Here are a few excerpts from the fall 2007 edition of On Tract, a publication of the Fellowship Tract League.

 

 

A man from Detroit Mi writes:

 

Thank you for making me think of this as my last five minutes alive, because I have been doing some crazy things and I didn’t care what happened to me.  I knew I needed to turn my life over to God.  Today after reading your tract, “This could be your last five minutes alive”, I decided to trust Jesus as my personal Saviour.  I know I am a sinner saved by the grace of God.  Time really is running out and I needed to give my life to the Lord today.  B.J.C.

 

 

My name is Thomas, and I just finished reading “One Heartbeat Away”; I loved every word of it.  It taught me to own up to the sins I do every day, and to stop doing them.  I am only 19 years old but I know if I continue to sin, my days will be shortened, so I am turning my life around before it’s too late.  Your tract helped me understand the Bible better.  I was wondering if you could send me one of every tract you have, if it’s not too much.  I want to learn as much as I can.  I am tired of doing the same old things.  God bless.

Sincerely, T.D. Oxford NC

 

 

Fellowship Tract League, I have decided to trust Jesus Christ as my Saviour.  I am a 16-year-old male who lives in Lower Burrell, PA.  My name is Keith.  I am in placement right now for a dependency charge.  I would like you to pray for me as I am also praying.  I have been away from home for 8 months and I really believe that God will give me another chance to do right.  Thank you for your time!

 

K.B. Lower Burrell PA.

 

Tracks do work!  I hope that you are involved in putting out tracks. 

 

 

The word saved means saved.

 

If a ship sinks a thousand miles from land there is no way that the people can swim to shore.  They cannot make it to safety alone.  But there is a ship nearby that comes to their rescue and picks them up out of the water.  But we do not feel that it has saved the passengers if they are drowned before they arrive home safely. 

 

We only consider them saved if the boat actually finishes bringing them to land.  It is the same way with salvation.  We are adrift on a sea of sin with no way to make it to safety on our own.  Christ comes and picks us up.  But it would not be salvation if He later on drops us back in the sea to perish.  For Him to save us, He must take us all the way.

 

Phi 1:6  Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform [it] until the day of Jesus Christ:

 

You can be assured that when Christ picks you up and saves you that He will take you all the way to heaven.  He will never drop you.  Saved means Saved.  You cannot loose your salvation.

 

He has stood before the world, proclaiming something which he called the gospel.  He has been a noted preacher; the multitude have been hanging on his lips; they have listened to his words; before his eloquence a nation stood amazed, and thousands trembled at his voice.  But his preaching is over; the time when he can mount the pulpit is gone; another standing-place awaits him, another congregation, and he must hear another and a better preacher than himself.  There he lies.  He has been unfaithful to his charge.  He preached philosophy to charm his people, instead of preaching truth and aiming at their hearts.  And, as he pants upon his bed, that worst and most accursed of men – for surely none can be worse than he – there come up one, a soul from the pit, and looking him in the face, says, “I came to thee once, trembling on account of sin; I asked thee the road to heaven, and thou didst say, ‘Do such and such good works, ‘ and I did them, and am damned.  Thou dist tell me an untruth; thou didst not declare plainly the word of God.”

 

He vanishes only to be followed by another; he has been an irreligious character, and as he see the minister upon his deathbed, he says, “Ah! And art thou here?  Once I strolled into thy house of prayer, but thou hadst such a sermon that I could not understand.  I listened; I wanted to hear something from thy lips, some truth that might burn my soul and make me repent; but I knew not what thou sadist; and here I am.”  The ghost stamps his foot, and the man quivers like an aspen leaf, because he knows it is all true.  Then the whole congregation arise before him as he lies upon his bed; he looks upon the motley group; he beholds the snowy heads of the old, and the glittering eyes of the young; and lying there upon his pillow, he pictures all the sins of his past life, and he hears it said, “Go thou! Unfaithful to thy charge; thou didst not divest thyself of the love of pomp and dignity; thou didst not speak ‘As though thou ne’er might’st speak again, A dying man to dying men.’

 

Oh! It may be something for that minister to leave his charge, somewhat for him to die; but worst of all, the sting of death will be his sin: to hear his parish come howling after him to hell; to see his congregation following behind him in one mingled herd, he having led them astray, having been a false prophet instead of a true one, speaking peace, peace, where there was no peace, deluding them with lies, charming them with music, when he ought rather to have told them in rough and rugged accents the Word of God.  Verily, it is true, it is true! The sting of death to such a man shall be his great, his enormous, his heinous sin of having deluded others.

 

 From thoughts on the Last Battle – sermon by Charles Spurgeon

The least promising lad in a lady's class was a raggedly dressed boy named Bob.  The superintendent secured a suit of new clothes for him.  After three Sundays, Bob was missing.  The teacher visited him and discovered that his new clothes were torn and dirty.  The superintendent gave him a second new suit, and Bob returned to Sunday school.  After attending twice, his place was empty again.  Once more the teacher learned that the second suit had gone the same way as the first.  Utterly discouraged, she told the superintendent that she must give him up.  Please do not do that, urged the superintendent.  I'll give him a third suit if he will promise to attend regularly.  Bob did promise, and he did attend regularly.  He became an earnest Christian, joined the church, was a teacher and studied for the ministry.  He became Dr. Robert Morrison, honored missionary to China, who translated the Bible into the Chinese language and opened the gate to teeming millions in that country.

One time my wife’s right side of her face swelled up.  The doctors had no idea of why.  They did a cat scan and did not see anything wrong with her face, but they did see a small lump in her thyroid.  So they scheduled an ultrasound and a nuclear thyroid scan.  By the time that they got to these tests her face swelling went totally away and never came back.  The thyroid tests showed that she had a tumor on the surface of her thyroid that was 1.5cm.  They scheduled surgery for 5 weeks later, saying that it will be a small incision and that they will just scoop it off the top of the thyroid.  When they operated they found that the tumor had grown to 2.5cm, and that it had grown into the middle of the thyroid.  The doctor then had to make a much bigger incision and remove that lobe of the thyroid.  He was amazed at how fast it was growing.  It turned out to be what is called a complex type of tumor.  It has both hard and liquid sections in it.  The doctor said that 70 percent of the time when they take this type of tumor out that it is cancer.  In Tina’s case it was not cancer.  But the rapid growth rate of this tumor makes you wonder what would have happened if her face had not mysteriously swollen up.  I like to think that it was God’s way of making sure that the tumor was detected in time.  

 

When God sends something unpleasant your way, we need to just have faith.  We need to remember that God is all knowing as well as a loving father.  We need to remember that God knows what He is doing.  He has a reason and we do not have to understand why. 

We are to have faith and trust it to our Savior.

 

There was a man in Chicago who twice determined to give his heart to God but never had the courage to acknowledge Christ before his ungodly companions.  When recovering from a long sickness, he still refused to come out boldly on the side of Christ, saying, “Not yet; I have got a fresh lease on life.  I can’t be a Christian in Chicago.  I am going to take a farm in Michigan; then I will profess Christ.”

 

I asked him, “How dare you take that risk?”  He said, “I will risk it; don’t your trouble yourself any more about my soul, Mr. Moody.  I have made up my mind.”

I have never left a man with a sadder heart in my life.  The very next week he was stricken down with the same disease.  His wife sent for me and said, “He doesn’t want to see you, but I can’t bear that he should die in such an awful state of mind.  He says, “My damnation is sealed and I shall be in Hell in a week.”

I tried to talk and pray with him but it was no use.  He said his heart was as hard as a stone. “Pray for my wife and my children but don’t waste your time praying for me.”

 

His last words were, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and I am not saved”; and then the angels bore him away to judgment. – D.L. Moody

 

Mr. Moody witnessed to him until the end, but he waited too long and went to eternity without Jesus.

 

What about you?  Are you putting off getting born again? 

Don't wait any longer!  Don't take the chance that your heart will become hard.

Call upon Jesus right now, tell Him that you are a sinner, and ask Him to save you, and you have His promise that He will.

 

Try to visualize this scene. 

 

A man leaves home jogging.

He jogs and then turns left

Jogs some more and then turns left

Jogs some more and then turns left and heads back home.

When he gets there, there are two masked men waiting for him.

 

Who are the men and why is the man jogging?  Have you visualized the scene?

 

I dare say that most of you are thinking the masked men are robbers but they are not robbers. 

The human mind likes to jump to conclusions and without thinking much about it.

 

So what is really happening in our scene? And who are the masked men? 

The man is a baseball player who hit a home run.  He leaves home jogging when he gets to first he turns left and goes to 2^nd base turns left and jogs to third, turns left again and jogs home where the two masked men (the catcher and the umpire) are waiting for him.

 

Don’t be too sure of first impressions.

 

One spring, before the Civil War, a boy in search of work came to Farmer Taylor’s prosperous Ohio farm.  The farmer knew nothing much about the boy except that his name was Jim, but he gave him a job.  Jim spent the summer cutting stove wood, bringing in the cows and making himself generally useful.  He ate in the kitchen and slept in the haymow.  Before the summer was over, Jim had fallen in love with Taylor’s daughter.  When the farmer refused to let him marry her – telling him bluntly that he had no money, no name and very poor prospects – Jim put his belongings in his old carpetbag and disappeared.

 

Thirty-five years passed before Taylor one day pulled down his barn to make way for a new one.  On one of the rafters above the haymow, he discovered that Jim had carved his full name – James A. Garfield.  He was at that time President of the USA. 

 

 

 

God had prepared the answer before he had asked

 

A man was trying to prepare himself for Christian service and his funds ran out.  It looked liked he would have to leave school.  He then earnestly asked the Lord to come to his aid if it was His will for him to go on with college.  The next day he got a letter containing a check that was large enough to take care of his needs.  He was happy that his prayer had been answered.

 

But Satan whispered to him to look at the date of the letter and he would see that it was not an answer to his prayer because it had been written before he had prayed.  This dampened his joy until he remembered that the Lord had said, “Before they call, I will answer.”  Then he realized that God had known his need and had prepared the answer even before he had called upon Him.

A man had a large Sunday school and he would not turn a boy out on account of bad conduct.  He considered that those boys did not have the advantages of a good bringing up and for that very reason they should not be thrown out. 

 

Then he had a boy come along that tested his belief.  He would put this boy under one teacher after another and nothing could be done with him.  Finally, after several teachers, he decided to expel him from the school.  He was going to do it publicly as an example to all the other boys.  But there was a lady teacher who came to the superintendent and said, “I wish you would let me have that boy.”  The man said, “But he is such a bad boy; he uses such vulgar language.  All those men can’t do anything with him, and I think, I am sure you can’t.”  The lady responded, “ I am not doing much for Christ, and it may be that I can win him.”  She was a lady of refined society, and the man thought, “Surely, she won’t be willing to have patience with that boy.”  Well the man went ahead and gave her that boy.

 

He behaved well for a few Sundays and then on Sunday he behaved badly.  The lady corrected him and the boy then spat in her face.  She quietly took her handkerchief and wiped her face.  The lady said, “I wish you would go home with me.  I want to talk with you.”  “Well, I won’t.  I won’t be seen on the street with you, and what’s more, I won’t ever come to this Sunday school any more.”  The lady then said, “Well if you won’t walk home with me, let me walk home with you.”  “No” the boy said.  This boy was not going to come to that old dirty Sunday school anymore.

 

The lady knew that if she was going to reach that boy it must be now.  She then decided to appeal to his curiosity.  She said, “If you will come to my house, next Tuesday morning, I shan’t be there; but if you will go there and ring the front door bell, and tell the servant there is a little bundle on the bureau for you, she will give it to you.”  The little boy said that he would not come.  The boy thought it over and over.  He wanted to know what was in that bundle.  So Tuesday morning he went to the house and as promised the bundle was handed to him.  Inside there was a little vest in it, and a little necktie that she had made with her own hands, and a kind note stating that ever since he had been in her class she had been praying for him every morning and every evening, and she told him how she loved him and cared for him. 

 

Early Wednesday morning he came to the house.  The lady came down and found the boy weeping on the sofa.  She said, “ What is the trouble?”  The boy responded, “ O teacher, I have had no peace since I got that not from you.”  The lady got down and prayed with the little boy.  Later the superintendent said, “There is not a better boy in the school.  Love conquered him.” 

 

A missionary that went to India saw problems arise in the most unexpected areas, such as the distribution of milk powder.  Their missionary hospital regularly received large barrels of milk powder from the United States under a program called Milk for the Millions.  What a great idea providing milk powder for the many poor and hungry people around the world.  But if they gave packets of milk powder to people, they would run to the coffee shops and sell them.  They tried mixing the powdered milk with water and having the people drink it before leaving.  They didn't like the taste and stopped coming, even though they were hungry.  They tried giving glasses of milk to the locals that worked in the hospital, but they refused to drink it without gruel.  So they cooked gruel for them to eat with the milk.  Then they discovered them eating the gruel without the milk.  So they stopped doing that.
They were busy giving help that wasn't help. 
Then there were the dried beans.  The American government gave them large bags of dried beans.  It turned out that even after soaking the beans all night, the average village family could not afford the fuel (usually cow dung chips) to cook the beans.  They finally took the beans to the mill and had them ground into powder so that the people would have bean powder to cook with their curry.
They missionary said "I thought how often it is really hard to help people!"

 

We can spend alot of effort trying to help people without really helping.  We can spend a lot of time and money on social programs and not really help much.  To really help people, we need to spend our efforts getting them saved.

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A grandma had her granddaughter spend the night and they had to get up early in the morning to run an errand.  They lived in new England.  And it was a beautiful crisp fall morning.  There was a light frost.  And the early morning sun was sparkling off the leaves of yellow, red, orange and gold.  The grandmother was awe struck with the scene.  She then witnessed to her granddaughter about the magnificence and power of God.  And told her how God had created the beauty that was before them.  When she was done the grand daughter said.  And what is even more amazing grandma is that he did it all with his left hand.  The grandma was taken aback.  What do you mean by that she asked?  The grand daughter said he had to use his left hand because in Sunday school last week we learned that Jesus is sitting on the right hand of God.

When working with people (especially children) don't assume that they understand your terminology.

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What if I predicted that a cat would walk accross the street in front of the church? You would say that's it. That is not much of a prediction, of course a cat will walk accross the street sooner or later. But what if I predict the following:

1 A cat will walk accross the street in front of the church.

2 He will travel from the west side to the east side of the street.

3 The cat will be black with a white stripe down its nose

4 The cat's front paw will be white.

5 It will be wearing a red collar

6 The collar will have a bell on it.

7 The bell will not ring

8 The cat will stop half way accross the street.

9 And then he will lick his paw before he continues to cross the street

10 It will happen next Tuesday

11 At 2:00 in the afternoon

12 The Cat will meow as he finishes crossing the street.

 Now what are the chances that I would be right? It is statistically impossible that I would be right. And that was only 12 details. Now look at the Bible. The old testament has over 300 predictions about the first coming of Christ. And every one of them came true. Because predicting that many details in advance is impossible for man, the details must have been given by God.

 2 Peter 1:21 For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

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In world war two,  there was a commander of a submarine named Commander Gilmore.  This country was fighting for our freedom.  If we lost we would have lost our freedom and been nothing more than slaves.  His boat was in a fierce battle.  He had sunk 3 japanese destroyers.  They were all out of Torpedos.  There was no time to get more.  The battle was raging.  He gave the order and his Sub rammed another destroyer.  The destroyer was mortally wounded.  It was going down to its doom.  The commander raced forward to check the damage.  And he got wounded.  His first mate was coming to help him.  but the commander told him NO.  CLOSE THAT HATCH AND DIVE NOW.  For you see the destroyers guns were turning to fire on the sub before the destroyer sank.  There was only moments before the guns could fire.  The first mate objected  but I can get you in a moment.  The commander said that is a direct order CLOSE THAT HATCH AND DIVE.  He knew full well what that order meant for him.  It meant a watery grave.  He gave his life so that all of his crew could be saved.
That's what Jesus did for you.  He gave his life that we could be saved.  Satan is our destroyer.  And he is training his guns on you.  And it could be only moments before he fires.  But I got great news.  Jesus did not stay dead.  In three days he rose again and acended into heaven.   And we too can have a home in heaven if we will but believe.