_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. He will be won in the
labor._--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 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 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 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!”