My name is Brad Nelson.
I'm the Minister for Youth and I'm here
to introduce John.
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.
I come away 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.
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 dust.
Father, David Brainerd was just dust.
What dust he was.
And you have encouraged me so much through
what you did with this dust.
I want you, Lord God, to come and
sustain the dust in this room.
Breathe life into the dust in this room.
Awaken and make ministers who persevere out of
the dust in this room.
Through Christ I pray.
David Brainerd.
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.
And I 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, 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 100 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
would 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 Edwards 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, 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.
The 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
Wittlesley, 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 Wittlesley's prayer?
And he said, I think Wittlesley 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 had become a missionary to plead with
the officers to give him another chance.
He apologized profusely, and they never let him
back in.
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.
And 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, a 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,
you lame, and die.
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 for the Indians.
I will pray about it.
And he prayed, and he was commissioned.
So he went to Countameek, which was a
little village just north of Stockton where Edward
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 Countameek.
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, 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 Brainard's role in that.
So he was ordained in 1744.
He was 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 Weeksville
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 Weeksville, 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 Brainard 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 Brainard among
these Indians.
He moved them from Cross Weeksville 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 Edward's 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
Edward's house, October 9, 1747.
A short life, 29 years, 5 months, and
19 days.
Eight years a believer, four years.
Why, then, was Brainard's life so powerful?
Why has it made the impact that it
has?
Well, 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 Brainard.
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 Brainard?
Why was it written of Henry Martin?
Perusing The Life of David Brainard, 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
Brainard as a sacred text and have it
with him along with sermons of Edwards in
India?
Why did Robert Morrison and Robert McChane 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 Brainard 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 humans
to support me.
I read my Bible and Mr. Brainard's life,
the only books I brought with me, and
from them I have a little support.
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 Brainard'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 for his glory.
And 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.
Number one, Brainard 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,
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.
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, 42.
"'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, 43.
"'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.
Sunday, 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.
But Brainerd pressed 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.
Fourth, Brainerd struggled with immense external hardships as
a missionary.
In his first mission to Countermeek in 1943,
he said, "'I live poorly with regards to
the comforts of life.
Most of my diet consists of boiled corn,
pasty 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 formerly 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, for he
is, the comfort to me under my sharpest
trials, and scarce ever lets 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 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 burdened 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 and his soul goes.
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 you're
suffering.
It 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 the lilies.
Sixth, Brainerd struggled to love the Indians.
He struggled to love 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.
44, 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 unloved.
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 to
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.
That's a quote.
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 did that.
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.
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.
I long to be like him.
In spite of all the strangers and unhealthiness
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 lose if you
do not think.
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 1747, his 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.
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 friends 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.
He just went off by himself often to
pray.
He would 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.
But oh, with what reluctance did I find
myself obliged to consume time.
With what reluctance I went to bed when
I wanted to keep on.
And he fasted and fasted and fasted.
Again and again you read.
Fasted and prayed for the day.
Fasted every time he needed guidance when he
switched fields.
That summer after he was kicked out of
school.
Fasting and fasting for guidance, for spiritual depth,
for usefulness.
And then he wrote a letter at the
end of his life to young ministers.
Urging them to build into your lives fasting
and prayer.
Because of the spiritual benefits he had received
by it.
Here's what Edward wrote about this experience.
Among all the many days he spent in
secret fasting and prayer.
And that he gives account of in his
diary.
There is scarce an instance of one.
But what was either attended or soon followed
with apparent success.
And a remarkable blessing in special incomes and
consolations of God's spirit.
And very often before the day was ended.
In other words, Edward says that he documented
that almost every day that he fasted.
Something good happened in his life.
Thirdly, besides prayer and fasting.
Here was in a sense a very frustrated
scholar.
Which every pastor is almost.
Every pastor wants more time to read as
far as I know.
I've never met one who says, oh I
read too much.
I get too much time to read.
But Edward Brainerd was an extraordinary man.
He was a genius probably.
In his language learning and his bent towards
study.
And he studied much.
Picture him studying.
He built four little huts in his life.
A place where he worked.
He built with his own hands a little
hut.
And in the hut you have a candle.
And a fireplace.
No electricity.
No computers and word processors.
No pencil.
And no paper.
Of any significant amount.
45, December 20th.
I spent much of the day in writing.
But was unable to intermix prayer with my
studies.
January 7, 44.
Spent this day in seriousness.
With steadfast resolutions for God and the life
of mortification.
Studied closely.
Till I felt my bodily strength fail.
December 20th, 42.
Spent this day in prayer and reading and
writing.
And enjoyed some assistance.
Especially in correcting some thoughts on a certain
subject.
He was constantly writing.
Now, one of the reasons this is significant
is because we don't know what he wrote.
Only the diaries and the journal are preserved.
There aren't any other manuscripts.
Except letters.
And yet he was constantly writing theological things.
And we don't have any of this.
He was writing for himself.
Just like you all should do.
Publishing is not as significant as writing.
You should all write because you clarify things
when you write.
You go deeper when you write.
You get order when you write.
You grow in facility with language when you
write.
He said, was most of the day employed
in writing on a divine subject.
Was frequent in prayer.
Another time, spent most of the time in
writing on a sweet divine subject.
That's what we just don't have any of.
Another time, was engaged in writing again almost
the whole day.
Again, rose early in the morning by candlelight
some considerable time.
Spent most of the day en route.
Another time, towards night enjoyed some of the
clearest thoughts on a divine subject that ever
I remember to have had upon any subject
whatsoever.
And spent two or three hours writing them.
Here's a man with absolutely none of your
benefit.
None of your comfort.
None of your advantages.
Spitting blood every day.
Agonizing in his breath.
Not adequate food.
Indians clamoring for his attention.
Totally alone.
Writing, writing, writing.
And I commend it to you.
Brainerd's life is one long agonizing strain to
redeem the time, not grow weary in well
-doing, and abound in the work of the
Lord.
Well, let me close with the last section.
The effect of his life.
And I want to begin this little section
with his effect on Edwards.
We know Brainerd because of the impact he
had on Jonathan Edwards.
Had Edwards not been so moved, we would
not know David Brainerd.
Here's what Edwards wrote.
I would conclude my observations on the merciful
circumstances of Mr. Brainerd's death by acknowledging with
thankfulness the gracious dispensation of providence to me
and to my family in so ordering that
he should be cast hither to my house
in his last sickness and should die here,
so that we had the opportunity for much
acquaintance and conversation with him and to show
him kindness in such circumstances and to see
his dying behavior, to hear his dying speeches,
and to receive his dying counsels and have
the benefit of his dying prayers.
Now, what gives that incredible poignancy is that
Edwards knew Derusha caught the disease and died,
so that he was writing this a couple
of years later knowing that it had cost
him the life of his daughter to have
Brainerd in his house and thanking God for
the ministry.
There's this beautiful description of his taking each
of Edwards' children aside and asking them about
their faith and praying with them.
You can imagine how a father would see
one of the most noble missionaries of the
day doing that to his children and would
be deeply, deeply thankful.
As a result of this immense impact on
Edwards, he wrote The Life of Brainerd.
It's been reprinted more than all of his
other books and has had an immense, immense
impact.
I listed all the missionaries that I could
think of who had read and commented on
Brainerd earlier in the talk.
But if that's true, that is, if you
can assemble about a dozen famous missionaries who
said they owe so much to Brainerd, how
many countless unknowns must we stand on and
were strengthened by this book?
I mentioned colleges.
Let me just refer to this briefly.
Princeton and Dartmouth, in some measure, owe their
existence to David Brainerd, the frustrated pastor-scholar.
It goes like this.
He was kicked out of Yale.
Jonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr were getting fed
up with Yale College.
They were behind the awakening.
They took Brainerd's side, tried to get him
readmitted and couldn't.
The Senate of New York and New Jersey
headed up to here with the carnality of
Yale and said, when it happened to Brainerd,
we're going to start our own school, named
the College of New Jersey, which became Princeton.
And the beautiful little touch of providential, what
do you call it, irony, is that in
October of 46, Princeton was chartered by the
presbytery there in New Jersey, and in May
of 47, now picture this, he is four
or five months before he's dead.
He is at the house of Jonathan Dickinson
for four months, trying to recover to get
back to Cross Weeks and to continue his
ministry and then giving up finally and realizing
he's too sick.
During that time, Jonathan Dickinson, where he's staying,
is appointed the first president of Princeton.
The classes begin in his house, and David
Brainerd is called the first student of the
College of New Jersey.
And numerous scholars write about the indirect inspiration
and impact that his expulsion from Yale and
his passion for the ministry and for thinking
had on the founding of Princeton College.
There's another interesting story about Eliezer Wheelock.
Brainerd went to work among the Indians on
the Delaware River at the Forks of Delaware,
the Susquehanna Indians, and he felt like a
total failure.
He worked there a year, gathered a few
believers who later, by the way, went on
to Cross Weeks and then joined the community
there, but left feeling a failure.
However, his journal about his time there was
read by Eliezer Wheelock, a friend of his
who was absolutely enthralled with the prospect of
working among the Indians there, the Iroquois in
particular.
And so he took up the challenge among
the Iroquois, then moved to Connecticut, pressed on,
formed a school, and started a college which
became Dartmouth College, owing in a very remarkable
way, a significant way, to the inspiration of
the journal and model of David Brainerd.
In 1740, Yale, Harvard, and William & Mary
were the only colleges in the colony, and
they were not sympathetic to the Awakening.
None of them was.
But in the tide of the Awakening came,
with the Presbyterians, Princeton, with the Baptist Brown
University, with the Dutch Reformed, Rutgers, and with
the Congregationists, Dartmouth.
So the educational spinoff of the Great Awakening.
And isn't it remarkable that this nobody who
served for four years in the wilderness was
a key element in the founding of half
of those schools, two out of the four?
The lesson is that had he abandoned his
missionary career, the writing of his journals, and
suffering, in order to take up a peaceful,
settled, scholarly, pastoral life, the schools may not
have been founded.
We've never heard of him.
The missionary movement would not have had that
impulse.
It is an amazing thing.
I close with two last comments.
The most awesome effect of David Brainerd's ministry
is the same as yours.
There were about 150 Indians who will be
in heaven because of his direct preaching ministry.
I can't begin to estimate how many millions
of people from all the tribes and tongues
who will be because missionaries went under the
inspiration.
But let's just take his life as it
stood.
He had gathered about 130 souls of whom
he was fairly sure of their conversion by
the time he left.
And it went on growing under the ministry
of his brother John.
And I think Sinclair Ferguson has made plain
to us the inestimable value of one soul
plucked from everlasting destruction and brought into the
eternal joy of God.
Had he suffered what he suffered for only
one Indian, that would still be his greatest
achievement.
And if he has 130 or 40 or
50, then all the more amazing.
It might be fitting for me to close
by opening up a journal that is far
weaker and far more worldly.
This is from a journal entry of mine,
June 28, 1986.
Remember that day?
You don't keep a journal, Tom.
Maybe you do.
June 28, 1986.
This afternoon, Tom and Julie and I drove
to Northampton.
We found the gravestone of David Bringer.
A dark stone slab the size of a
grave top and a smaller white marble insert
which said, sacred to the memory of Reverend
David Bringer, a faithful and laborious missionary to
the Stockbridge, Delaware, and Susquehanna tribes of Indians
who died in this town October 10, 1747.
Tom and Julie and Ruth and Hannah and
I took hands and stood around the grave
and prayed to thank God for Bringer and
Jonathan Edwards and to dedicate ourselves to their
work and their God.
It was a memorable and, I hope, powerful
and lasting.
Father, my heart is thankful to you 250
years later for this man.
Broken, sick, tormented, lonely, beat down, frustrated, glorious
man.
And I thank you for what you've taught
me, what you've worked in me.
And I long so much for us all
now to be thankful.
Father, give us some measure of his good
spirit and oh, that we may not loiter.
I pray this now in your name.
Well, we've got 20 minutes, I think, for
us to reflect on Brainerd's life, the very
prejudiced account that you've heard here.
Unashamed admiration.
What would you like to talk about?
Anything at all that defines me, corrections or
additions or queries?
Go ahead, Bear.
Father, I haven't read one other book about
Brainerd.
All I've read is this, the Yale critical
edition of the diary and journals and all
of Norman Pettit's introduction and Brainerd's, I mean,
Edwards' comments.
So my exposure is very, very, very limited.
It's not based on the secondary literature at
all.
And I commend that approach to life to
you.
Forget secondary literature and go to the sources.
I am so glad that I did not
read Norman Pettit's introduction before I read Brainerd
because I got so angry at the way
he talked about Brainerd.
I was angry at him.
He talked about joylessness again and again and
I underlined 50 places where he talked about
joy.
Unbelieving literary critic from the University of Chicago,
Handling Pearl.
He knows nothing about.
So don't go to secondary literature.
Go to the sources.
No offense, Bear.
You did, you did.
I'm glad.
I didn't think you would be.
Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
So did Henry Martin, that lovely man.
Fritz, if
I were a homiletics teacher, I would require
that my students try every time.
I have read enough of history to know
that God could take Thomas Chalmers who read
laboriously and transform a people and God could
take a Spurgeon who could prepare in 45
minutes and deliver an unforgettable message with a
half sheet of notes.
You must find your own way.
I write out every Sunday morning sermon for
10 years because I think I have a
gift for delivering it without people knowing that.
Not everybody does.
And anybody that looks like they're reading should
get rid of their manuscript, all right?
But I do because I can't get my
thoughts straight any other way.
I can't get them straight.
I can't get my ideas in order.
You have to write if you have a
weak mind.
I believe this with all my heart because
I went one time and talked to the
faculty at Fuller Seminary in 1978 and I
remember Ralph Martin, a New Testament teacher, in
a kind of demeaning way said, Oh, do
you do that arcing stuff that Dr. Fuller
teaches?
Isn't that just a crutch?
That's an exegetical device that requires writing out
the text.
Isn't that just a crutch?
And I said, That's exactly what it is
because I'm a cripple in lecture.
So unless you are like Jonathan Edwards and
Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan or whoever and
can take an idea and for an hour
or two hold it and turn it like
Dr. Ferguson said, I agree with him.
That is not the prerogative of a genius.
But I have to do it on paper.
I cannot do it.
I think of the shutters banging and the
cars going by and food and my mind
won't hold an idea without a pencil in
my hand.
So know thyself, brother, and proceed.
Go ahead, go back.
I don't, but I'll tell you who can
tell you.
Mark Noll has just written a history of
Princeton, and you can find, I'm sure, a
very profound treatment of that move.
It's a troubling phenomenon, I agree, Tom, to
see what happens, what seems to always happen
with my own alma mater.
I fear, I don't know what might happen
there, but it's a tragic thing, which is
why I suppose there has to be constantly
new schools being created like there is in
Florida now.
Two of them.
There.
I don't know where the hands are coming
first.
This is right here.
Go ahead, baby.
No, I was looking behind you, but go
ahead.
We'll jump back in.
My only exposure to John is the little
I read in the introduction here by Pettit,
who says that John took over the work
in Cross Weekson, pressed on until he was
60 years old, that the work prospered, and
that's it.
So I just don't know what else to
say.
John, he had two favorite brothers, John and
the other younger one, Israel.
Maybe I'm not sure what his name was,
but they both were evidently very warm and
successful men.
The people in his own day did not
regard Brainerd as a weird, sick guy.
When we read these kinds of personal testimonies
and the self-deprecation, we Americans, from our
psychological perspective, immediately indict him with sickness.
They didn't, and it may not have been
as sick as it looks to us.
We have been told to esteem ourselves so
consistently for so many years that anything that
looks like the lack of self-esteem looks
sick.
Now, I suspect there was a measure of
sickness in Brainerd, but not as much as
the average reader today would think, probably.
Now, David, oh, there's
so many things he has to teach us.
Community, oh, he just cried out for Christian
community.
He loved friends.
He loved to talk with people.
If there'd only been somebody with him to
say, Come on, David, quit it.
It didn't go that bad yesterday.
You have a very bad perspective.
It was good.
They listened to you.
Somebody forgiven.
We are not made to function alone in
the ministry.
We will not judge our ministries correctly if
we're left alone.
We will either be excessively proud or excessively
despairing.
We must get the orientation of friends.
So there's a first thing to learn, partnership
and community in the ministry to give us
balance.
Oh, my goodness, that's so important.
A second thing is we must learn to
use, no, that's not the right way to
say it.
We must learn to perceive our successes as
the works of grace and delight in them,
delight in them.
And he does that periodically.
He's just very, very hesitant, I think, to
say anything that would come close to looking
like he is extolling himself.
And we must find language that can say,
it was a wonderful service yesterday.
The Lord blessed.
I felt freedom.
I thanked the Lord for his goodness to
me as a minister.
I'm not perfect.
I made mistakes, but it could have been
a lot worse.
So find language that can extol the mercy
of God in our lives when he does
one little fraction of kindness in us and
through us.
That's my alternative to self-esteem.
Grace esteem, I like to call it.
Cultivating the esteem of grace in all of
the little dimensions in our lives.
That's my counseling approach.
If somebody thinks they're too useless to go
on in life, I don't generally try to
find some feature in which they can boast,
but I can point out so many evidences
of grace in their lives, that God is
at work in their lives, and he's the
kind of God who really doesn't need much
to work with.
Witness David Brainerd in order to get on
with them.
So that's an approach that I think he
would point us toward.
I think the biggest lesson he has for
us along those lines is God-centeredness.
An utter, absolute passion to keep God at
the center of everything.
Now, the danger of that is that people,
some Puritan types, don't have the theological sophistication
or depth to learn how to value the
creation for God's sake.
They feel that any delight in things is
idolatry.
In my book Desiring God, I wrestled with
that in the chapter on prayers, as well
as I know how to wrestle with it,
and got my answer from Augustine, who prayed,
Father, he loves thee too little who loves
anything together with thee, which he loves not
for thy sake.
Now, what that does is free you to
obey 2 Timothy, or 1 Timothy 4, where
all these things were freely given to you
to enjoy.
Marriage, bed, and food is the specifics in
view.
Sex and eating are not to be demeaned.
And so when I say God-centeredness, what
I mean is not that all you think
about is God, but that you think of
all in relation to God.
Food, sex, children, shoes, health, sunshine, broken clutches,
and everything else.
Everything relates to God.
And what I just cry for in my
people is that they would be just God
-besotted.
I love that phrase that Mark Noll used
in describing John to them.
He was a God-besotted person.
They didn't need touch.
Those are two or three things that come
to my mind.
All the historical implications of faithfulness.
Who knows what will come in a hundred
years?
That was Tom's point.
We have not bothered to compile a list
of biographies, but a good...
What?
Can I make a...
That's exactly what I would have said.
So that's the first thing to say.
And my second thing to say is this.
Most contemporary biographies are very thin.
They are excessively atheological.
You read Mary Drury on William Carey, you
can't find a thing about his theology.
You don't know what drove the man.
Contemporary biographies don't give a rip about what
drove the early missionaries.
And that's all I care about.
So you know what you do?
You go to the library and you get
these old, tattered versions that have no more
copyright laws on them anymore.
And you photocopy it.
Because they're not available.
And you say, now what would you pay
for this in a used, rare bookstore?
$60, $40, $50 for one of these old
gems?
Like the Journal of Henry Martin?
You can't get that.
But you can photocopy it for $15.
Or cheaper, depending on where you get your
machine.
So if I were you, I would pick
out the people you want to read.
And then go back and find their journals
and their diaries and their letters.
And copy them out of the library on
paper.
Bind them yourself with a loose-leaf binder.
And read a few each day.
Or if you can find a classic biography
that is theologically astute, then spend your time
on that.
But there's just a lot of stuff that's
so thin today.
You've got more important things to do with
your time.
It's not just age.
The original is what I'm aiming at, mainly.
That's a very good point.