CLIMBING THE ROMAN ROAD STEP 7 & 8 (LIVING SACRIFICE/HEAVEN WITH JESUS!)

     I’m very excited today to share my last Roman Road tract post because in it, we’re going to conclude with the ultimate goal of all Christians! I think I loved sharing these posts more than any other posts I've ever done--because they were about the essence of the Gospel that is so near and dear to my heart. OK, here we go.
     My last post, "Climbing the Roman Road Step 5 & 6 (The Response/A Restored Heart),” was about the response a person makes when he comes to the end of his rope. He then needs help from someone much bigger than himself, so he calls out for help from God. His prayer is one of desperation and urgency.
     God always responds to this call, and he gives that person a restored heart, free from sin. What’s next for the person who called out to God and has a restored heart?
     Steps 7 & 8 (Living Sacrifice/Heaven With Jesus!) give us a serious mandate, then a wonderful outcome. The serious mandate, Step 7, is found in Romans 12:1, where Paul wrote, 

"I beseech you therefore brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.” 

     It’s a mandate to, instead of being a dead sacrifice, be a living one. This means that after we become Christians, we obey God’s calling for us to act as Jesus did, to do good works. No amount of good works will get us into heaven--but as Christians, good works are a response of gratitude for what He has done for us. Our good works for Jesus, in a sense, bring a little bit of heaven down here to earth.

     Step 8 isn’t depicted in The Roman Road picture in the tract, but I just had to add Step 8. What is Step 8 of the Roman Road tract? It's the ultimate goal of every born-again Christian. It's eternal life with Jesus in heaven. Paul explained it in Romans 5:21: 

“. . .so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace will reign through righteousness, resulting in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” 

     It would have been difficult for The Roman Road artist to add a Step 8, “heaven”, onto the top of the picture, but I simply couldn’t leave out the final outcome or scene of the Christian story.
     My wife, Dee, will confirm that I love happy endings of stories like what happens in ALL Hallmark movies. I cry at most of them, and I even cry for joy at the end of action stories like Westerns when the hero wins the conflict and rides off into the sunset with the heroine.
     But what is the happiest ending of all time? It's when we enter the New Heavens, the New Earth, and the New Jerusalem with its streets of gold—and we live with Jesus there for the rest of eternity!

CLIMBING THE ROMAN ROAD STEP 5 & 6 (THE RESPONSE/A RESTORED HEART)

     My last post, "Climbing the Roman Road Step 3 & 4, “The Gift/Cross Solution", was about the “good news of great joy” which was the gift sent by God, Jesus, to be our once-for-all-time sacrificial lamb to take away our sins. No longer was mankind dependent on the repeated sacrifice of animals to atone for sins. Again, I reiterate that God’s plan was “good news of great joy”.
     Steps 5 & 6 of The Roman Road tract is entitled "The Response/A Restored Heart". Step 5 shows a person in the middle of the Roman Road praying in an almost prostrate position. It's the response a person needs to make to experience this “great joy”. After a person recognizes his or her dire need, even if they don’t have a full understanding yet of the cause of their need, they do what Romans 10:13 says: “For whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
     When I called upon God’s name almost forty-eight years ago, I felt a great sense of freedom that at the time was unexplainable to me. I cried with joy for a long period of time. I knew later, however, that the joy I felt was because I had finally broken free from the bondage of sin.
     Now on to Step 6 on the tract which shows a restored heart. The verse associated with the restored heart is Romans 10:9, where Paul wrote, “That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” At the beginning of The Roman Road tract, there was a picture of a broken heart as a result of our sins. Now, after calling on Jesus’ name, we have a restored heart as a result of being saved from our sins.
     There’s not much more I can say about the wonderful transaction of being saved from the bondage of sin after calling on the name of the Lord, except that the transaction has heavenly implications. In Luke 15:10, Jesus explains these implications. Here's what He said: “There is joy in the presence of God’s angels over one sinner who repents.”
     Imagine angels in heaven singing with joy over one person, perhaps you, who gives their heart to God.

CLIMBING THE ROMAN ROAD STEP 1 & 2 (THE BROKEN HEART/SIN PROBLEM)

 

     Do you think people are born with innate goodness in them—as many people claim? Or do people have broken hearts as a result of sin as the Bible claims, even though they may not realize it—or won’t admit it? Here are a couple of Bible verses that contradict the assertion that people are born with innate goodness.

1. In the first verse Jeremiah says the following in chapter 17, verse 9:

“The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?”

(Jeremiah said that the hearts of people aren’t just a little bit wicked—but they are “desperately wicked” and deceitful. In other words, instead of people being innately good, they are innately wicked and sinful. The internet cite “Got Questions” compares the sinfulness of man to being born with a “terminal, incurable illness”.)

2. In the second verse Paul wrote in Romans 1:29-32 the following about the sinfulness and depravity of mankind: 

“They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful. Although they know God’s just sentence—that those who practice such things deserve to die—they not only do them, but even applaud others who practice them.”

(Wow! Paul makes it clear that mankind is unquestionably wicked and they “deserve to die”. He wasn’t talking just about a physical death however, but an eternal death in hell.)

     I’ll use myself as an example. Almost 48 years ago I had a good job and plenty of money. Everything seemed to be going A-Okay. But, what I also had was an incurable ache in my heart, a broken heart if you will, that nothing could satisfy. What was causing the incurable ache?

  It’s been said repeatedly and almost ad nauseam, “To solve a problem, the first step is to realize that you have one.” This statement seems like old-hat, but it is so very true when it comes to every person having a broken heart as a result of sin.

     I don’t want to imply that we have the ability in ourselves to cure our own aching, broken heart. The aching, broken heart in us is just a fact—and it’s something for which WE have no answer. We need someone else to tell us about it, and tell us the solution for the cure. That someone else is God!

     God can, however, use other Christians to tell or show us how to help our broken heart. He can use an evangelistic service. He can use difficult circumstances—and a myriad of other things too deep for us to understand. He can even use a gospel tract.

     What I like about The Roman Road gospel tract I created is that it uses Paul’s writings in Romans to simply and clearly outline the problem of sin, and the aching, broken heart it produces. And then Paul simply and clearly tells us the remedy to heal our heart. Let’s look at the first two steps.

Step 1: The Roman Road tract shows at the foot of the road a broken heart as a result of sin. The verse that coincides with the picture of a broken heart as a result of sin is Romans 3:23:

"For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

(So the first step to solving the broken heart/sin problem is to realize that you and I are born very sinful and wicked beyond repair on our own.)

Step 2: The Roman Road Tract shows a gravestone a short way up the road with the word “Die” on it. The verse that coincides with the gravestone is the first part of Romans 6:23:

“For the wages of sin is death.”

(Paul asserted that to be born with sin means certain death. Again, Paul wasn’t just talking about a one-time physical death. He was talking about a forever death in hell.)

    So, we’ve covered the first two steps on the Roman Road tract. I hope and pray it has been meaningful to you. God’s ways are very mysterious and deep, but I think He is very wise to reveal them clearly in the Bible—so even a child can understand them. Recognizing our brokenness and our broken heart as a result of sin for which we have no answer is the first step toward God. And then, the second step is to recognize that our sin leads to death—eternal death in hell.

     See you the next time when we’ll cover the next two steps of The Roman Road tract.

CLIMBING "THE ROMAN ROAD"

     I’ve been a Christian for going on 48 years, and my passion has always been evangelism. I want others, especially family members, to know the wonderful love of Jesus that I have felt these many years. It’s also why I started the “Soulwinnersr.us” website doing evangelistic videos.

     In my many years of being a Christian, I have come across numerous evangelistic tracts—although to be honest, I have only used them a very few times. I guess honesty is the best policy—although it makes me sort of ashamed that I haven’t witnessed more than I have, given my passion for lost souls.

    I practice witnessing a couple of times per week, given what 1 Peter 3:15 says, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” I want to be persistent in that way—just like the widow with the unjust judge—who never stopped asking for justice. I want to never stop asking God for opportunities to witness—and I want to be ready for the inevitable time/s that He gives them to me.

     I’ve tried many gospel tracts at one time or another. Some told stories of famous people, perhaps sports stars, who gave their hearts to Christ—and encouraged the readers to do the same. Some had cartoons with the gospel message in them to draw in the younger reader. Some had colorful pictures of nature or people talking to one another. Some included stern warnings to the readers on how to avoid hell. I had a whole drawer full of gospel tracts.

     My mind always went a little “boggle-woggle”, as my wife sometimes says, trying to remember the gist of each tract, and trying to discern which one to use for a specific encounter with a specific person. So I decided to develop my own Gospel tract.

     In 2014 I found “The Roman Road” image on the internet, so I developed a tract based on that image. It made sense to me to make a tract that had the theme of ‘climbing’ The Roman Road. I made several iterations of the tract in the ensuing years. I made it for personal use, so only me and a dear elderly couple in my church used them.

     In 2019 I retired from about 29 years of mental health work, and I again began thinking about The Roman Road Image. I didn’t want to use the image in the tract on a wider basis without permission from the owner of the rights to the image. So, I researched and found that “The Tract League” was the owner who had commissioned the painting of the image for their own Roman Road tract.

     I went to The Tract League website and found an email link to contact them about using the image. To my surprise, The Tract League wrote the following response:

“Arlen: Thanks for your inquiry. You are welcome to use that image and any/all parts of that tract. By the end of next year, our Roman road tract will no longer be available as we are closing operations in the US.”

     You can imagine how excited I was to get blanket permission to use the image in any way that I felt the Lord leading me. I know many other wonderful gospel tracts out there are effective in sharing the gospel, and I had many of them in my drawer. But last year I bit the bullet and threw them out and focused only on The Roman Road tract I created.

     Why did I do that? It has nothing to do with the fact that I thought the tracts were bad or poorly made. They in fact were wonderful. But, I’m a concrete thinker, and if I am to share the gospel with others it needs to make explicit sense to me. And, The Roman Road tract that I created does just that for me.

      So, I plan to share a post, or two, or three focusing on The Roman Road tract that I created, and why I think it’s a logical way of sharing the gospel with others. I ask you to give your opinion about what you use, and what you think of using the Climbing ‘The Roman Road’  theme to share with the lost.

EVANGELISM QUESTION 5: WHAT ABOUT USING GOSPEL TRACTS?

 

“Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." Matthew 4:19.

Hello Friends:

     Welcome to the Soulwinnersr.us website. It’s been about two to three weeks since we discussed “Evangelism Question 4: Is It Time to Open Up?” Last week I did a “Let’s Roll!” post to encourage myself, and other Christians, to take life-saving action to prevent lost people from going to an eternity in hell. This week I want to discuss the strategy of using gospel tracts to share the gospel with other people. I entitled the post “Evangelism Question 5: What About Using Gospel Tracts?”
     Gospel tracts have been around for many, many years. Companies and individual people, like myself, develop them to make it easier to share the wonderful gospel message with lost people. Here are some examples of gospel tracts I have, some I’ve used, and some I haven’t used.
     Today we’re going to share a few pros and cons of using gospel tracts.

Pros of using gospel tracts:

1. Gospel tracts contain God’s written Word. The Bible is clear that God’s Word will not return “void”, and it will “accomplish” what it says. Isaiah 55:11.
2. Gospel tracts can establish a point of connection to another person and make it easier to share with that person. Especially if we’re uncomfortable sharing specifics without something written to lean on as a reference.
3. Gospel tracts given to a lost person will allow that person to take it with them to mull over later.

Cons of using gospel tracts:

1. Gospel tracts can be very impersonal, especially if just left lying in public places. Let’s be real! How often have you and I kept, and taken to heart, a tract that was just left lying in a public place?
2. Piggybacking off the previous con, giving a gospel tract to someone with no interpersonal interaction doesn’t allow that person to experience up close and personal the Holy Spirit living inside of you and me as Christians.
3. Tracts can oftentimes be long and wordy. If you’re a non-reader, like me, and have many pieces of literature and mailings to read each day, a gospel tract may seem like just one more piece of junk mail to be discarded.

     Have you ever used gospel tracts to share the gospel? What was your experience like? Were you scared? Do you feel they helped, or hindered you?
     I’d like to hear what you think. I know that many of you are watching my videos but have never responded to me about them, except perhaps a “Like”, which I appreciate. Maybe you think by responding I’m going to hold you accountable in some way to begin evangelizing. I’m pretty easy-going about things . . . and I can certainly identify with your feelings. I went many, many years with very little reaching out to others with the gospel. I’m trying to change that in myself.
     I’ll be honest. I do want evangelization of the lost to have a snowball effect . . . where more and more Christians feel an urging in their soul to do it, perhaps by using gospel tracts . . . or just by interpersonal engagement without tracts.
     What choice do Christians have when thinking about loved family members, friends, and others heading downhill toward hell? I realize that many people, including some church and ministry leaders, are these days trying to minimize the reality of a literal hell. But that’s a discussion for another day.

So, until I see you next time, keep sharing the wonderful love of Jesus,
Arlen