_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 labour and take pains for Him, and set by as much time in the
day for Him as you can. He will be won in the labour._—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 honoured 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 labour 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 distinguished 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 equalled. 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 straitened 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 labour 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 centre 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 marvellously 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 marvellous 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 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 labour? 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!"