As I have mentioned in the evangelism classes that we give, I used to think gospel tracts were stupid. The reason for this is because of the first one I ever recieved. It was back in my pagan days, and a guy “rear-ended” me at a stoplight. The first thing he did was to get out of the car and walk over to me and give me a tract. Just great. I was hoping for an insurance card, but got a religious thing instead.
Anyway, my mind has completely changed since then. Now I am sure there are times to give one out and times to wait(such as the car wreck incident), but giving out tracts is AWESOME! God keeps bringing people up to me with testimonies on how they got saved by a gospel tract. No relationships or long term church growth programs……just the power of God through His Word. Now I am sure that God was drawing these folks and probably seeds were planted beforehand. But every conversion that I hear about was almost instantaneous. A miracle of God. To make a “dead, blind, bonded to sin, hater of God”, a new creation in Christ by the power of the Gospel.
Examples include a couple of friends of mine. One was given a bible(the best gospel tract) and first threw it across the room. Then she eventually picked it up and read it and was converted. Another friend was stuck in a vacant house for 3 days before the moving van showed up with all his goods. The only thing in the house was a drawer with 3 gospel tracts. By the second tract, he was on his knees asking God to save him. Other examples that I have been hearing or reading about.
Bill Armstrong (former Senator for Colorado). A janitor at congress gave him a tract, and he was saved after reading it.
In my college classes, we have been reading about many other conversions from a tract.
- Soon after the invention of the modern printing press in the 1450’s, religious literature flourished. This is especially true of the tracts used by Martin Luther and other reformers during the Protestant Reformation in the early-to-mid 1500’s. In 1557, a young French officer, wounded in the battle of Saint Quentin, lay weak in bed in an enemy fortress where he was imprisoned. His brother, a covert Huguenot, visited him bringing a few evangelical books and tracts. The wounded officer read one of the tracts and trusted Christ as his Savior. When he was released from prison months later, the officer, Gaspard de Coligny, joined the Protestant movement embodied in the Huguenots in France, and he became one of the great spiritual leaders in the history of that country.
- But this same tract had still more work to do. Coligny’s nurse retrieved the tract from his sick bed and gave it to the Lady Abbess, the superior among the nuns at a local convent. The abbess, Charlotte of Bourbon, read the tract, and she too was converted. She later renounced her vows and fled to the Netherlands. There she met and married a young Hollander. She bore him six daughters, and she influenced him greatly for the cause of Christ across Europe. Her husband was William of Orange, who was to the Netherlands what George Washington was to the United States. William became a champion of liberty and of Christ in Europe, and he established the political foundations of that European country that still stand today.
- The best thing I can do is enjoy the pleasures of this world, for there’s no hope for me beyond the grave.” So thought 16-year-old James. Although he had been raised in a devout Methodist home, he was frustrated by his growing feelings of doubt about God. He had tried to make himself a Christian by doing the right things and associating with the right people—and he failed. “For some reason,” he concluded, “I cannot be saved.” One afternoon, James found a gospel tract on a bookshelf in his home. While reading through the tract he was struck by the phrase “the finished work of Christ.” “What does that mean?” he questioned. In a moment he remembered something from his religious training: “And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world” (1 John 2:2). Then he said, “If the whole work was finished and the whole debt paid, what is there left for me to do?” Years later James penned these words about that moment of truth: “With this [thought] dawned the joyful conviction. . .that there was nothing in the world to be done but [to]… accept this Savior and His salvation.” It was not long after this eternal decision that James—James Hudson Taylor—now heralded as one of the pioneer missionaries of the 19th century, received his call from God to take this same Gospel of grace to China.
- At the same time a guy named Hung Hsiu-chuan, the founder of the Taiping movement in China in the 1800’s, read a gospel tract and was converted. He wrote to an American missionary to send Christian teachers, to “make the Truth known”. Hudson Taylor was the missionary that was sent, and now there are millions of Christians all over China.
To God be the glory… now grab those tracts and GET OUT THERE!!!
There is an optical illusion gospel tract we use that looks like this. Obviously, it is smaller, but this will get peoples’s attention maybe from across the road or park or something.
