Unusual Soul Winners

Welcome to the BB, Scott.

Man, I haven't heard of Ron Zwatko in many years--not since a supporting pastor told me Ron had been there and he had told him never to come back!! :smilewinkgrin: I knew Ron Back in the 1970's when he was sales rep for the Sword of the Lord, where I worked briefly in 1977 before deputation for Japan.

But you've given a fair description of Ron and his ministry. Thanks!

 

Miss Dotty

Miss Dotty Reichal​

I grew up knowing Miss Dotty Reichal, or “Miss Dotty” as we knew her in the Southern manner. She was an excellent artist and taught my sisters to draw. More than that, she was the staff artist for the Sword of the Lord, my grandfather’s Christian paper and publishing company. Thus, she drew almost all of the art on Sword book covers and in the Sword of the Lord from 1954 to 1978.

Miss Dotty was born with spinal bifida, a severe handicap having to do with her spinal column. In later years simply falling down would break a bone and put her in the hospital. However, I never heard Miss Dotty complain. She was always happy. And she did much more to fulfill the Great Commission than the average Christian in the pew.

Everyone who came to Miss Dotty’s door got a copy of her tract, “Handicapped And Happy!” She could not go out on bus visitation or to homes on Thursday night visitation like the other believers in our church, but she could witness at her door and did!

She also believed in supporting missions, and when we went to Japan she supported us for the grand sum of $10.00 a month. This may not seem like much, but to her it was a large amount, since her income was small and her handicap was severe. To us on the mission field it was a huge amount, because we knew that it came coated with much prayer!

One day in 1992 our prayer letter mailing service sent us the front of the envelope used to send our prayer letter to her, and it was marked, “Deceased.” We were sad no one had told us about her death, but happy for her that in Heaven all her pain had ceased, and she was with the Savior who loved and died for her. Since she served Him all of her life, how wonderful it was that she could life with Him forever.

On our next furlough we went out to the Memorial Gardens on the Bill Rice Ranch outside of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where members of the Rice family and workers at the Sword of the Lord and the Bill Rice Ranch are buried. Walking down the central sidewalk, we looked carefully for her grave, and there it was, with a simple marker set into the ground. Tears came to our eyes as we remembered this faithful servant of Jesus Christ, now no longer handicapped, but eternally happy!:saint:

Hopefully later I can put her entire tract on this thread. It's a very sweet, compassionate testimony and invitation to Christ.

 

Check back--I've got more! I just can't write one every day. Sometimes I have to look in my files--both my hard copy files and my memory files.

Stay tuned for Miss Dotty's tract; Jim Norton, who was in Japan over 45 years; the man who called himself "The Master's Sheepdog" (from the time of D. L. Moody), etc.

 

Amen!

Amen, mima. God bless him! :thumbs:

 

Thanks to those of you who prayed for Habazaki San. He did very well at the funeral, according to a relative I talked to. He left before the worship time came up! I went out on evangelism with him yesterday, and we had a good time. He even witnessed a little bit to one man who asked him what he was passing out, and I believe that is the first time he has done that.

This was a special thrill for me, since I found out from the relative what I already suspected. Habazaki San has a mental handicap. I suspect that it is a mild form of Down's Syndrome because of certain symptoms. I rarely get to witness when I am out with him since I am always worried that he will get lost. He seems to have little directional sense, and I have to give him careful instructions.

It is less so now, but as my friend was growing up here in Japan anyone with any kind of handicap was kept hidden away and pretty much ignored. But praise God, this saint functions well in society, and probably does more for the Lord than many people on this Baptist Board!:thumbs:

 

Miss Dotty's Tract, part 1

HANDICAPPED AND HAPPY​

By Dorothy E. Reichel​

Real Handicaps to Happiness Are Not Physical​

I was born with a Spina Bifida in the lower part of my back (three vertebrae are not complete in structure). This makes my back very weak and my feet and legs crippled. It also affects main nerves so that if I did not ‘live, and move, and have my being in Jesus’ I would feel irritable most of the time. But the Lord has made me happy and wonderfully used me since I was saved at the age of eight. He has helped me to be the artist for Dr. John R. Rice at The Sword of the Lord for the past twelve years.

Have you said, as I have: “I am unhappy because I can’t do what others do”? Hundreds of physically healthy people are NOT HAPPY; yet they give gifts, entertain and seemingly do good deeds.

“There is none good but…God. “—Matt. 19:12.
God imputeth righteousness without works.” —Rom. 4:6b.
Or perhaps you say: ‘‘I have tried to ‘have faith’ until I am a nervous wreck.” You are right, you can’t ‘‘pump up” faith.

You probably think, “When I feel better, I’ll be happy!” I used to believe this, too, but I found that just about every happy person I know suffers from some physical illness most of the time though they do not appear ‘‘handicapped.’’

So Start YOUR Happy Days NOW!​

HOW?​

The Bible Has the Answer​

“Rejoice in the Lord . . .”—Phil. 4:4.
“In him we live, and move, and have our being.”—Acts 17:28.

How can we be “…in the Lord”? Jesus said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”—John 14:6.

It is sin that brings misery in this life and punishment in Hell for eternity.
“The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?”—Isa. 33:14.
“And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.”—Matt. 25:46.
“For be hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”—II Cor. 5:21.

Step 1—Believe the Bible:​

“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”—Acts 16:31.

JESUS IS GOD​

“For God so loved the world, that be gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”— John 3:16.

Without JESUS, Nothing Else Brings​

TRUE HAPPINESS​

‘‘Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”—Acts 4:12.

He Died on the Cross to Save Us Forever​

“…and the blood of Jesus Christ his son cleanses us from all sin.”—1 John 4:7b.
“He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation: but is passed from death unto life.”—John 5:24.

He Is the Only Conqueror of Death​

“And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.”—I Cor. 15:17.

Step 2—Repent​

Your spirit is the REAL YOU, not your body. YOU are not different from anyone.

“For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”—Rom. 3:23.
“God…commandeth all men every where to repent.”—Acts 17:30b.
“I tell you, Nay: but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”—Luke 13:3.5.
“…all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags —Isa. 64:6.

We have said that sin is what brings all unhappiness, so admit that you are a sinner. This means you have not obeyed all God’s laws. He gave us His laws to show us how to be happy but we can not obey them all the time in our own strength. We must have the divine help and power of Jesus.

There must be real sorrow for sin. But do not think you need to spend long periods of weeping and mourning. The right kind of sorrow leads to immediate repentance.
Repent means, ‘‘turn from sin to Jesus.’’

 

Miss Dotty's Tract, part 2

Step 3—Trust Jesus​

This means DEPEND on Him to help you overcome sin now and take you to Heaven at death.

“…and whoso trusteth in the LORD, happy is he.”—Prov. 16:20.
Job said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him….”—Job 13:15.

This takes FAITH and we have said, “You can’t ‘pump up’ faith,” so pray as the disciples: “…Lord, Increase our faith.” — Luke 17:5.

God’s Holy Spirit will change your spirit. YOU will receive FAITH to DEPEND on Jesus for Salvation: HAPPINESS!

When you have found happiness, you can give it to others (even though your body may be helpless) by showing them Jesus. He has commanded us to bear much fruit.
“…He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit.”—John 15:5.

At times you may lose your joy but do not think you have lost your salvation. Read John 5:24. Ask Jesus to show you your sin, forgive you and help you forsake it. Read your Bible daily, praise God for all He has done for you, especially your salvation, and ask Him to show you how to help others.

I hove proven the truth of this tract by experience. Only one way can be true: two plus two never equals five, a circle cannot be a square, etc. My father and mother led me to Jesus and showed Him to me in their daily lives but their faith could not save me. Only when I believed Jesus and turned from sin to Him in complete surrender and trust did I receive true peace and happiness. Without Him I would be lost.

I have always been under doctors’ treatment but physical relief has never given my soul any comfort.

I often go to sleep singing in my heart “My Jesus I Love Thee, I Know Thou Art Mine.” Each day is usually begun with a song of praise, Bible reading and prayer. I try to pray without ceasing and show Jesus to others. My happiness grows as I practice these things.

The Lord has allowed me to serve Him in many joyful ways other than with art work. He helped me to train my singing voice so that I could sing solos in churches, rescue missions, jails, etc. I have taught Sunday School classes, directed choirs and played the piano or organ for services. I cannot say that He has worked miracles for me but with Paul, I have found His grace to be sufficient.

The greatest joy comes when someone puts their trust in Jesus as their Savior as a result of my efforts. I will never know fully about this until I meet Him face to face but I have drawn these pictures and written these words because I love you and want you to have the happiness I have.

You CAN Be Handicapped AND…

HAPPY!

​

‘‘Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.” —Prov. 27:1.

Just say, “Lord, I believe Your Word, turn from my sin, TRUST JESUS to save me and use me for His glory NOW!”

“For whosoever shall call upon the name of the LORD shall be saved. —Romans 10:13.
‘‘Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.’’—II Cor. 6:2.

When you do this, just write your name and address below and mail it to me. I will pray for you, help you in any way I can and rejoice with you because you are on your way to Heaven!

Name_______________________________ Date______
Address_____________________________
City________________ State______ Zip_________

If you have not trusted Jesus, YOU are on your way to Hell. You can arrive any minute. Trust Him NOW.—Luke 16:23-31.

 

Jim Norton came to Japan in 1952, fresh out of BJU and newly married. He was one of the great group of missionaries who came out to Japan at Douglas MacArthur's invitation. He was from the Upper Penninsula of Michigan, so the cultural gap could not have been wider for him!

On his furloughs, Bro. Norton was always zealous to recruit young people for Japan. I met him at my graduation ceremony, where he was sitting behind my parents. He headed outside and met me before my parents, and almost the first thing he said was, "Pray about coming to Japan to work with me." Little did he know that the Lord had already called me! His invitation gave me a goal, though, and I'm blessed to say I worked with him for a year and then pastored his branch work while he was on furlough before we moved to Yokohama to begin our own work.

Jim Norton is the very epitome of the phrase "soul conscious." He is always looking for someone to witness to for the Lord Jesus Christ. You may be walking along with him, having a normal conversation, when you look around and he is nowhere near! You look behind you and there he is, 20 feet back, witnessing to someone!

The first time I preached in Japan was not an official message, it was on the street with Jim Norton. He used to preach with a large picture, about 3' x 2', of Christ on the cross, since the typical Japanese has no idea at all of what Christ's death was like or means to us. On the other side of the picture was a chart of Heaven and Hell, people with the burden of sin on their backs, and the cross through which they went to have their burdens taken away.

Anyway, that day I was tagging along as usual, when a crowd of kids gathered around us. Brother Norton said to the kids, "This man is going to tell you how to get to Heaven!" He then handed the chart to me and walked off. Talk about sink or swim!! Praise the Lord I got through to the kids, and when he came back and questioned them, a number confessed faith in Jesus Christ.

In his younger days, one of his soul winning projects was to get a set of Bible story books into hundreds of Japanese junior high libraries. He also wrote tracts and books, taught personal evangelism in a Bible school, and planted several churches in Japan, where many missionaries are delighted if they can plant just one church in 30 years. He is now retired and back in his beloved UP of Michigan, but he makes trips to Japan still, and still wins Japanese souls for Christ. God bless him! :thumbs:

 

May God continue to use this great kid! :thumbs:

 

Uncle John Vassar

“Uncle John” Vassar​

“Uncle John” Vassar was probably the most unsung and under-appreciated soul winners of modern times. He lived from 1813 to 1878, and his story is told in a rare little gem of a biography by Thomas Vassar, a cousin, entitled Uncle John Vassar, or the Fight of Faith.

Uncle John was a descendent of French Huguenots who fled to America for religious at the beginning of the 19th century. He got saved at a Baptist revival meeting when he was 28 after saying one night to his sleeping wife after arriving home from the meetings, “How can you sleep when your husband is going right down to Hell?”

God prepared him for his life’s work of soul winning by taking to Heaven the three he loved the most by the time he was 36: his only two children, both sons, and his beloved wife. Uncle John came through this with a sweet tenderness towards lost sinners. He began to witness faithfully for Christ, and though he never became a preacher or pastor he began to call himself “the Master’s sheepdog,”

In 1850 he came under conviction for working at a brewery, and quit his job. He felt all alone in the world until the American Tract Society hired him as a colporteur, and sent him out West. For you young whippersnappers, a colporteur was a full time Christian literature worker who traveled from town to town selling Christian books and Bibles and giving out tracts.

Uncle John wrote about those days, “I visit frequently forty families a day, have a meeting somewhere every night, and speak to three Sunday-schools where practicable every Lord’s Day. I have conversed with over three thousand people during the last three months on the subject of personal religion, and feel that for this city a wonderful blessing is in store” (p. 64). What was Uncle John’s “method” of personal evangelism? He would ask the prospect, “Sir, do you love Jesus?” and then go on from there.

My favorite story about Uncle John begins when he was out on door to door evangelism, and was rudely rejected by a woman. After she had slammed the door, he sat down on her porch and weeping, began singing, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see!” Where all of his persuasion could not break through, the simple singing of this Gospel song broke through to her hard heart, and she trusted Christ as Savior!

In 1863 he went out as a chaplain with the Northern Army, and God used him greatly there. In one brigade, 180 soldiers trusted Christ as Savior! After the Battle of Gettysburg, General Stuart’s Confederate cavalry made the mistake of capturing Uncle John. The general thought he might be a spy until they brought him in for questioning. Uncle John said, “I am working as a colporteur of the American Tract Society, to try and save the souls of the dear boys that fall around me daily. General, do you love Jesus?” He was only in the Confederate camp for about 10 hours before they let him go. One officer said to General Stuart, “General, take the man’s promise that he will not tell of our whereabouts for 24 hours, and let us see him out of our lines, or we will have a prayer meeting from here to Richmond!” So they let him go (p. 84)!

Uncle John cared nothing for a person’s station of life. It is said that when he met President Grant, he held on to his hand and said, “Do you love Jesus?” Then he would not let go until he had given the president the Gospel!

Uncle John died in 1978, and his last words were, “Farewell—farewell.” Then, “Hallelujah!”

 

Mrs. John R. Rice

LLOYS RICE​

I wanted to add just one last person to this thread, but one thing and another came up and I never got around to it. Here she is now, one of the greatest Christians I’ve ever known, if not the greatest: Lloys Rice, Mrs. John R. Rice, my grandmother.

Lloys was a beautiful and brilliant young lady from a well-to-do Texas family. She met John R. at Decatur Baptist College in 1916, and they began dating right away. They were married after her graduation in 1921, and were a very happy couple. They both went on to seminary at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where she made better grades in Hebrew than he did!

The Christian character of this lady showed up in their family life. They had six daughters (my mother was the second), and Mrs. Rice gave up her art lessons and piano ability so that each one of them could have piano lessons. All six turned into excellent pianists, including one with concert skills (Grace), but Mrs. Rice never again played. However, the whole family served God together as witnesses for Christ and in putting out the early issues of the Sword of the Lord newspaper.

Because of her love for souls, for her husband John R. Rice and for God, in fact for everyone she ever met, the Lord always seemed to me to take a special interest in Lloys Rice. After we came to Japan, she once wrote me a letter which should have no way ever arrived in Japan. I still have the envelope, and the address is correct, but she put four 30 year old Mexican stamps on it—and it made it all the way to Yokohama, Japan, without those stamps being cancelled!

Grandma Rice late in life seemed to simply take it for granted that God was on her side and would take care of her. I once rode with her to Nashville to put her husband on the plane for revival meetings. On the way back we exited the freeway, and stopped at the stop sign below. She began to pull out just as a car turned in front of her to get on the freeway. Somehow that car’s bumper took out the plastic—only the plastic—in the blinker on Grandma’s left front fender, doing no more damage than that. It was the closest I’ve ever seen to an accident without one happening!

In some ways she blossomed even more after John R. Rice died, living until well into her 90's. Preachers and Christians young and old would come to the house on Franklin Road in the outskirts of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, for prayer and advice. I have had many tell me they stopped by in those days and were greatly blessed by her sweet Christian character.

She had a heart for the lost, too, and such a prayer life for folks to be saved! In 1984 she gave as a Christmas present a little book entitled, Great Personal Workers, by Faris D. Whitesell, and put in it a letter to each of us grandchildren. Here it is, so that you can know her soul:

“My Dearest Loved:

“I prayed and searched for many days for the best gift I could ever give you and I have chosen this precious book (you already have the Rice Reference Bible).

“I was so thrilled as I read it and have prayed it will awaken your hearts to the thing nearest to our dear Savior’s heart; the precious privilege of saving souls for eternity.

“Some of these have been my personal teacher: L. R. Scarborough, when we were students in Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary at Ft. Worth, Texas. So were Will H. Houghton, Walter L. Wilson and William McCarrell in conferences around the world. Only Uncle John Vassar was completely before my day—I came on the scene the last few years of the time of great revivals. I heard Billy Sunday, Paul Rader, Locket Adair, a great Presbyterian evangelist, George W. Truett (Pastor Evangelist) and many lesser lights.

“I pray you will follow the train of these so greatly used of God to win souls. I love you and want God’s best for you. I wish you knew how my heart runs after you. You are in some way mine. I love you so much and want God’s best for you.

“With All my love,

Grandmother Rice.”

Perhaps now you can see why John R. Rice was so used of God. He had Lloys Rice behind him all the way! After her six daughters all grew up, she took art lessons once again and painted some wonderful pictures. The most poignant of all is a view of her evangelist husband walking out across the tarmac to board his airplane (this was in the old days), a sight she saw all too often. He would go off and see great revivals and hundreds of souls saved, while she stayed at home and prayed and took care of the family. “A prudent wife is from the LORD” (Pr 19:14).