When I am plodding along in pain, sickness, and difficulty attempting to live out the indescribable passion that God has placed in my heart for His kingdom, I often disarm the enemy of my soul as he is attempting to lure me into a comparison of my current accomplishments with my much larger vision and desire, by remembering the stories of men and women whom God used mightily to impact the kingdom but who at the time could’ve had no idea what God was up to. David Brainerd is such a man.
David Brainerd became a missionary to the indians of New England on April 1, 1743. In his wildest imaginations he could not have foreseen how God would use him and especially the WAY God would use him. As it turns out he would work as a missionary for less than 4 years and all the while suffering horribly with his health and many other trials and yet God would use him mightily in those 4 years and Brainerd’s story would go on to change the world after his death in October of 1747 at the age of 29. He couldn’t have known.
Another person that couldn’t have known what God was up to was Jonathan Edwards. Pastor Edwards took into his home the dying Brainerd for the last months of his life. During this time, he was nursed by Jerusha Edwards, Jonathan’s seventeen-year-old daughter. The friendship that grew between them was of a kind that has led some to suggest they were romantically attached. He died from tuberculosis on October 9, 1747, at the age of 29. Jerusha died a few months later as a result of contracting tuberculosis from nursing Brainerd and was buried next to him in New Hampton.
What appears to be a senseless tragedy for the young missionary and the sweet family that nursed him turns out to be, in God’s grand design, an amazing epoch of kingdom shaking proportions for you see the next year Jonathan Edwards published a biography of Brainerd with a compilation of his journals and that story went around the world.
Brainerd’s influence grew remarkably within the transatlantic evangelical community through The Life of David Brainerd, Edwards’s most frequently reprinted and widely read book. It was the first American biography to reach a large European audience. It became the best-selling religious book in nineteenth-century America (with more than thirty different editions) and remains in print to the present day.
John Wesley read it and urged: ‘Let every preacher read carefully over the Life of David Brainerd. Let us be followers of him, as he was of Christ, in absolute self-devotion, in total deadness to the world, and in fervent love to God and man.’
The story of his life influenced William Carey, Samuel Marsden and Henry Martyn to become missionaries. Through these, David Brainerd spoke to India, to New Zealand and to Persia. Other missionaries who have asserted the influence of Jonathan Edwards’s biography of Brainerd on their lives include Henry Martyn, Jim Elliot, and Adoniram Judson.
In 1769 John Newton (writer of Amazing Grace) wrote: “Next to the Word of God, I like those books best which give an account of the lives and experiences of His people… No book of this kind has been more welcome to me than the life of Mr. Brainerd of New England.”
Brainerd’s missionary career spanned less than five years, but Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd revealed a missionary hero whose impact was astounding. The little book made a significant contribution to the new era of missions that sent British and American Christians to many parts of the world.
Archibald Alexander said that a missionary spirit was enkindled in the New Side Presbyterian Church as a result of the publication of Brainerd’s diary.
As William Carey prepared to go to India, Brainerd’s Life was “almost a second Bible.” When Carey, Ward, and Marshman signed the historic agreement that laid down the principles of their missionary work at Serampore, they agreed to “often look at Brainerd in the woods of America, pouring out his very soul before God for the perishing heathen without whose salvation nothing could make him happy.”
Robert Murray McCheyne was deeply moved when he first read Brainerd’s Life in 1832. He remarked that as a result of Brainerd’s example he was “more set upon missionary enterprise than ever.” A few years later McCheyne wrote in a letter: “O to have Brainerd’s heart for perfect holiness.”
Oswald J. Smith, founding pastor of the People’s Church in Toronto, paid tribute to Brainerd with these words:
‘So greatly was I influenced by the life of David Brainerd in the early years of my ministry that I named my youngest son after him. When I was but eighteen years of age, I found myself 3,000 miles from home, a missionary to the Indians. No wonder I love Brainerd! Brainerd it was who taught me to fast and pray. I learned that greater things could be wrought by daily contact with God than by preaching. When I feel myself growing cold I turn to Brainerd and he always warms my heart. No man ever had a greater passion for souls. To live wholly for God was his one great aim and ambition.’
David Brainerd couldn’t have known… Jonathan Edwards couldn’t have known… You and I can’t possibly know what God is doing in us and through us and for us. We must keep on keeping on.
