Preacher and PrayerBounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Religion
Preacher and Prayer
Bounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Clergy -- Religious life; Prayer
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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