An Example of Devotion
I urge upon you communion with Christ a growing communion. There
are curtains to be drawn aside in Christ that we never saw, and new
foldings of love in him. I despair that I shall ever win to the far
end of that love, there are so many plies in it. Therefore dig
deep, and sweat and labor and take pains for him, and set by as
much time in the day for him as you can. We will be won in the
labor. -- Samuel Rutherford
God has now, and has had, many of these devoted, prayerful
preachers -- men in whose lives prayer has been a mighty,
controlling, conspicuous force. The world has felt their power, God
has felt and honored their power, God's cause has moved mightily
and swiftly by their prayers, holiness has shone out in their
characters with a divine effulgence.
God found one of the men he was looking for in David Brainerd,
whose work and name have gone into history. He was no ordinary man,
but was capable of shining in any company, the peer of the wise and
gifted ones, eminently suited to fill the most attractive pulpits
and to labor among the most refined and the cultured, who were so
anxious to secure him for their pastor. President Edwards bears
testimony that he was "a young man of distingushed talents, had
extraordinary knowledge of men and things, had rare conversational
powers, excelled in his knowledge of theology, and was truly, for
one so young, an extraordinary divine, and especially in all
matters relating to experimental religion. I never knew his equal
of his age and standing for clear and accurate notions of the
nature and essence of true religion. His manner in prayer was
almost inimitable, such as I have very rarely known equaled. His
learning was very considerable, and he had extraordinary gifts for
the pulpit."
No sublimer story has been recorded in earthly annals than that of
David Brainerd; no miracle attests with diviner force the truth of
Christianity than the life and work of such a man. Alone in the
savage wilds of America, struggling day and night with a mortal
disease, unschooled in the care of souls, having access to the
Indians for a large portion of time only through the bungling
medium of a pagan interpreter, with the Word of God in his heart
and in his hand, his soul fired with the divine flame, a place and
time to pour out his soul to God in prayer, he fully established
the worship of God and secured all its gracious results. The
Indians were changed with a great change from the lowest besotments
of an ignorant and debased heathenism to pure, devout, intelligent
Christians; all vice reformed, the external duties of Christianity
at once embraced and acted on; family prayer set up; the Sabbath
instituted and religiously observed; the internal graces of
religion exhibited with growing sweetness and strength. The
solution of these results is found in David Brainerd himself, not
in the conditions or accidents but in the man Brainerd. He was
God's man, for God first and last and all the time. God could flow
unhindered through him. The omnipotence of grace was neither
arrested nor straightened by the conditions of his heart; the whole
channel was broadened and cleaned out for God's fullest and most
powerful passage, so that God with all his mighty forces could come
down on the hopeless, savage wilderness, and transform it into his
blooming and fruitful garden; for nothing is too hard for God to do
if he can get the right kind of a man to do it with.
Brainerd lived the life of holiness and prayer. His diary is full
and monotonous with the record of his seasons of fasting,
meditation, and retirement. The time he spent in private prayer
amounted to many hours daily. "When I return home," he said, "and
give myself to meditation, prayer, and fasting, my soul longs for
mortification, self-denial, humility, and divorcement from all
things of the world." "I have nothing to do," he said, "with earth
but only to labor in it honestly for God. I do not desire to live
one minute for anything which earth can afford." After this high
order did he pray: "Feeling somewhat of the sweetness of communion
with God and the constraining force of his love, and how admirably
it captivates the soul and makes all the desires and affections to
center in God, I set apart this day for secret fasting and prayer,
to entreat God to direct and bless me with regard to the great work
which I have in view of preaching the gospel, and that the Lord
would return to me and show me the light of his countenance. I had
little life and power in the forenoon. Near the middle of the
afternoon God enabled me to wrestle ardently in intercession for my
absent friends, but just at night the Lord visited me marvelously
in prayer. I think my soul was never in such agony before. I felt
no restraint, for the treasures of divine grace were opened to me.
I wrestled for absent friends, for the ingathering of souls, for
multitudes of poor souls, and for many that I thought were the
children of God, personally, in many distant places. I was in such
agony from sun half an hour high till near dark that I was all over
wet with sweat, but yet it seemed to me I had done nothing. O, my
dear Saviour did sweat blood for poor souls! I longed for more
compassion toward them. I felt still in a sweet frame, under a
sense of divine love and grace, and went to bed in such a frame,
with my heart set on God." It was prayer which gave to his life and
ministry their marvelous power.
The men of mighty prayer are men of spiritual might. Prayers never
die. Brainerd's whole life was a life of prayer. By day and by
night he prayed. Before preaching and after preaching he prayed.
Riding through the interminable solitudes of the forests he prayed.
On his bed of straw he prayed. Retiring to the dense and lonely
forests, he prayed. Hour by hour, day after day, early morn and
late at night, he was praying and fasting, pouring out his soul,
interceding, communing with God. He was with God mightily in
prayer, and God was with him mightily, and by it he being dead yet
speaketh and worketh, and will speak and work till the end comes,
and among the to glorious ones of that glorious day he will be with
the first.
Jonathan Edwards says of him: "His life shows the right way to
success in the works of the ministry. He sought it as the soldier
seeks victory in a siege or battle; or as a man that runs a race
for a great prize. Animated with love to Christ and souls, how did
he labor? Always fervently. Not only in word and doctrine, in
public and in private, but in prayers by day and night, wrestling
with God in secret and travailing in birth with unutterable groans
and agonies, until Christ was formed in the hearts of the people to
whom he was sent. Like a true son of Jacob, he persevered in
wrestling through all the darkness of the night, until the breaking
of the day!"