(Men of Whom the World Was Not Worthy) Brainerd, David Oh That I May Never Loiter in My Heavenly Jou — John Piper

My name is Brad Nelson. I'm the Minister for Youth, and I'm here to introduce John, and I know most of you don't need to hear an introduction of John Piper. You know that he graduated from Wheaton College, from Fuller Seminary, and then from the University of Munich.

He's written numerous books, Love Your Neighbors, The Justification of God, Desiring God. He and Wayne Grudem are editing a book right now on recovering biblical manhood and womanhood that should be out this summer.

You know that he's married to Noel and has four sons, Carson, Abraham, Benjamin, and Barnabas. Two of whom are in my youth group, and they're just a joy to minister with and minister to. They are really great kids.

John's done a great job in fathering them. John is the type of person, the type of communicator, that whenever he writes an article or writes a book or preaches a sermon or does a teaching or just reflects on a person or an event or a book, I come away inspired.

I come away encouraged. I come away challenged in many different ways, challenged in how I'm living, challenged in how I'm thinking about something. Oftentimes I'm humbled or I have to fall before the Lord, but almost always I have a greater thirst for God.

Almost always I am encouraged and so desirous to go hard after God. And so it's with that desire that I invite John up to share with us on his reflections from the life and ministry of David Brainerd.

David Brainerd and the Glory of God in Psalm 103

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.

The Lord works vindication and justice to all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his deeds to the people of Israel. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor requite us according to our iniquities. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him.

As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him. He knows our frame. He remembers that we are...

Brainerd’s Early Life, Losses, and Spiritual Struggles

David Brainerd was just to come and stay in the dust in this room, breathe life into the dust, awaken and make ministers who persevere out of the dust. I wish everybody had the opportunity to spend a week or two just immersed in the 18th century, in the journals and diaries of David Brainerd.

Some people couldn't stand it, and others of us simply find glory everywhere. He was born in 1718 in Haddam, Connecticut. John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards were 14 years old when he was born. He was to see both waves of the Great Awakening firsthand in the mid -30s and early 40s of the 1700s and then die at the age of 29 in 1747 in the house of Jonathan Edwards.

His father was named Hezekiah, and he died when he was nine years old, when David Brainerd was nine years old. I've reflected on that because I've had three sons now, and Lord willing we'll have a fourth who turn nine.

Of all the ages I would choose not to die on my boys, it would be nine, because at nine they cling and love and need so badly. But he lost his father when he was nine, he lost his mother when he was 14, and then he went to visit or live with his 18-year-old sister who'd married in a nearby town.

On top of an austere father and losing his father and mother, he inherited probably a constitutional disposition towards depression. A man named Thomas Brainerd, writing a hundred years later, 1865, wrote about his family.

In the whole Brainerd family for 200 years there has been a tendency to morbid depression, akin to hypochondria. He wrote when he was young, I think it was just before his conversion, about this issue in his youth.

He says, I was, I think from my youth, something sober and inclined rather to melancholy than the other extreme. Which is an understatement, I think. You all know that melancholy is the old-fashioned word for depression.

He moved in with his sister then when he was 14 and lived with her for five years and wrestled with God. He hated the doctrine of original sin, he hated the divine law and its strictness, he hated the sovereignty of God, and he wrestled and wrestled.

He was, however, very paltilious in his religious efforts to break through. He read the Bible through twice a year as a rule while he was in that house with his sister Jerusha. Interesting name correlation there between the woman he will probably fall in love with.

But he wasn't converted. He was very, very legalistic, he said. But then the day came, and let me read you the account of his conversion. And if you understood this account, you would understand his theology.

It is Edward's theology, they write almost the same when it comes to salvation and the nature of true and saving faith. As I was walking in a dark, thick grove, he's 21 years old now, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the view and apprehension in 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, so that I stood still and wondered and admired. My soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency, the loveliness and the greatness and the other perfections of God that I was 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 ever was such a creature as I.

And 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, that is 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 of Jesus.

I felt myself in a new world. Lord's Day, July 12, 1739, he was 21 years old. A few months later he entered Yale and the hardships in those first years were terrible. He had to be sent home the first year because he began to cough up blood.

So he already had in 1739 the disease of which he would die eight years later, tuberculosis. The students were carnal. There was immense disinterest in spiritual things that year. He went home with measles again.

It was an awful thing in those days. And when he came back in November of 1740, his second year, everything was different because George Whitefield had been there and had preached. And there was a great moving now among the students.

Spiritual awakening was happening and there was a division among the faculty who were not following along with what they would have called enthusiasm, but which Brainerd discerned to be genuine awakening.

And the fans were flamed by Gilbert Tennant and Ebenezer Pemberton and James Davenport as they came through the college and fired the students up and created tremendous problems for the faculty and the staff.

The way they decided to deal with these problems in the fall of 1741 was to call Jonathan Edwards to come preach a sermon at the graduation ceremony. To straighten out the students and save the faculty from these enthusiasts.

And Edwards preached a message. Brainerd was in the audience. The message was called, The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God. And he totally disappointed the faculty and the powers that be because he argued that this awakening was a real work of God.

No matter how many excesses, no matter how many weird things were happening, it was real. Now, to understand the poignancy of this moment, you have to understand that on the morning of this address, the trustees gathered together of Yale College and passed a resolution that read like this.

If any student of this college shall directly or indirectly say that the rector, either of the trustees or the tutors are hypocrites, carnal or unconverted men, he shall, for the first offense, make public confession in the hall, and for the second offense, be expelled.

Now, keep those words in mind, and you hear Edwards preaching, and he comes to the conclusion of his message and says this. It is no evidence that a work is not the work of God if many that are subjects of it are guilty of so great frowardness as to censure others as being unconverted.

It was a direct attack on the trustees, and one can't help but wonder, with Brainerd sitting in the audience, whether Edwards felt some responsibility for what happened the next term. Brainerd came to chapel, and one of the faculty members, one of the tutors named Chauncey Whittlesley, prayed in what was called a most pathetical manner, which I think means full of excessive pathos.

And the hall cleared. Three people were left with Brainerd. A freshman was walking by the door. One of the students said to Brainerd, What did you think of Whittlesley's prayer? And he said, I think Whittlesley has no more grace than a chair.

And it was also reported that he said he wondered why the rector did not drop down dead for fining students for their evangelical enthusiasm. And Brainerd was summarily expelled. And it broke his heart.

He could never get back in. He tried again and again to get back in. He rode miles through the wilderness even after he'd become a missionary to plead with the officers to give him another chance. He apologized profusely, and they never let him back in.

God’s Providence in Brainerd’s Expulsion and Missionary Calling

Now, I'm moved to reflect at this moment on the sovereignty and providence of God. Because had this not happened, this man with tuberculosis would have finished Yale and taken a pastorate. That was his settled purpose.

And he would have died and nobody, no impact upon the missionary movement would have happened. He was cut off in the middle of his dream. Because you see, a law had just been passed in Connecticut that said no established minister may be installed in Connecticut who has not graduated from Harvard, Yale, or a European college.

And so he was undone as far as he was concerned. And there's a tremendous lesson here, namely that God, for His glory and for the good of His church, works through those moments when the best intentions of His servants are dashed.

Brainerd couldn't know it, and I think hopefully came to see it before the end of his life, that this careless word, I've thought about it with people like Johnny Erickson, one dive on one Sunday afternoon, sudden moment, and everything changes.

Manila was different 12 years later as she led 4 ,000 of us in song, lifting her hands like this. Be blind, behold your Savior coming, and leap, ye lame, with joy. So there's a great lesson here. In fact, I'm tempted to speculate that the modern missionary movement wouldn't have happened if Brainerd hadn't been expelled from Yale University.

But that's speculation. November 25th, 1742 now, after a summer of agony, he is examined for his fitness to the missionary service. I won't go through the long process that drug him that direction, but one very dear friend, Jonathan Dickinson, who was a part of the commissioners for the Society of Scotland for propagating Christian knowledge, said, you should be a missionary.

I will pray about it. And he prayed, and he was commissioned. So he went to Countermeek, which was a little village just north of Stockton where Edwards was going to become a missionary to the Indians in a few years after he got kicked out of his church.

And in April 1st, 1743, he began his year of preaching among the Indians in Countermeek. He lasted one year there, although he learned the language in that year, translated some of the Psalms into the Indian language, and started a school.

Left it behind, and the Indians came down and were ministered to by a sergeant there in Stockbridge. His second assignment was to the Forks of the Delaware, which is a little northeast of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

And at the end of a month there, he rode down to New York and was ordained by the New Jersey Presbytery. The New York and the New Jersey Presbytery were on his side and on the side of the students in the Great Awakening against Yale.

And we're going to hear the implications of that for the founding of a new school when we're done, and Brainerd's role in that. So he was ordained in 1744. Now, he's going to die, keep in mind, in 47.

He preached to the Indians then at the Forks of the Delaware for a year, gathering a few of God's people, and then he was assigned to Cross Weekson in New Jersey. And he went there, and there is where the great blessing came.

God poured out the Holy Spirit on the Indians in Cross Weekson, New Jersey, in an incredible way. And within a year, he had about 130 solid believers. He described, you know, I could give a whole talk on the way God came upon the Indians through the weight of truth, as David Brainerd kept discussing it.

The weight of truth came upon them and they'd fall off their seats and weep for hours seeking rest and peace for their consciences. God did a mighty work through Brainerd among these Indians. He moved them from Cross Weekson in May of 1746 up to Cranbury.

And there they built a little village and got land for the Indians so that they could have their own little reservation like and their own church building. And he had a little hut there. And then his sickness got so bad that he spent four months in Elizabethtown with Jonathan Dickinson.

And then on March 20, 1747, he said his last farewell to the Indians. Went up to Jonathan Edwards' house. There's not much evidence to go on, but almost everybody agrees he was in love with Jerusha, his 17-year-old daughter, Edward's 17-year-old daughter.

She nursed him for the last 19 weeks of his life and he died in Jonathan Edwards' house October 9, 1747. A short life, 29 years, 5 months, and 19 days. Eight years a believer, four years. Why then was Brainerd's life so powerful?

The Enduring Influence of Brainerd’s Piety and Biography

Why has it made the impact that it has? Of course, practically the first reason is that Jonathan Edwards was overwhelmed with this man's piety as he met him and lived with him for 19 weeks. And he took the diaries and wrote The Life of Brainerd.

That book has been the most republished book of Edwards. The book has never been out of print. To my knowledge, it has exerted an absolutely enormous impact upon the modern missionary movement. Why did John Wesley say, let every preacher read carefully over The Life of David Brainerd?

Why was it written of Henry Martin? Perusing The Life of David Brainerd, his soul was filled with a holy emulation of that extraordinary man and after deep consideration and fervent prayer, he was at length fixed in a resolution to imitate his example, which has a sweet irony about it because he died almost at the same age and of the same disease.

Why did William Carey regard Edwards' Life of Brainerd as a sacred text and have it with him along with sermons of Edwards in India? Why did Robert Morrison and Robert McChain of Scotland and John Mills of America and Frederick Schwartz of Germany and David Livingston of England and Andrew Murray of South Africa and Jim Elliott of modern America, all of them count David Brainerd a teacher and model and stand in awe of him and find inspiration from him.

Gideon Hawley was another missionary that went out inspired by Jonathan Edwards and he wrote about the struggles that he had in the wilderness of New England. I indeed greatly need something more than human to support me.

I read my Bible and Mr. Brainerd's life, the only books I brought with me and from them I have a little. Now why did this life have this extraordinary impact? Well, let me ask a more manageable question.

Why has it had an impact on me and then maybe it will transfer to you. Why? The answer, in summary form, I think is that Brainerd's life is a vivid, powerful testimony to the truth that God can and does use weak, sick, discouraged, beat down, lonely, struggling saints who cry to him day and night to accomplish amazing things.

So what I want to do now in the time we have is to talk about the struggles that he had, seven of them, the way he pressed on in these struggles and thirdly, the effect of his life. First in, his struggles.

Brainerd’s Constant Sickness and Physical Suffering

Number one, Brainerd struggled with almost constant sickness. He had to drop out of college, as I said, several times. He began to cough up blood in 1740. In 1744 he wrote, rode several hours in the rain through the howling wilderness although I was so disordered in body that little or nothing but blood came from me.

He would write things like this again and again. In the afternoon my pain increased exceedingly and was obliged to take myself to bed and was sometimes almost bereaved of the exercise of my reason by the extremity of the pain.

August 46, having lain in the cold sweat all night I coughed much bloody matter this morning and was under great disorder of body and not a little melancholy. May of 47, at Jonathan Edwards' house the doctor said, your disease is incurable.

You will die of consumption in a matter of weeks or months. In the last couple of months of his life his suffering was absolutely incredible. You know, there were no pills in those days. Nothing to relieve what we say must be relieved today.

Nothing. September 24, this is two weeks before he died. In the greatest distress that ever I endured having an uncommon kind of hiccup which either strangled me or threw me into a straining to vomit.

Edwards comments in the last week. He told me it was impossible for any to conceive of the distress he felt in his breast. He manifested much concern lest he should dishonor God by impatience under the extreme agony which was such that he said the thought of enduring it one minute longer was almost insupportable.

And just before he died he said to those around him it is another thing than people imagine. The thing that strikes you about the suffering of Brainerd is not simply the severity of it but the consistency of it.

He always suffered. From the time he was a student he never had relief for any significant amount of time. It was a relentless sickness and he pressed on in his work. Second, Brainerd struggled with relentlessly recurring depression.

Depression, Sin, and Brainerd’s Persevering Faith

He came to understand this a little, I think. Edwards said that at first he attributed far too much to spiritual desertion and far too little to the disease of melancholy. That's their phrase, the disease of melancholy.

And so his later judgments about what was happening in his blackest moods were a little more balanced than his earlier ones. But it was a horrendous thing, nevertheless. And this was his greatest torment, not the tuberculosis.

He did say that he detected a very profound difference in the melancholy after his conversion and the melancholy before his conversion as though a great rock had been inserted underneath his life so that he never despaired of the electing love of God after his conversion.

A great gift to him in his darkest days. He would say repeatedly, black, God is gone, but I do not doubt his love. Things like that. A few words of his own to give you a flavor of what he experienced.

Much of it was owing to his intense hatred for the remaining sin in his life. November 4, 1942. "'Tis distressing to feel in my soul that hell of corruption which still remains in me.". And his sense of unworthiness was so intense that it sometimes just paralyzed him.

January 23, 1943. "'Scarce ever felt myself so unfit to exist as now. I saw I was not worthy of a place among the Indians where I am going. None knows but those that feel it what the soul endures that is sensibly shut out from the presence of God.

Alas, tis more bitter than death.'". In fact, again and again he compared it to death, and I wrote down 22 places where he longed and pleaded that he would die. Sunday, February 3, 1745. "'My soul remembered the wormwood and the gall.

I might almost say the hell of Friday night last. And I was greatly afraid I should be obliged again to drink of that cup of trembling which was inconceivably more bitter than death and made me long for the grave unspeakably more than for hidden treasure.'".

Sunday, 44, December 16. "'Was so overwhelmed with dejection that I knew not how to live. I longed for death exceedingly. My soul was sunk in deep waters and the floods were ready to drown me. I was so much oppressed that my soul was in a kind of horror.'".

And what compounded this experience for Brainerd was that the Depression began to infect and lame his devotional exercises and his ministry of preaching. March 9, 43. "'Rode 16 miles to Montauk and had some inward sweetness on the road, but something of flatness and deadness after I came there and had seen the Indians.

Withdrew and endeavored to pray but found myself awfully deserted and left.'". It was immobilized sometime in his distresses. September, 46. "'Was scarce ever more confounded with the sense of my own unfruitfulness and unfitness of my work than now.

Oh, what a dead, heartless, barren, unprofitable wretch did I now see myself to be. My spirits were so low, my bodily strength so wasted that I could do nothing at all. At length, being much overdone, lay down on a buffalo's skin and sweat much of the whole night.'".

But Brainerd prayed and did not quit. He never quit. Third, Brainerd struggled with loneliness. He tells of having to endure profane talk of strangers one night, April, 43. "'Oh, I longed for some dear Christian who knew my distresses.'".

A month later, he says, "'Most of the talk I hear is either Highland Scotch or Indian. I have no fellow Christian to whom I might unbosom myself and lay open my spiritual sorrows with whom I might take sweet counsel and conversation about the heavenly things and join in social prayer.'".

December, 1745. He wrote a letter to Eleazar Wheelock. We'll come back to him in a minute. He founded another college under Brainerd's inspiration. He wrote, "'I doubt not by that time you have read my journal through, you'll be more sensible of the need I stand of a companion in travel than ever you were before.'".

And I read two nights ago this quote that we all can empathize with, I think, about... He didn't want just anybody. A horse wouldn't do, and a carnal Christian wouldn't do. He wanted a soul companion.

He wrote, "'There are many with whom I can talk about religion, but alas, I find few with whom I can talk religion itself. But blessed be the Lord, there are some that love to feed on the kernel rather than the shell.'".

He, in his last 19 weeks, was nursed by Jerusha Edwards. She was 17, and in all likelihood it was a precious relationship. He speaks of an unparalleled, precious acquaintance. Never names him or her, but most people think that they did have a warm and spiritual relationship in those last days.

Missionary Hardships, Poverty, and Dependence on God

Fourth, Brainerd struggled with immense external hardships as a missionary. In his first mission to Count Ameek in 1943, he said, "'I live poorly with regards to the comforts of life. Most of my diet consists of boiled corn, hasty pudding, etc.

I lodge on a bundle of straw. My labor is hard and extremely difficult, and I have little experience of success to comfort me.'". In August of that year, he said, "'In this weak state of body, I was not little distressed for want of suitable food.

Had no bread, nor could I get any. I am forced to go or send 10 or 15 miles for all the bread I eat, and sometimes it is moldy and sour before I eat it, if I get any considerable quantity. But through divine goodness, I had some Indian meal of which I made little cakes and fried them, yet felt contented with my circumstances and sweetly resigned to God.'".

He was frequently lost in the woods. His horse, his car, broke down again and again. His horse would get poisoned. His horse got a broken leg. His horse got stolen. All of our car experiences happened to a missionary back then as well.

With this lung condition, picture yourself now trying to be warmed in the winter in a hut with a fire. Again and again, the smoke would so fill the room, he would almost lose his breath. He would have to go outside in the cold.

And he said, "'I would either be dying of cold outside or I would be smothering in the smoke inside.'". And he's alone, totally alone, 15 miles from anybody in the wilderness with tuberculosis and smoke filling his house and 29 degrees outside.

The struggle with external hardships was not the worst struggle, but it was an amazing one. And he resigned himself to it like this. Here's what he said, "'Such fatigues and hardships as they serve to wean me more from the earth than I trust will make heaven sweeter.

Formerly, when I was thus exposed to cold, rain, etc., I was ready to please myself with the thoughts of enjoying a comfortable house, a warm fire, and other outward comforts. But now these have less place in my heart through the grace of God, and my eye is more to God for comfort.

In this world, I expect tribulation, and it does not now as formally appear a strange thing to me. I don't, in such seasons of difficulty, flatter myself that it will be better hereafter, but rather think how much worse it could be, how much greater trials others of God's children have endured, and how much greater are perhaps those reserved for me.

Blessed be God that He makes, or He is, the comfort to me under my sharpest trials, and scarce ever let these thoughts be attended with terror or melancholy, but they are attended frequently with great joy.'".

So in spite of the terrible external hardships Brainerd pressed on, and indeed often flourished at the moment when he suffered most. Fifth, Brainerd struggled with a bleak outlook on nature, a bleak outlook on nature, and we will forgive him for this quickly, I think, because it is hard to look at a rose when you're spitting.

But it is a great tragedy that he did not have more of Jonathan Edwards' eyes. He never said one thing about the beauty of nature. Never once did he talk of a sunset, a sunrise, a bird, a bee, a flower, and he lived among them, always.

Edwards, on the contrary, would take walks and horse rides in the woods. He would see the excellency of God everywhere, echoes of glory in everything from a spider's web to the sun. Brainerd had not one ounce of this appreciation for nature.

It was a howling wilderness to him, constant misery as far as he was concerned. And the great tragedy of that is that the burden that he bore blinded him, it seemed, from the antidote to the burden. God has appointed nature as a healing means for our souls.

One of the ironies here, too, is that Edwards did not see this, as far as I can tell. Edwards complimented Brainerd for not having an imagination because it was imaginations that were wrecking the great awakening.

See, enthusiasm, as it was called, excessive emotionalism was rooted in imagining things that had no grace in them. And Edwards was just fighting and fighting against people who say, Oh, I saw the Lord.

His arms were open wide to me. He was enfolding me in His arms. I am His child. And they lived like the devil. Edwards said, This is no true grace. Your visions are nothing. And so he warmly congratulates Brainerd for having no warm imagination.

All of Brainerd's thought was rooted in a spiritual apprehension of glory. Well, there is a plus and a minus to not having an imagination, I'll tell you. Far healthier would have been the counsel of Spurgeon.

To sit long in one posture, poring over a book, or driving a quill, is in itself a taxing of nature. But add to this a badly ventilated chamber, a body which has been long without muscular exercise, and a heart burned with many cares, and we have all the elements for preparing a seething cauldron of despair.

Especially in the dim months of fog, nature outside his window is calling him to health and beckoning him to joy. He who forgets the humming of the bees among the heather, the cooing of the wood pigeons in the forest, the song of birds in the woods, the rippling of the rills among the rushes, the sighing of the wind among the pines, needs not wonder if his heart forgets to sing in his soul.

Nobody told him to open the eyes of his eyes. At least he didn't seem to hear, or he didn't record if they did. But I repeat, we will quickly forgive Brainerd, because it is hard to see when your see is hard.

And yet, let us consider the lilies, brothers. It was not merely Spurgeon who set us on this quest to open our eyes. Consider... Sixth, Brainerd struggled to love the Indians. He struggled to love the Indians.

Brainerd’s Struggle to Love and Serve the Indians

If love is known by sacrifice, he loved them. If love is also known by heartfelt, warm affection and compassion, he struggled to love. Felt some compassion for souls and mourned. I had no more. I feel much more kindness, meekness, gentleness, and love toward all mankind than ever.

He really did get great success in this from time to time. Felt much sweetness and tenderness in prayer, especially my whole soul seemed to love my worst enemies and was enabled to pray for those that are strangers and enemies to God with great degree of softness and pathetic fervor.

But at other times, he was empty of affection and compassion for souls and he expresses his guilt for that, that he had no more ardency and so little desire for their salvation. Forty-four, November 2nd, about noon, rode up to the Indians and while going could feel no desire for them and even dreaded to say anything to them.

So Brainerd struggled with the rise and fall of love in his heart. He loved, he loved, but he longed to love more. I love them, Father, help thou my unlove. And seventh, he struggled to stay true to his calling as a missionary.

He struggled to stay true. Remember now, he was expelled from college, cut off from the pastoral ministry, bowed to what he believed was the call of God, two missions after that breaking off of his pastoral journey, and then surprisingly was offered several pastorates along the way, good ones too.

He was offered the church at Millington near his home in Haddam in 1744 and he turned it down and prayed that God would send forth laborers to the vineyard. And then he was offered the most lucrative parish in New York, Long Island, East Hampton.

Jonathan Edwards says, it is the fairest, pleasantest town on the whole island and one of its largest and most wealthy parishes. And Brainerd wrote on Thursday, April 5th, mark this choice, committed, resolved to go on still with the Indian affair, if divine providence permitted, although before felt some inclination to go to East Hampton where I was solicited to go.

Mark this choice. He's spitting blood almost every day. He is alone. He doesn't have adequate food or shelter. The Indians are often unresponsive. He is offered a parish, his lifelong dream or his dreams that he was converted.

And he says no. There were a lot of other opportunities too. He wrote, I could have no freedom in the thought of any other circumstances or business in my life. All my desire was the conversion of the heathen and all my hope was in God.

God does not suffer me to please or comfort myself with hopes of seeing friends, returning to my dear acquaintance, who is that, and enjoying worldly comforts. He has basically surrendered them. He probably knows he's a doctor.

Well, those are the seven struggles that I wanted to mention. And now I want to turn to how he pressed on in these struggles. We began with introduction to his life, turned to the struggles, and now thirdly to his pressing on.

Brainerd’s Passion to Finish His Race

I personally think the reason that David Brainerd's life has exerted the power that it has is because in spite of his struggles, he never gave up. That's it. He was consumed with a passion to finish his race, honor his master, spread the kingdom, and advance in holiness.

Absolutely consumed. He could not relent from his pursuit of the kingdom, the honor of his master, and his own holiness. He had an unswerving allegiance to the cause of Christ so that I think we can all empathize with Henry Martin when after reading him in Cambridge in 1802, he said, I long to be like him.

Long to be like him. In spite of all the strangeness and unhealth and suffering, there is something in this man that makes us say, I must be like him. I want to be like him. Brainerd called this passion to finish his race and not turn back a pleasing pain.

He said, When I really enjoy God, I feel my desires of him the more insatiable, and my thirstings after holiness the more unquenchable. Oh, for holiness. Oh, for more of God in my soul. Oh, this pleasing pain.

It makes my soul press after God. Oh, that I might not loiter on my heavenly journey. Oh, that I might not loiter on my heavenly journey. He was utterly gripped by the apostolic admonition, Redeem the time for the days of evil.

Do not grow weary in well-doing, for in due time you will reap if you do not faint. Abound in the work of the Lord. He is an outfleshing of the pursuit of those apostolic commands with incredible devotion and single-minded fervor.

April 17, 47. Last year. Oh, I long to feel the remaining moment. Oh, for God. Though my body was so feeble and wearied with preaching and much private conversation, yet I wanted to sit up all night to do something for God.

To God, the giver of these refreshments, be glory forever and ever. Amen. February 21, 46. My soul was refreshed and comforted. I could not but bless God who had enabled me in some good measure to be faithful in the day past.

Oh, how sweet it is to be spent and worn out for God. Among the means that Brainerd used in pursuing God in this way was prayer, fasting, study and writing. Let me say a word about each of these. Prayer.

Prayer, Fasting, Study, and Writing

What a man of prayer. Again and again you read, spent the day in prayer for the Indians. Or set aside six times today. Prayer. Or met with nearby family or friend to pray with them for the concerns of the kingdom.

He prayed for his holiness. He prayed for the conversion of the Indians. He prayed perhaps above all for the advancement of the kingdom. Oh God, let your kingdom come in New England. He prayed and prayed that God's cause would advance.

What a spirit of prayer this man had. He was visiting the home of a friend one time and he just went off by himself often to pray. You seek out a little place, a room or outside. And this is what he wrote.

I continued wrestling with God in prayer for my dear little flock here and more especially for the Indians elsewhere as well as for dear friends in one place and another till it was bedtime and I feared I should hinder the family, etc.