“…and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.”  Acts 1:8

In Northampton, Massachusetts there is an old Puritan cemetery where David Brainerd, the young missionary to the American Indians is buried.  He died at the age of twenty-nine after suffering seven years with tuberculosis.  He is buried beside his fiancée Jerusha Edwards, the eighteen year old daughter of Jonathan Edwards who died just four months later.  Theirs was a colonial love story.

David was born into a Puritan family in 1718.  His parents both died leaving him an orphan at the age of 14. When he was 21, he came to Christ through the preaching of George Whitefield and the evangelists of “The Great Awakening” in America.  Two months later, he entered Yale University to begin pastoral studies.  He was expelled after making an unkind remark about a faculty member.  Although he tried several times to apologize and re-enroll, he was turned down.  God had other plans for David!

By any standards of modern mission boards, David would have been rejected as a missionary.  He was frail and sickly, suffering with the beginning stages of tuberculosis and prone to melancholy and depression. In spite of these shortcomings, God used him and he was later considered “the pioneer of modern missionary work.”

His first attempts to evangelize the Indians of New York and Pennsylvania proved unsuccessful.  He felt his ministry was ineffective, but David persevered in spite of physical pain, loneliness and the hardships of living in the wilderness. The Indians in New Jersey received him and listened to the message of Jesus Christ.  Many came to Christ as David poured out his life to them, writing that he wanted “to burn out in one continual flame for God.”  This was the place where God moved in power and brought awakening and blessing to the Delaware Indians.  Within a year, there were 130 persons in this growing assembly of believers.  He guided the Indians when their land was threatened, instructing them on building a church, school, carpenter’s shop and infirmary.  David stayed with them until he was too sick to minister, retiring to the home of Jonathan Edwards where his friendship with Jerusha Edwards ripened into a love relationship.  Jerusha nursed him faithfully through all the stages of tuberculosis.  He went to be with his Savior, October 1747.

It was a short life, just 29 years, only eight of those years as a believer, and four as a missionary.  Why has David’s life made such an impact?  One answer is that Jonathan Edwards took David’s journals and published them as “The Life and Diary of David Brainerd.”  This book found its way across the Atlantic Ocean and into the hands of a young Cambridge student named Henry Martyn.  Henry was so inspired by David’s example; he left his home and went to India.  Other missionaries, William Carey, Robert Morrison, Robert Mc Cheyne, David Livingston, Andrew Murray and modern day, Jim Elliot all considered the diary of David Brainerd one of the motivating influences of their lives.  He is a vivid, powerful testimony to the truth that God can use weak, sick, discouraged, beat-down, lonely, struggling saints, who cry to him day and night, to accomplish amazing things for His glory.

“Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.  But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”  John 12:24.

You can still buy David Brainerd’s book in most Christian and secular bookstores!

Your friend, Jean