in service over the last weeks with Brother
McAfee, we foresaw two things.
One, that quite a sizable number of our
people would duck out on us this morning,
and cut class, and go down to the
Opera House, for which we do not blame
them at all.
One chance in thirty-one years to get
to Council, I don't blame them for going.
And obviously some of them did, quite a
sizable number.
The second thing we foresaw was that a
few of the delegates would come here to
church.
And our prophetic predictions have come to pass
in both anticipations, and we concluded together that
we would not alter the service at all,
not even by asking anyone else to read
scripture or pray.
Though we are not unmindful of the honor
some of our ministerial brethren have done us
in coming here this morning to our service.
We felt that we would go ahead just
the same as we always do, without any
change at all.
And I even concluded that I would go
right on with my sermons in Peter.
So I'll do it.
Somebody was unkind enough, bless her heart, to
remind me that she had taken down the
date of my first sermon on 1 Peter.
One year ago I began preaching from 1
Peter, and I am now in 3.13.
At this rate I'll be an old man
when I get through it, if indeed you
would not want to say that I was
one when I started.
But at any rate, here is 1 Peter
3.13. And who is he that will
harm you, if ye be followers of that
which is good?
Now, that is a rhetorical question.
And the 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?
Should tribulation or distress or persecution or famine
or nakedness or peril or sword, knave, and
all these things which are more than conquerors
through him that loved us, for I am
persuaded that neither death nor light 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 gives his language.
He says, who shall lay anything to the
charge of God's elect?
Who is he that condemns?
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
light 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 person nor thing nor circumstance.
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'm 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'll 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
devalue 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,
devalued, 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-tonguedographer said
about a certain man, he said he was
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 but 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 nobody.
That kind of thing dishonors God Almighty.
Who art thou, man, to speak against the
potter that made thee, and the carpenter that
built the 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 mired 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
minds 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
is in Christianity and it is in 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 kind 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 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.
Now, 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 ever there
are lost or saved?
That our lost are saved and we'll be
saved?
Now, how'd 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 anywise
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 shoots another man and we say
he did him an injury.
One man starts a slander about another man
and 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
peeking 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.
And 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've never been a very devil-conscious creature.
I've 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 of
the underworld.
Ah, that old madam so-and-so with
her rag around her head telling fortunes in
a dirty hole under the sidewalk.
Let her alone.
Stay away from her.
Why do you want to go in there
for?
And unless you're taking the gospel and having
services, why do you want to be down
on West Madison Street for?
I don't mean to moisten, I mean throw
the way.
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 Hill, 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 always in such
contact with the devil that it was breathing
on their neck all the time.
And they were always praying, and almost fantastically
praying, Oh, Lord, deliver me and help me.
I concede 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 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 paralyzed.
So nobody outside can hurt you.
If you go along looking over your shoulder,
thinking the devil is catching up with you,
he'll never catch up with you if you're
faintly believed that nothing can harm a good
man.
And who is he and what is that
will harm you if you 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 follow along with me, it'll
do you some good, I think.
I want to point out here, brethren, that
some people imagine 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 New Testaments 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?
He 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 free?
The emperor said, betray a secret.
And he said, I'll not betray a secret.
He said, well, if you don't betray a
secret, I'll fetter you.
He said, what do you mean, man?
Fetter me?
No, he said, you can fetter my legs.
And 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 North China
or Colombia 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.
The 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 their slaves.
We imagine the physical injury of her harmed
people.
It does not.
Here's 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 poor God he 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.
You think that when the rocks began to
wham him to 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
12th of Acts, the man James, says that
they cut off his head, or at least
they threw him with a sword.
Did that harm him?
Not at all.
The only thing he 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 the 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 go on 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,
in deserts, mountains, in 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 your...
Here they were wandering about.
They had no home.
They were in goatskins.
They had no clothing.
Persecuted.
They had no money.
In deserts, they had no friends, mountains, dams,
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 and all?
Because silk and goatskin belong to the body,
whereas the value of a man lies inside
of him.
They weren't persecuted.
You know, I think when we live, 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
the printing presses and old-made 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 never got to the essence of them.
They only cut their heads off.
And now they are with the Lord, and
the souls of the righteous are in the
hands of God, and no evil shall harm
them, and though it seems 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
think, for example, 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 to 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
way harmed him.
Slander never hurt anybody, and it will never
hurt anybody down the years.
And there is abuse.
People have suffered, God's 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 King 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 the
thumb-lashing from the firstborn, or want-born.
And you know, 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 douse.
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
implications 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 one that he knows.
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.
Fallen ravens sitting on a dead limb croaking
his displeasure with your spirituality.
You can afford to take it, brother.
The day will come when God will avenge
all of his people.
But he 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 breath.
You're harmed, but the devil didn't do it,
you did it.
Keep the persecutor out of your bosom.
Keep hate out of your heart.
Keep malice out of your spirit, and your
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 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, this is Adam's
philosophy, this is not God's.
This terrible fear of death is not the
teaching of the scripture.
Gracious 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 century and
as black as the pit where you go.
So the devil wants to kill people, the
people of God.
And he'll heap all the indignities he can
upon them.
And he'll push 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 enter back.
He's as humble as a rug and in
his prayers as lofty as the eagle and
a great creature 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 gone away to a shadow.
The well-fed-up body now bent.
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 proposes a miracle within
the next three months, that tired, sick, whole
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 grave
digger can do it.
And not the slow forces of nature that
will dissolve this 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 a young Muslim.
He was 25 years old.
And he's as sound and healthy as at
the healthiest moment of his life.
Only the body is suffering, that is all.
John Adams.
Which one of the Adamses?
John Adams, the President.
He only had two of them.
Well, this grand old man, he was a
godly old man, too.
He was 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 and said, well, 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 sodium years, he said, well,
nature's 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.
If you believe that, you can relax.
If you believe that, you can start worrying
that somebody will do you dirt.
Nobody can do that.
They can cry.
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 dear 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.
You can be as free as an angel
that walks the streets of God.
For nothing can harm a good man.