Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long. Psalm 119:97
Much of the modern thinking about meditation demeans rational thought. It’s a carryover from Transcendental Meditation. Such meditation involves the repetition of a mantra, a word (sometimes the name of a Hindu god) not thoughtfully pondered but mindlessly repeated in order to stop thinking. The goal isn’t to focus on words or meaning ; the goal is not to focus at all.
In contrast, meditation in the Bible is always on a real person (God) and real words and meanings from God (those in scripture). May we join David in praying, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer” (Psalm 19:14 ESV).
“Give yourself to prayer, to reading and meditation on divine truths: strive to penetrate to the bottom of them and never be content with a superficial knowledge.” David Brainerd.
Be sure to read the history of this spiritual giant below the music. Unforgetable! Forward to others.
Truth: A Bigger View of God’s Word, Randy Alcorn, 2017, Pg 76 Harvest House.
UP NEXT: Sin’s Consequences Do Capture Our Attention!
David Brainerd was born on April 20, 1718, in Haddam, Connecticut, the son of Hezekiah Brainerd, a Connecticut legislator. He was orphaned at the age of nine years, as his father died in 1727 and at 46 his mother died five years later.
On July 12, 1739, he recorded having an experience of “unspeakable glory” that prompted in him a “hearty desire to exalt God, to set him on the throne and to ‘seek first his Kingdom’. This has been interpreted by evangelical scholars as a conversion experience.
Two months later, he enrolled at Yale. In his second year at Yale, he was sent home because he was suffering from a serious illness, tuberculosis, that caused him to spit blood. When he returned in November 1740, tensions were beginning to emerge at Yale between the faculty staff and the students as the staff considered the spiritual enthusiasm of the students, which had been prompted by visiting preachers such as George Whitefield, to be excessive. Brainerd was expelled because of comments about the impious staff.
A law forbade the appointment of ministers in Connecticut unless they had graduated from Harvard, Yale, or a European institution, so Brainerd had to reconsider his plans. In 1742, Brainerd was licensed to preach by a group of evangelicals known as New Lights. As a result, he gained the attention of Jonathan Dickinson, the leading Presbyterian in New Jersey, who unsuccessfully attempted to reinstate Brainerd at Yale. Instead, Dickinson suggested that Brainerd devote himself to missionary work among the Native Americans, supported by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. He was approved for this missionary work on November 25, 1742, which he would continue until late 1746 when he became too ill. .
Within a year, the Native American church at Crossweeksung had 130 members.
Thereafter, he refused several offers of leaving the mission field to become a church minister. He continued his work converting Native Americans, writing in his diary:
“I could have no freedom in the thought of any other circumstances or business in 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, and enjoying worldly comforts.”
In November 1746, he became too ill to continue ministering, and moved later to Jonathan Edwards’ house in Northampton, Massachusetts where he remained until his death the following year. Diagnosed with incurable consumption, his diary entry for September 24, stated:
“In the greatest distress that ever I endured having an uncommon kind of hiccough; which either strangled me or threw me into a straining to vomit.”
During this time, he was nursed by Jerusha Edwards, Jonathon’s seventeen-year-old daughter. The friendship grew between them and “many speculate that there was deep (even romantic) love between them”. He died from tuberculosis on October 9, 1747, at the age of 29. Jerusha herself died in February 1748 as a result of contracting tuberculosis from nursing Brainerd. After his death, his younger brother John Brainerd continued his work.
He made a handful of converts, but became widely known in the 1800s due to books about him. Much of Brainerd’s influence on future generations can be attributed to the biography compiled by Jonathan Edwards and first published in 1749 under the title of An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd. It gained immediate recognition, with eighteenth-century theologian John Wesley urging: ‘Let every preacher read carefully over the Life of David Brainerd.’ From the eighteenth century, missionaries also found inspiration and encouragement from the biography. Gideon Hawley wrote in the midst of struggles:
“I need, greatly need, something more than humane [human or natural] to support me. I read my Bible and Mr. Brainerd’s Life, the only books I brought with me, and from them have a little support.”
Other missionaries who have asserted the influence of Jonathan Edwards’s biography of Brainerd on their lives include Henry Martyn, William Carey, Jim Elliot, and Adoniram Judson.
Brainerd’s life also played a role in the establishment of Princeton College and Dartmouth College. The ‘College of New Jersey’ (later Princeton) was founded due to the dissatisfaction of the New York and New Jersey Presbyterian Synods with Yale; their expulsion of Brainerd and subsequent refusal to readmit him was an important factor in driving individuals such as Jonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr to act on this dissatisfaction. Dartmouth College originated from a school founded by Eleazar Wheelock for Native Americans and colonists in 1748, and Wheelock too had been inspired by Brainerd’s example of Native American education.