Christ to wait on each other for Christ’s sake.

That is one thing. It’s quite another to take a lick, spittle, hand-licking attitude that I am beneath this big man, or a supercilious, proud attitude, he is beneath me. So, either one’s dangerous, and I don’t want to fall into either trap. More on this next week. Amen.

“Who is He That Will Harm You?”

Who Is He That Will Harm You?

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 16, 1954

And who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good?

Now that is a rhetorical question, and a rhetorical question, as you know, is one that carries its answer in itself, you don’t have to answer it. For the answer that this question carries, who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good? The answer is simply, no one. It answers itself.

Now Paul says something about the same in Romans 8.35, let me read. He says, verse 33, who, verse 34, who, verse 35, who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us, for I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I emphasize the personal pronoun, who, three times, in order that you might see how the Holy Spirit uses language. He says, who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? Who is he that condemneth? Who shall separate us? Those are personal pronouns implying personality. But then he uses neutral things here. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor principalities, nor things, showing that when he says who, he includes not only the persons who might want to harm us, but things that might want to harm us.

And this gives me my thesis for the morning hour. I will state it, and then at least hope that I may be able to prove it. It is simply that nothing can harm a good man, neither persons, nor things, nor circumstances. Nothing can harm a good man, or woman. Now, if you want to take down the gist of the sermon, and for any reason at all you feel you must go now, you will have had the sermon. That is it. Nothing can harm a good man.

Now I want to talk a little about what it means to be harmed. Because I never like to use words that I am not sure my hearers understand. If I use a word meaning one thing and you hear it and give it some other meaning, you and I might as well be talking Chinese.

So, I define the word harm, or harmed, in my own language. I didn’t even look in Webster. I thought this up myself for purposes of this sermon, that to harm is to debase in quality. That is one meaning of the word harm.

Harm is done to gold, for instance, if it were possible to do it. If gold could be debased by being made silver, that would be harming the gold. And if the silver could be debased by being made iron, that, on the other hand, would be harming the silver. And if we went on to debase the iron by making it lead, that would be debasing the iron. And then if we made the lead clay, that would be debasing it still more. It would be a deterioration in quality. That would be to harm a thing or a person.

And then the second definition I will give it is that harm would mean to reduce in dimension or amount. A building, for instance, say an office building that has a thousand offices in it, had a fire or a bombing or an earthquake, and great sections, wings of the building were destroyed so that it was reduced to say a hundred offices or fifty offices, that would be harming the building in that it would be reducing its dimensions and its numbers or amount.

Then when we come to human beings, we would say that harm means to prevent the fulfillment of our destiny. Most people don’t know it, but you amount to something. God made you in His image, and you have a destiny to fulfill. And harming you would mean to stymie that destiny somehow and to block its fulfillment.

And secondly, it would mean to block the accomplishment of our appointed task. God has appointed a task for all of us, and if somehow you can be cheated out of the fulfilling of your task, you’ve been harmed, or it means lowering in value. If somehow or other, someone or something can get hold of me and debase me and devaluate me so that I no longer signify in the eternal scheme of things as high as I did before, but that I am reduced in value, I am cheapened like money, devaluated, then I have been harmed.

Now, on that definition, I say that nothing can harm a good man or woman that follows that which is good. Nothing can debase his quality, nothing can reduce his dimensions, nothing can prevent the fulfillment of his destiny, nothing can block the accomplishment of his appointed task, and nothing can lower his value before God and the universe.

Now I say these things cannot harm a good man. They cannot happen to him. Only sin can debase us, only sin can deteriorate us, and if we deal with sin, we may be perfectly sure that nothing else can get to us. That is, nobody can be reduced in size by anything that anybody can do to him. You can’t get any smaller.

I remember years ago the sharp-tongued MacArthur said about a certain man, he said he’s getting smaller and smaller every day trying to get big enough to fill his job. And you can make yourself smaller and smaller if you want to do it. You can debase yourself. You can reduce your size and your moral dimensions, but nobody can do it to you, and nothing or a combination of things can reduce you.

And then think of our destiny as a human being made in the image of God. We have a higher position. I have often said and repeated that there is a morbid humility that is dishonoring to God Almighty. God made me in His image, and outside of sin I have absolutely nothing to apologize for.

This belly-scraping kind of humility that crawls like a paddle spaniel over the sidewalk and says, excuse me for living, I’ll die as soon as I get around to it.  I’m no good, I’m no body; that kind of thing dishonors God Almighty. Who art thou, O man, to speak against the Potter that made thee, and the carpenter that build a house? Who art thou to find fault with the house? God made you, and He made you higher than the angels, in that He said about you what He never said about an angel, that He made you in His own image. You have only one thing to be sorry for and ashamed of, and that is the sin that marred that image.

So you have a destiny and a high moral calling as a human being, and I ask you, who can change that? Who can unmake that image in you? Who can make you anything less than God intended you to be, except your own self and sin?

Then there is our appointed task. Everybody has an appointed task. I never believed in this little orphan Annie conception of a human being. I never believed that we were orphaned in childhood and that somehow cut loose from our moorings we float, driven by one wind and another, and changed and twisted by all cross currents, and that we have no home and no beginning and no ending and no certain dwelling place. All that is deism or agnosticism, but it isn’t Christianity and it isn’t in the Bible.

The Bible teaches there is a sovereign God who has appointed the ways of man, and it teaches that you and I are dearer to God than the apple of His eye, and it teaches that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, and it teaches that the very second Person of the Triune God came down and was made in the image of mortal flesh that He might redeem us.

God would not do that for a creature that was any less than infinitely valuable. And if you imagine that anybody can take away from that value, can make you anything less than you are, you are tragically and sadly mistaken. And the purpose of this sermon is to try to correct your error. No, lowering us in value can’t be. Nobody can do it. Here we stand.

And you say, all right, then what is this, Mr. Tozer, universalism? Do you believe that all men everywhere are lost or saved, that are lost will be saved? Now how did you get that idea? I don’t believe anything of the sort, but I believe that no external circumstance can harm me, and I believe that nobody outside me can reduce me in value nor in any wise hurt me, but I believe that I can hurt myself. I believe that I can harm my own soul, and the very things I’ve said nobody on the outside can do, I can do inside my own heart if I don’t watch myself.

Now I not only believe that nobody can harm me, I believe that nobody can harm anybody else. We use language very foolishly. One man cheats another man, we say he did him an injury. One man starts a slander about another man, we say he harmed that man’s reputation, but we’re using words very carelessly, my friends. The simple fact is nobody can harm anybody else. All he can do is to put temptation in his way and make it possible for him to harm himself.

Now I’ll give you Bible illustrations of this. You remember there was Adam and Eve way back in the garden, and someone will be thinking out ahead of me and say, how do you get that way, sir? The devil harmed Adam and Eve. I reply, the devil did nothing of the sort. He did not harm Adam and Eve. The devil simply told Adam and Eve how they could harm themselves, and they were fools enough to accept the proposition.

If they had stood on their own piety and believed their God, there would have been no harm done to either one of them, and it would not have been said the devil harmed them, and they would not have been harmed. But they accepted the proposition that they should harm themselves, and so they harmed themselves. But unless you open the gate and let the devil in, he is totally harmless, and he can’t injure anybody except as he is allowed to get in.

Now later on that same devil, remembering that he had succeeded in tempting the first Adam to harm himself, he came to the second Adam and started the same nefarious scheme. But how far did he get with the second Adam? He didn’t get anywhere, for the first Adam would not harm himself. The second Adam, I mean, the first one did, but our Lord Jesus Christ refused to do it, and He stood on His own spirituality and His own faith and said, it is written. And the devil went away red-faced because he had not succeeded in causing the second and last Adam to harm Himself. Jesus Christ knew better. He would not do it, and so nobody harmed Him, and nobody could harm Him, and the devil couldn’t harm Him.

I have never been a very devil-conscious preacher. I have always been a wee bit afraid of these people who are in rapport with the dark world. I don’t believe in visiting the underworld, not even for purposes of writing an article. I think we ought to stay out away from the underworld. Well, that old madam so-and-so with the rag around her head telling fortunes in a dirty hole under the sidewalk, let her alone. Stay away from her. What do you want to go in there for?

And unless you’re taking the gospel and having services, what do you want to be down on West Madison Street for? What do you want to be down there for in the first place? Why hang around with cutthroats and bums and droppers and gunmen. Stay away from them. And don’t be jittery and jumpy about them. Since we’ve had Council here, we’ve had one gang murder and two kidnappings. But they didn’t bother me, and they didn’t bother you, and they wouldn’t bother you.

So why should we be always devil-conscious? I’ve met people that were in such contact with the devil that he was breathing on their neck all the time. And they were always praying, and almost frantically praying, O Lord, deliver me and help me. I conceive that sometime during your lifetime you might have a run-in with the devil where you would have to really get down and pray, but for the most part, if you will forget about the devil and focus your attention on the eternal, everlasting, victorious Son of God, you’ll break the devil’s heart and render him powerless.

So, nobody outside can hurt you. You go around looking over your shoulders, thinking the devil is catching up with you. He’ll never catch up with you if your faith will believe that nothing can harm a good man. And who is he and what is that will harm you if ye be followers of that which is good.

I want to point out here a few things that people mistakenly believe harm them. You may have to do a little thinking here, and if you’re not used to it, you may get a charley horse in your head. But if you will follow along with me, it’ll do you some good, I think.

I want to point out here, brethren, that some people imagine a physical injury harms a man, and I don’t believe it. I have here a little thing I want to read, it’s only about nine lines long and brief.

An old fellow by the name of Epictetus, he had a name, I’d have changed if I’d had it, but Epictetus was a crippled Roman philosopher. And he was, of course, stoic, but he did have some ideas. He never had seen the New Testament, but he got further without a New Testament than some of you do with one.

But he said, what’s the use of worrying about external injuries and harms? He said, I must die? Well, must I die groaning? Said I must be fettered? Well, must I be lamenting too? I must be exiled. Well, what hinders me then from going smiling and cheerful and serene? The emperor said, betray a secret, and he said, I’ll not betray a secret. They said, well, if you don’t betray your secret, I’ll fetter you. He said, what do you mean, man? Fetter me? No, he said, you can fetter my leg, but not even Zeus himself can get the better of my free spirit.

Well, he said, I’ll throw you into prison. And Epictetus had the answer. Then he said, I’ll behead that paltry body of yours. And Epictetus said, did I ever tell you that I was the only man on earth that had a head that couldn’t be taken off his body? Well, what can you do with a man like that, brethren? You see, he’s gotten loose from kings and emperors and prisons and chains.

But we Christians don’t have that much sense. If we hear that somebody in Indochina or Columbia has been thrown into jail, we write a big tract about it, and we say they’ve been harmed, they haven’t been harmed at all. Their building blown up, well, that’s not part of them. That doesn’t reduce them in value in the universe. That doesn’t devaluate their currency to have their building blown up under them. That doesn’t make them any smaller. That doesn’t hinder their manifest destiny. That doesn’t prevent them from doing the work of God, not the slightest. We imagine the physical injury harms people. It does not.

Take Abel, way back in the early part of the world’s history. The fellow didn’t like Abel because he was a spiritual fellow, so he took him out and beat him up. It doesn’t say how it happened. He probably didn’t mean to kill him. He just meant to give him a good beating, I would guess. But he didn’t know his own strength, and when he walked away, his brother was dead.

So, he kicked a few leaves over him, and there he lay, his blood crying unto God for vengeance. But I want to ask you, was Abel harmed? Was he any less dear to God? Were there any of the mansions of his soul closed and a sign out of order put over them? No. He was the same great, big, believing Abel that he had been before. And though his poor body lay there among the leaves and the dirt, he still was as great a man and as strong a man and as big a man and as significant a man as he ever was.

Take that man Stephen, when they stoned him to death there. Do you think that when the rocks began to wham into the ribs and head of the man Stephen and he finally died, did they harm Stephen? No, they didn’t. They injured his body, but they didn’t harm the man. They killed his body, but they never touched his soul. Who is he that can harm Stephen? He was a follower of that which was good. He was a man full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, and you can’t harm the Holy Ghost and you can’t harm wisdom. So, Stephen was just as valuable in the scheme of things, just as wonderful, and just as big as he was before they killed him.

This man that we read about in the Twelfth Acts, the man James, says that they cut off his head, or at least they slew him with a sword. Did that harm him? Not at all. The only thing it did was separate his head from his body, and he had no need for his head then. Anyhow, and if we only knew how little need we have of our head, we wouldn’t be so careful of the poor empty thing, because really our heads don’t amount to an awful lot.

God Almighty makes us to run by heart power and live by heart power. God did not say He blew in him the breath of life and he became a living head. It said He blew into him the breath of life and he became a living soul. In your head, God gave you as a kind of steering wheel to keep you out of trouble and help you along while you’re down here, but you are spirit. God made you spirit, and that’s the part nobody can get to.  Well, you might talk about Paul also and Peter and all the rest, then there’s persecution.

Now we groan and cry about being persecuted. I personally never was persecuted, any. Maybe I’ve not been good enough Christian to deserve the honor, but I’ve not been persecuted much. I’ve been called some very eloquent names, but sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt you. So persecution. Now, it says, they wandered about in goatskin, destitute, in deserts, mountains, dens, and caves.

Now, those were the persecuted ones, but you see, the persecution came to the outside. It couldn’t get to the inside at all. The genius of Christianity is internalism, you know that? The genius of Christianity is that the kingdom of God is within you, and it is inside of you that you matter. It’s inside of you that you signify, and the persecutor can only get to the external. The persecutor can’t get in to the mansion of your soul. He can’t get to you.

Here they were wandering about, they had no homes, wearing goatskins, they had no clothing. Destitute, they had no money. In deserts, they had no friends, mountains, dens, and caves, and yet all these were external things, and you couldn’t get to them.

Were these persons dressed in goatskins any less valuable than the king in his palace dressed in his silks? No, because silk and goatskin belonged to the body, whereas the value of a man lies inside of him. They weren’t persecuted.

I think we waste a great deal of sympathy on people. I remember some missionary was killed, not in our society, some years ago, and it gave printing presses and old-maid poets and tear-jerking preachers ammunition for the next five years. And we built that up and built it up and built it up. It was an amazing, astonishing, wonderful, world-shaking event.

Two missionaries were killed for Christ’s sake. Oh, brother, they weren’t hurt at all. They just made them kneel down, lean over, and they cut their heads off. But they didn’t get to them. They didn’t get to the spirit of them, the soul of them. They only cut their heads off. And now they’re with the Lord, and the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and no evil shall harm them. And though it seemed for a season that they have been injured, actually God has taken them away from the troubles to come.

So, it was a victory that they went home, not a defeat. And because we’re earthbound and our faith won’t penetrate the blue, but we think as men think and we evaluate as men evaluate, and our scale of values is that of Adam and not of God. We make a great to-do if somebody in the course of his duty dies on the battlefield of the faith.

My brethren, that ought to be taken in stride as a matter of course. And when a man goes, we ought to sing, Hosanna to Jesus on high, another has entered his rest, another has escaped to the sky and is lodged in Emmanuel’s breast. Nobody is harmed when he’s killed, nobody is injured when he dies, if he’s a Christian.

And then slander, I notice. Some people are so desperately jittery, they fear somebody will slander them. Now Christ was slandered, but did it do Him any harm, I want to ask you? They said He had a devil, and they said a great many other terrible things about Him. But it never hurt Jesus any, it never changed the love of God for His Son, it never took away the crown from the heart and head of the Savior, it never made Him any less than He was, it never closed up a single mansion in the mansion of His soul, it never in any wise harmed Him. Slander never hurt anybody, and it’ll never hurt anybody down the years.

And there is abuse. People have suffered abuse. Now that is one thing the good of all the ages have had to suffer, they’ve had to suffer abuse. I suppose before Cain killed Abel, he told him off plenty. He abused him before he slew him. And all down the years the righteous have had to be abused by the unrighteous. The twice-born have had to take a tongue-lashing from the first-born, or once-born.

And you know that sin has taken away a great many things from humanity, but it’s not taken away the power of speech. A sinner can be just as eloquent as a saint, and he can be a whole lot more effective because he’s more uninhibited in his use of words. A saint, you see, when he starts to answer a sinner, has to be awfully careful and sound like a Christian.

But when a sinner starts working on a saint, no holds are barred. And the names that we get called are simply something lovely to behold and to hear. I say to you, my brethren, that sin does not take away the power of speech. The sinner can still curse and still does. But the man of faith sees it and knows that it’s simply the raven sitting on the dead limb of a blasted oak, croaking imprecations against the dove.

And the dove can’t answer because he’s a dove. And so, he looks modestly down at his pink feet and makes little tender noises like the dove that he is. And because he doesn’t answer back, the raven thinks he’s won the debate. But all he’s done is prove he’s a raven.

And so, when you get abused, if you don’t get abused, God help you, you’re not where you should be. And if you do get abused, just think of that fellow that’s abusing you as one of Adam’s ravens, a fallen raven sitting on a dead limb, croaking his displeasure with your spirituality. You can afford to take it, brother, for the day will come when God will avenge all of His people.

But it doesn’t hurt you, you see, it only gets to your ear, and your ear isn’t you. Cursing doesn’t get past your ear, unless it gets past your ear. Suppose that the man that curses you tempts you to hate him, then you’ve injured yourself.

Suppose the man that persecutes you tempts you to malice, you’ve injured yourself then. Suppose you carry sulky spirit in your breast, you’re harmed, but the devil didn’t do it, but you did it. Keep the persecutor out of your bosom, keep hate out of your heart, keep malice out of your spirit, and you’re as sound as gold, and nothing can harm you or get to you.

Well, the last, and I’m finished, is death. Death, we all generally agree down here among the sons of Adam, that to kill a man is the last, dirtiest trick you can do to him. And even the law is based upon the fear of death. The law says if you murder, we’ll kill you. And the theory is that if that restrains men, they’re afraid of death. And we generally agree that to die is to incur the greatest damage, the greatest harm.

I say to you, brethren, that this is Adam’s philosophy, this is not God’s. This terrible fear of death is not the teaching of the Scripture. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.

Now I wouldn’t underestimate, nor would I in any way try to rise poetically above death or show that death is not something to shock us and startle us and frighten us. I wouldn’t. I would be a liar if I tried it. But I believe that death is the devil’s last indignity. It’s the last ferocious, obscene attack he makes upon the tabernacle of the Holy Ghost. But he can only reach the tabernacle.

Fear not them that can kill the body, said Jesus. That’s only the tabernacle. And the devil is not only bad, he’s dirty. And he’s not only dirty, he’s obscene. And he hates the people of God with a hatred as old as the centuries and as black as the pit where he will go. And so, the devil wants to kill the people of God. And he’ll heap all the indignities he can upon them. And he’ll twist them and break them and make their bodies look terrible.

One of the holiest men that I have ever known, I saw the other day, he has been to me an outstanding example of spirituality in this degenerate hour. He has lived a long and useful life, not too long, but a useful life. He has been persecuted. He has endured a great deal of suffering. But he has never as much as opened his mouth once to answer back. He is as humble as a rug, and in his prayers as lofty as the eagle, and a great preacher of truth. I hadn’t seen him for about a year.

I saw him recently. To say that I was shocked wouldn’t be to tell all the truth. Those fiery eyes were now looking dully out through hollow sockets. That fine, rather homely, but strong, good-looking face had gone away to a shadow. That well-set-up body now bent, and the arms and legs showing through the clothing like sticks, sitting looking at the floor.

Death sits like a buzzard, or circles over him and waits, and unless God Almighty performs a miracle within the next three months, that tired, sick, holy body will be the plaything of the forces of death, and they’ll destroy it, and they’ll make it pale and gaunt and worse-looking than now, and shut up the eloquent tongue and pull down the blind over those bright eyes, and they’ll carry him out, and the devil will laugh and say, I’ve enjoyed this indignity, this profane act of indignity against the temple that I’ve hated.

But listen, brethren, he hasn’t harmed the man of God at all, and not all the devil’s tricks can do it, and not the undertaker can do it, nor the embalmer can do it, nor the gravedigger can do it, and not the slow forces of nature that will dissolve his mortal body back to dust can harm the man. For the man was made in the image of God, redeemed by the blood of the Holy Son of God, and indwelt by the Holy Ghost.

And so, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost have made his soul their habitation. And death can’t get to that habitation. He’s as young as when he was twenty-five years old, and he’s as sound and healthy as at the healthiest moment of his life, only the body’s suffering, that is all.

John Adams was a godly old man too, getting pretty old, and he was the sort of emeritus elder statesman walking around the streets of Washington. And some friend met him and said, Mr. Adams, how are you? Well, he said, I’m all right, I never was better in my life. But he said, my dwelling place is on mortgage, and I understand they’re going to foreclose before long, and I’ll be thrown out.

Oh, his friend said, how terrible for a man like you. And he started a little affair, what do you call it, to get money, a subscription, to buy a house for this fellow. And when it came back around to him, he laughed, he said, oh, you misunderstood me entirely. He said, I was talking about this old carcass of mine. He said, you asked how I was, and I said I was all right, but there was a mortgage on my home. He said, this old place where I’ve lived for these 70-some-odd years, he said, well, nature has got a mortgage and it’s going to foreclose, but he said, it doesn’t bother me any. Now you see what I mean, don’t you?

Now, my brethren, here’s my thesis. No one, no thing, no circumstance can harm a good man, and if you will believe that, you can relax. If you can believe that, you can start worrying for fear somebody will do you harm. Nobody can do that. They can try it. Nobody can block you. Nobody can hinder your manifest destiny. Nobody can reduce the size of the mansions of your soul. Nobody can make you any less valuable to God or dearer to the Father. Nobody can block your ministry or stop your forward progress. Nobody can do it. Nothing can do it. Only you can do it.

Keep sin out of your heart. Walk under the blood. Keep in contact with Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and you can be as free as an angel that walks the streets of God, for nothing can harm a good man.