"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!"