Going to Jesus

Gospel Tracts

 Select a tract to read:

• Tracts 1-50

  1. How I Received the Holy Ghost 2. Jesus Is Coming Again 3. You Must Be Born Again 4. Stir Up the Gift of God 5. The World’s Most Dreaded Hour 6. What is Salvation? 7. Stand Still in Jordan 9. Grieved Hearts 10. The Second Death 11. The Father and the Son 12. Suffering and the Saints 13. Cancer Conquered 14. The Church? 15. How Shall They Preach, Except They Be Sent? 16. Have You Received the Holy Ghost Since You Believed? 17. Patience 18. Alone With God 19. Tithes and Offerings 20. Prayer 21. The True Sabbath 22. The Besetting Sin 23. The Cry of the Righteous 24. What Will the Harvest Be? 25. Marriage and Divorce 26. Taking the Name of the Lord 27. The Keys of the Kingdom 28. Works 29. Politics and Believers 30. Unequally Yoked in Marriage 31. Coming Out of Babylon 32. The Forgiven Woman 33. The New Earth 34. The Sin of Silence 35. Freedom 36. Gods of the Gentiles 37. Why Some Are Not Healed 38. The Seven Pillars 39. Life, More Abundantly 40. Fear 41. The Comforter’s Testimony 42. This is My Friend 43. Conversion 44. The Time Is Drawing Near? 45. Songs in the Night 46. The Master’s Net 47. Trials are Opportunities 48. Receiving the Messenger 49. Seven Messages to the Seven Pastors 50. Keep Yourself Pure

• Tracts 51-100

  51. The New Birth 52. John the Baptist and Jesus 53. Denying Jesus 54. Bruised Reeds 56. The Wise and the Foolish 57. Holiness 58. Is Jesus God? 59. Christ or Christianity 60. Have Faith In God 61. Worthy to Suffer 63. Four Kinds of Soil 64. Communion 65. The Fullness of Time 66. Baptism 68. No Room 69. Crucified With Christ 70. Homosexuality and the Bible 71. The Kingdom of God 72. The Gospel of Christ 73. A Wedding Garment 74. Perseverance 75. The Resurrection 76. Salvation 77. Sanctification 78. New Commandments 79. The Sacrifice of Christ 80. The Seal of God 81. The Sound of the Spirit 82. The Wrath of God 84. God’s Compass 85. Perfection 86. The Abomination of Desolation 87. Antichrist 88. The Way of Grace 90. Relationships 91. The Vineyard of God 92. The Conversion of Saul 93. Subdued 94. The Spirit of Christ 95. The Blood of Christ 96. Spirit of a Serpent, Spirit of a Dove 97. Gluttony 98. The Lost Lamb 99. Scripture Burners 100. Bleating and Lowing

 

The struggle to survive occupied so much of ancient man’s attention that relatively few people had the time to learn to read or write; therefore, a seal (a mark, or sort of picture) was commonly used on legal documents instead of a signature. Each person’s seal, or mark, was the equivalent of his name. In the New Testament, it is said that God puts His name, or seal, on those whom He forgives. God’s Old Testament seal was physical circumcision (Rom. 4:11), but the Seal of God is now “the holy Spirit of God, by which you were sealed until the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30). Yes, receiving the holy Ghost is the New Testament equivalent to Old Testament circumcision, as Paul said, “Circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit, not the letter” (Rom. 2:29).

There must be a believing before there is a receiving. Paul told the Ephesians, “After you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation in which you also believed, you were sealed with the holy Spirit of promise” (Eph. 1:13). So, we are sealed after we believe in Christ, not before, nor even when we believe. Abraham received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness of the faith he demonstrated before he received circumcision (Rom. 4:11). Likewise, we receive the baptism of the Spirit as a seal of the faith in Jesus which we demonstrate before we receive it. As Peter explained, God gives the holy Ghost “to those who obey Him” (Acts 5:32).

God’s Witness

In the kingdom of God, His Seal must be applied to every transaction before it is official, and when His holy Seal is applied to our hearts, the evidence of it is the same as it has always been: a sound coming through the person who receives it. As Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows wherever it will, and you hear its sound. . . . So is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (Jn. 3:8). Without that sound, no one is authorized to claim to belong to God. Paul told the saints in Rome, “You received the Spirit of adoption, by which we cry out, ‘Abba!’ (that is, ‘Father!’)” (Rom. 8:15). My friend, until we receive the holy Spirit and “cry out” by its power, we are not yet born into the family of God.

Even before the apostles all died, the faith of Christ Jesus was perverted by ministers who denied the necessity of the sound that Jesus said would always accompany every new birth experience. They did that cleverly, not by rejecting the reality of Spirit baptism, but by claiming to have it without the witness of that experience which Jesus promised: the sound of the Spirit. To this day, ministers who are not sent by God teach that error, denying that the Spirit moves those who receive it to speak when it comes in.

Conception always precedes a birth. No child can be born without being conceived. Still, the unborn child has no life of its own and has no hope of an inheritance until he is born and makes the sound that lets everyone know it has arrived. Likewise, conviction for sin always precedes the new birth, and when that new birth happens, others will hear the sound of the Spirit as it blows through his soul, announcing his arrival in the family of God. “This is the witness of God that He has given concerning His Son,” John wrote (1Jn. 5:9b), and Jesus and his apostles stressed the importance of this baptism because they knew it was the Seal that God sets upon all who truly believe.

The Holy Spirit of Promise

Immediately before he ascended into heaven, Jesus commanded his disciples to “wait for the promise of the Father, which you have heard about from me. John indeed baptized with water, but you will be baptized with holy Spirit not many days from now” (Acts 1:4–5). The promise of the Father is the baptism of the holy Spirit by which we are sealed, as these faithful disciples learned when they were sealed by the Spirit on Pentecost morning.

Reader, is this promise for you? It is, if God has called you. Jesus encouraged his disciples’ faith with these wonderful words: “If you, being evil, know to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father who is in heaven give the holy Spirit to those who ask Him” (Lk. 11:13). Amen!

Greater than John

When one receives “the holy Spirit of promise”, he is in possession of the most marvelous experience ever obtained by man. Jesus told his disciples that “many prophets and righteous men longed to see the things you’re seeing, and did not see them, and to hear the things you are hearing, and did not hear them” (Mt. 13:17). Peter would later echo Jesus’ words when he wrote that “prophets who prophesied of the grace that has come to you searched for and diligently inquired about this salvation, trying to determine who or what time the Spirit of Christ which was in them was indicating when it testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ and the glory that followed” (1Pet. 1:10–11). None of Israel’s prophets experienced the new birth, for it was purchased with Jesus’ blood, but “to them it was revealed that they were ministering those things not to themselves, but to you, which things are now reported to you by those who preach the gospel to you by the holy Spirit sent from heaven, into which things angels long to look” (1Pet. 1:12).

The baptism of the Spirit was not available to the saints of old because Jesus was not yet glorified (Jn. 7:37–39). The Spirit was purchased for us by Jesus after he ascended into the presence of the Father in heaven and offered himself to God as a sacrifice for our sins (Heb. 9:24). It was not possible that the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament could take away sins (Heb. 10:4), but “the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God” is able to cleanse the vilest sinner and make him perfectly blameless before the Father’s throne. By the blood of Christ, the forgiveness of sins which were unforgivable in the Old Testament is now available (Acts 13:38–39)!

Even the greatest of Old Testament saints were not as blessed as are the lowliest saint in the New Testament. Jesus said, “Among those born of women, there has not arisen a greater man than John the Baptizer; and yet, the least one in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Mt. 11:11). John was so great in the sight of God that the prophets of old in Israel prophesied of his coming just as they prophesied of Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection (Mt. 11:7–10). That is why Jesus said that John was “more than a prophet”. Still, anyone in this New Testament who is sealed with the Spirit has been honored more highly by the Father and stands closer to His heart than was John, King David, Abraham, Moses, or anyone else who lived before the Promise came. All those ancient heroes of faith were “given a good testimony because of their faith, but they did not receive the Promise” (Heb. 11:39).

The Final Benefit of the Seal of God

Reader, do you hope to escape the awful plagues which are to come upon this earth, such as this one: “It was said to them [the scorpion-like locusts] that they were not to harm the grass of the earth, nor anything green, nor any tree, but only the men who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. And it was given to the locusts not to kill them [those without the Seal of God] but to torture them five months, and their torment was like the torment of a scorpion when it stings a man. And in those days, men will seek death and will by no means find it, and they will long to die, but death will flee from them” (Rev. 9:4–6). If we hope to escape such plagues, then we must be sealed with the baptism of the holy Ghost. Doing that, we may be counted worthy to be in that number who “will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads” (Rev. 22:4).