A gentleman on holiday strolled across to the seat on which his wife was sitting. “What did that fellow say to you?” he asked. “He handed me this little book and inquired whether I had the supreme joy of knowing the Lord Jesus as my own personal Savior,” she replied. “Why didn’t you tell him to mind his own business?” he replied testily. “Well, dear,” she answered thoughtfully “he acted as though it really were his business.”
It should hardly be necessary to say that wisdom and discretion are needed in offering a tract to someone. Let friendliness be added to courtesy, and to both a gravity that consorts with the holy business in hand. Most of the time, the tract will be accepted and read.
If you are a businessman, you touch people all day long, and can pass on a tract in a split second. One day, I offered my card to a bus conductor to whom I promised a “Traveller’s Guide,” with the remark, “You’ll know who sent it when it arrives.”
He replied, “That’s all right, guv’nor, I’ll know it’s you; nobody else has ever bothered about me.” I was able to follow this up with a Bible and booklets for the children, from whom I received charming letters.
You may notice a taxi driver waiting at the curb. These are mostly old soldiers, hard-bitten and critical. But they rarely refuse a courteously offered booklet. If he tells you he has no use for religion, agree with him wholeheartedly. Tell him of the only place in the Bible where “religion” is mentioned (Jas. 1:27). Speak of Christ in a bright manly way, and he will probably alter his mind and take your book. Above all, let him know what Christ is to you personally. A brief word of testimony may leave him wondering. Let him know you are a businessman who does this out of love to the Lord Jesus, and that you are not paid to do it. But the Holy Spirit will show you how to tackle each case; you cannot deal with two cases alike.
Leave a booklet, with a prayer for its preservation and usefulness, on the table in a waiting room, in the lounge of a hotel, or in the pocket of an airline seat. Slip one in with your bill payments (you’ll be sure to pay on time), or with a gratuity in the restaurant (with a generous tip, making friends of the world with the mammon of unrighteousness).
Someone may ask, “What’s the use of tract distribution? Tracts have had their days; they’re a spent force.” Even if that were the case, it would not absolve us from attempting to carry out our Lord’s command to preach the gospel to every creature, and this is certainly an effective way of doing it. But the objection is fallacious and based on prejudice and ignorance. Tracts have not had their day yet; they have only had their morning.
A young man, wounded at the siege of St. Quentin, read a slip of paper that had been left on the table. As he read it, he was converted to God. He was Admiral Coligny, leader of the Reformation in France. The tract was found by the nun attending to him, and, duty bound, she carried it to her abbess. The latter, too, was saved. Fleeing from the convent, she met and married a young Dutchman, William of Orange, who broke the power of Rome in the person of Philip II of Spain, and freed the Netherlands from his yoke. His stalwart Protestantism changed the face of Europe.
A pedlar gave a tract to a boy who was converted through it. He became a great preacher, Richard Baxter, the author of The Saint’s Everlasting Rest. Philip Doddridge was saved through this book, and wrote another, blessed to the conversion of Wilberforce. He wrote a book which led Leigh Richmond to Christ, and the latter’s Dairyman’s Daughter was translated into over fifty languages, a blessing to thousands.
Here is work for you to do every day. You will reap the fruit in that day, even if you do not reap it all now. Don’t excuse yourself by reciting your disadvantages –shyness, lack of time, lack of opportunity. Go in purpose of heart to God, ask Him to make you willing in the day of His power, to remove every hindrance, to take away your shyness, and to give you such joy in this service that it will overcome the other things. Then get some tracts, pray over them, and plant a seed.