Leadership Thought Did You Ever Use One of These to Share Your Faith?

Dear Friends,

I received an e-mail last week from one of my close friends, and I wanted to share part of it with you.

In closing my friend writes. “Patti and I went to a doctor’s appointment. The nurse that came in to do the preliminary blood pressure stuff didn’t seem to be in the best mood, so I asked her ‘if everything was OK.’ Without details, she said, ‘things were not going well at home.’”

“I pulled out a “Live Can Be Hard” tract and I told her that the solution to her problem could be found in the pamphlet. She thanked me and left the room. About seven or eight minutes later she came back in with tears and a smile and said, ‘We were angels sent by God to introduce her to Jesus.’ She prayed the prayer in the tract and accepted the Lord.”

My friend concludes, “Tom, without exaggeration, this type of encounter appears nearly weekly, simply because we have our spiritual radar up, and we look for opportunities. God orchestrates these encounters, and we just do our part to be a link in the chain.”

I have been with my friend Brian Rechten many times, and I can personally attest that he shares his faith on almost a daily basis and one of the ways he does it is through the passing out of tracts.

Brian has been so encouraged by the way people respond to this form of evangelism that he not only uses tracts regularly in his day-to-day conversations with people, but he now writes and produces his own tracts, and they are excellent in quality and in content.

Recently he sent me a number of professionally done tracts he has produced, and he is now making them available as an effective tool for evangelism.

Early on in my ministry I utilized tracts as a form of witnessing, and I know they can be a very valuable resource in sharing your faith, and yes, people today are still reached for Christ with these simple little evangelistic ‘tools.’

A gospel tract can clearly present the gospel in clear and concise ways, and it can be used to go places where we cannot go. And yes, as one proponent writes “a gospel tract never gets nervous or forgets what to say.”

A gospel tract can find its way into people’s homes we can’t reach. A tract doesn’t argue; it merely states the truth and calls the reader to repent and believe. It can be handed to anyone, at any time, at any place, always with a smile.

I was interested to learn that the great preacher and evangelist George Whitfield, who led the Great Awakening, was saved by a gospel tract. After reading it, he wrote: “God showed me I must be born again or be damned.”

The great missionary to China, Hudson Taylor, was also saved by reading a tract.

One of the greatest preachers ever was Charles Spurgeon, and he was a firm believer in using them. He writes, “When preaching and private talk are not available, you need to have a tract ready. A touching gospel track may be the seed of eternal life. Therefore, do not go out without your tracts.”

Before you diminish their value as old fashioned and not relevant in today’s sophisticated world, you might be interested to know that: “53% of all who come to Christ worldwide come thorough use of printed Gospel literature.” (The American Tract Society, “Handing Out Tracts: Scary, Yet Effective,” Steve Sanchez.

Spurgeon, along with the great evangelists Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote and shared their own tracts.

Spurgeon exhorts all who seek to reach people for Christ with these words, “Let us save men by all means under heaven." (“The Lost Art of Handing Out Gospel Tracts," Katherine Pittman internet)

Whether you are a gospel sower (casting the seeds that open the doorway to one’s  later salvation), or you are the reaper, of the one who sowed the seeds, God is blessed, lives are changed, and one more person steps through the doorway to eternity.

I don’t know about you, but writing this devotional has motivated me to order a fresh new set of tracts, to add to my staple “Steps to Peace with God," by Billy Graham.

If you are interested in doing the same, please e-mail me, and I will share with you my friend Brian’s link.

Yours in faith and friendship,

Tom

P.S. I would be interested in learning how receiving a tract might have impacted any of you receiving this Leadership Thought.