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David Brainerd: A Life of Total Denial

David Brainerd was fixated on the promotion of God’s kingdom among the Native Americans in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He also worked for the salvation of ignorant settlers, and even the clergy, endeavoring to instruct, exhort and encourage—even to his dying day. The hardships and privations that Brainerd endured in preaching the gospel defy imagination. Total self-denial marked him clearly. He faced death at many turns, willingly and joyfully spending His life for His Savior. Though he was young at the time he wrote it (Brainerd died at the young age of 29), his journal is filled with wisdom. The following quote, where he describes the essence of true Christianity, is just one of many examples that could be furnished from his historic, and insightful, book:

May 24, 1746: “Could not but think, as I have often remarked to others, that much more of true religion consists in deep humility, brokenness of heart, and an abasing sense of barrenness and want of grace and holiness, than most who are called Christians imagine; especially those who have been esteemed the converts of the late day. Many seem to know of no other religion but elevated joys and affections, arising only from some flights of imagination, or some suggestion made to their mind, of Christ’s being their’s, God loving them, and the like.”

June 18,1747 (just a few months before Brainerd’s death in Jonathan Edward’s home): “Especially, I discoursed repeatedly on the nature and necessity of that humiliation, self-emptiness, or full conviction of a person’s being utterly undone in himself, which is necessary in order to a saving faith; and the extreme difficulty of being brought to this, and the great danger there is of persons taking up with some self-righteous appearance of it…being never effectually brought to die in themselves, are never truly united to Christ, and so perish.”

The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, which is actually his journal, is a book that touches the soul, and one to be re-visited time and again, and worn out by much handling.