David Brainerd’s early life;
David Brainerd was a man after God’s own heart. He was a man that touched my heart, and many others as we would read through his infamous diary.
David Brainerd was born April 20, 1718, in Haddam, Connecticut. Brainerd was the sixth child, and third son, out of nine siblings. His father would pass away while David was the age of five, then his mother as well would pass away before David saw his fourteenth birthday. Death came to the Brainerd family at an early ages, most of his siblings did not live past the age of thirty five. David himself would not live to see the age of thirty. This is a real eye opener for myself personally, for I am reaching the age of David when he was taken by the Lord. I am now twenty six, and twenty nine, thirty is just around the corner. If I would compare my life to Brainerd’s while he was in his mid twenties, while pondering death at the age of twenty nine. Well it is a real eye opener, and I have learned from David that trials and tribulations will come, but how we over come them in Christ’s glory is what matters.
David early life was full of heart break and depression. He wrote in the beginning of his diary, “I was to think, from my youth something sober and inclined rather to melancholy than the other extreme”. After the death of his mother he moved in with his sister Jerusha. When Brainerd turned nineteen he inherited a farm that lied outside of Durham. After a year of farming, he decided that was not what he wanted to spend his life doing, so he quit and prepared to enter Yale University. During the time he spent on the farm he decided that he would study ministry.
To understand David’s entrance into Yale, his difficulties there, and then his move into the Mission field, we must first understand his early relationship with God, then his true conversion in Christ’s salvation. David’s first dealings with God in a type of religious manner was a works based relationship. He was completely honest with himself, and was often cast down knowing how futile his self righteousness really was. I am sure that would be the case for many if they were honest with themselves. There are many types of religious practices in the world today that has some sort of merit system for gaining favor with God. That type of thinking has taken the American church by storm. That is the nature condition of man, without the grace and sovereignty of Christ, we have all been there or would be there in some form or another. Brainerd was deeply disturbed by his short comings to the perfect standard that God holds.
In his diary he writes about this, while moving from his father’s house, to his sister’s, and then to his farm; “About the 15th of April, 1733, I removed from my father’s house to east Haddam. Where I spent four years; but still without God in the world, though, for the most part, I went a round of secret duty. I was not much addicted to young company, or frolicking, as it is called, but this I know, that when I did go into such company, I never returned with so good a conscience as when I went; it always added me new guilt, made me afraid to come to the throne of grace, and spoiled those good frames I was wont sometimes to please myself with. But, alas! All my good frames were but self-righteousness, not found on a desire for the glory of God.” Then while at the farm he would write; “I became very strict and watchful over my thoughts, words, and my actions; and thought I must be sober indeed, because I designed to devote myself to the ministry; and imagined I did dedicate myself to the Lord. He would go on for the next couple of years wrestling with convection, and fear of God’s wrath upon him. He was still trying to depend on his own merit and works, to gain favor to God. Then while in a lonely place trying to pray, he entered into an experience of God’s grace. “As I was walking in a dark thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the view and apprehension of my soul….It was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God; such as I never had before, nor anything that I had the least remembrance of it. So that I stood still and wondered and admired….. I had now no particular apprehension of any one person of the Trinity, either the Father, Son or Holy Spirit, but it appeared to be divine glory and splendor that I then beheld. And my soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable to see such a God, such a glorious divine being, and I was inwardly pleased and satisfied that he should be God over all forever and ever. My soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency, the loveliness and the greatness and other perfections of God that I was even swallowed up in him, at least to that degree that I had no thought, as I remember at first, about my own salvation or scarce that there was such a creature as I. Thus the Lord, I trust, brought me to a hearty desire to exalt him, to set him on the throne and to seek first his Kingdom, i.e. principally and ultimately to aim at his honor and glory as the King and sovereign of the universe, which is the foundation of the religion Jesus Christ has taught……I felt myself in a new world……I wondered that all the world did not comply with this way of salvation entirely by the righteousness of Christ.
I have spent so much time on writing of Brainerd’s conversion, because it was the most important thing that happened in his life. He would have been hard pressed to accomplish what he did, in the state of mind he was in with out the blood bought grace of Christ in his life.
Two months latter he would enter into Yale, to prepare for ministry. During the first year, he got the measles, and had to go home for several weeks. The next year he would go home due to spitting up blood, he contracted tuberculosis, and would die seven years later. David went back to Yale in 1770, and was on top of his class academically, but was expelled in 1772, during his third year. He was overheard saying that one of the tutors, Chauncey Whittelsey, “Has no more grace than a chair,” and wondered why the Rector “did not drop down dead.” These remarks he made was for the suppression the staff at Yale had for the students during Great Awaking movement. After failing attempts to be reinstated at Yale, it was suggested that Brainerd would become a missionary to the Indians. The Commissioners of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, sponsored him to do it. He was first assigned to Housatoic Indians at Kaunaumeek, they were located about twenty miles north of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He stayed there for a year, and made some progress. He was able to start a school for Indian children. He preached and taught, and he was also able to translate some of the Psalms to their native language (he was helped doing this by John Sergeant, a veteran missionary). He was then reassigned to the Delaware Indians in Pennsylvania, he was then later examined by the Newark Presbytery, and ordained on June 11, 1744. In June 19, 1745 he left to make a preaching tour to the Indians at Crossweeksung, New Jersey. God brought awakening here and blessed the Indians. In the year that he was there, the assembly of believers grew to 130 persons, and was growing even larger. David grew to sick to stay any longer, May, 1746 he left to recuperate in Elizabethtown at the house of Jonathan Dickson. He would later go back to visit his newly made Indian friends, but due to growing ever sicker, he could stay no longer. He left for the home of Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts. He arrived there May 28, 1747, he would stay there until October 9, 1747.
David Brainerd is a fine example of Christian character in times of suffering. As I read through his diary, I was somewhat pushed to tears, to read of his suffering for the name of Christ. Not only the physical ailments of tuberculosis, but the constant state of depression, the lack of food, the cold (which he despised), all this to preach the beautiful message of salvation in Christ alone. He struggled to love the Indians as well, but through time and Grace he made lasting friendships with them. He spent the first half of his life trying to find ways to please God, after God reviled his truth in Christ’s salvation to David, he spent the second half of his life bearing much fruit and spreading the gospel. Brainerd’s life is a living example of how we can please God. By having faith in the Son, and making much of him in all that we do.
At the age of twenty nine David Brainerd would die. Jonathan Edward’s eighteen year old daughter Jerusha, had tended David in his last days. Four months after he died she died of the same affliction. Edwards wrote of this as follows; It has pleased a holy and sovereign God, to take away this my dear child by death, on the 14th of February…..after a short illness of five days, in the 18th year of her age. She was a person of much the same spirit with Brainerd. She had constantly taken care of and attended him in this sickness, for nineteen weeks before his death; devoting herself to it with great delight, because she looked on him as eminent servant of Jesus Christ.
David Brainerd, and Jonathan Edwards have played important roles in my life, and I pray that my faith and service to God’s calling in my life would be as faithful as theirs was.
Resources;
The Life and Diary of David Brainerd; Edited by Jonathan Edwards
Hendrickson,2006
The Hidden Smile of God; written by John Piper
Crossway,2001
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