I grew up in a section of Chattanooga, Tennessee called Brainerd. We drove on Brainerd Road, we went to church at Brainerd, and I cut grass in Brainerd Hills. Only recently, though, have I learned of the man for whom my community was named.
A friend gave me a book called THE HIDDEN SMILE OF GOD in which John Piper writes about the fruit of affliction in the lives of three men of faith: John Bunyan, William Cowper, and David Brainerd. In October of 1747, at the age of twenty-nine, David Brainerd died of tuberculosis in the home of Jonathan Edwards (preacher of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”). Two years after his death, Jonathan Edwards published THE LIFE OF DAVID BRAINERD which he wrote using his young friend’s diary. Through this writing about a hidden life of ministry to the American Indians in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, scores of missionaries have been inspired to surrender all for the sake of the Gospel. Piper quotes Brainerd’s diary:
When I really enjoy God, I feel my desires of him the more insatiable, and my thirsting for 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 never loiter on my heavenly journey!
How marvelous are the ways of God! He speaks through His Word, through His Spirit, and through the lives of men and women who are abandoned to Him. As David Brainerd battled rejection, loneliness, depression, wilderness, and terminal disease, he often wondered if there would be fruit. But Jesus promises to abide in those who abide in Him with assurance of much fruit. Only God knows the full result of David Brainerd’s life. Sixty years after his death, a group of missionaries serving the Cherokee Indians in Chattanooga, Tennessee decided to name their mission for the young man who had given his all.
Seeing a man “carry his cross” and follow Jesus inspires us to enter the sufferings of Christ and live boldly. Perhaps one way we do this is by entering the sufferings of those around us. Jerusha Edwards, the seventeen year old daughter of Jonathan, cared for David Brainerd the last nineteen weeks of his life. Four months after his death, a father buried a teenage daughter who had contracted tuberculosis while caring for a visiting missionary. Such men and women are a part of the great cloud of witnesses cheering us on.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” Hebrews 12:1
“And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” Hebrews 13:12-14