A Letter From Brainerd

The following is a portion of a letter from David Brainerd to an anonymous friend of his. Though it was written about 262 years ago, I felt like it was written to me personally. His language is a little bit foreign to us now days, so read carefully. This is a letter to you.

(You may not have heard of David Brainerd. Here is a little bit of information about him that I gathered from the little bit I have read of him:
David Brainerd [1718-47] spent his life for his Lord. He was a man of prayer and devotional life like few who ever walked this earth. He was a young missionary to the Indians during the Great Awakening of our early colonial history. He had hoped to marry Jerusha Edwards, daughter of Jonathan Edwards, that they might spend their lives serving their King; however, he was completely "burned out" in the service of his God, and died at the Edwards' home in Northampton at the age of 29. Before he died, he said to his beloved Jerusha, "If I thought I should not see you, and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part with you. But we shall spend an happy eternity together." She, who attended him during the last year of his life, contracted the same disease of tuberculosis and died a few months later at the age of 18.
David Brainerd counted not his life dear unto death, and in a letter to his brother said, "I declare now I am dying; I would not have spent my life otherwise for all the world.")

Here is the letter; I have emboldened a few places that I especially like:

"How amazing it is, that the living who know they must die, should notwithstanding, 'put far away the evil,' in a season of health and prosperity; and live at such an awful distance from a familiarity with the grave and the great concern beyond it!...How rare are the instances of those who live and act, from day to day; as on the verge of Eternity; striving to fill up all their remaining moments in the service, and to the honour of their great Master! We insensibly trifle away time, while we seem to have enough of it; and are so strangely amused, as in a great measure to lose a sense of the holiness and blessed qualifications necessary to prepare us to be inhabitants of the heavenly paradise. But O, dear Sir, a dying bed, if we enjoy our reason clearly, will give another view of things. I have now, for more than three weeks, lain under the greatest degree of weakness; the greater part of the time, expecting daily and hourly to enter into the eternal world: sometimes have been so far gone, as to be wholly speechless, for some hours together. O of what vast importance has a holy spiritual life been appeared to me at this season!

I have longed to call upon all my friends, to make it their business to live to God; and especially all that are designed for, or engaged in the service of the sanctuary. O dear Sir, do not think it enough, to live at the rate of common Christians. Alas, to how little purpose do they often converse, when they meet together! The visits, even of those who are called Christians indeed, are frequently barren; and conscience cannot but condemn us for the misimprovement of time, while we have been conversant with them. But the way to enjoy the divine presence, and to be fitted for distinguishing service for God, is to live a life of devotion and constant self-dedication to Him; observing the motions and dispositions of our own hearts, whence we may learn the corruptions that lodge there, and our constant need of help from God for the performance of the least duty. And O dear Sir, let me beseech you frequently to attend the great and precious duties of secret fasting and prayer.

I have a secret thought, for some things I have observed, that God may perhaps design you for some singular service in the world... Suffer me therefore, finally, to intreat you earnestly to give yourself to prayer, to reading and meditation on divine truths: strive to penetrate to the bottom of them, and never be content with superficial knowledge. By this means, your thoughts will gradually grow weighty and judicious; and you hereby will be possessed of a valuable treasure, out of which you may produce 'things new and old,' to the glory of God"

"Draw me"

I stand amazed. This quote goes along perfectly with what I have been pondering of late. Read it carefully! The Spirit of God gives wisdom and understanding. Praise God!

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The Drawing Of The Father

"No man can come to Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him." John vi. 44.

"When God draws me, the issue of my will comes in at once--- will I react on the revelation which God gives---will I come to Him? Discussion on spiritual matters is an impertinence. Never discuss with anyone when God speaks. Belief is not an intellectual act; belief is a moral act whereby I deliberately commit myself. Will I dump myself down absolutely on God and transact on what He says? If I will, I shall find I am based on Reality that is as sure as God's throne.

In preaching the gospel, always push an issue of will. Belief must be the will to believe. There must be a surrender of the will, not a surrender to persuasive power, a deliberate launching forth on God and on what He says until I am no longer confident in what I have done, I am confident only in God. The hindrance is that I will not trust God, but only my mental understanding. As far as feelings go, I must stake all blindly. I must will to believe, and this can never be done without a violent effort on my part to disassociate myself from my old ways of looking at things, and by putting myself right over to Him.

Every man is made to reach out beyond his grasp. It is God who draws me, and my relationship to Him in the first place is a personal one, not an intellectual one. I am introduced into the relationship by the miracle of God and my own will to believe, then I begin to get an intelligent appreciation and understanding of the wonder of the transaction."

-Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest pg. 357

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This really blew me away. It is God who draws us, and when He calls we must not discuss it; we must go. No time to sit and decide whether or not He has called; He has, and we must obey. Belief is not understanding of the mind, but of the heart. Will we abandon unto Him? We must forsake all; we must pick up our cross. He has left it up to us to decide, but it is He that will do it. And He will so get us out of the way that it is only obvious that it is He that did it, and not anything that we accomplished. We pray to fall in love; He draws us, and then He shows us what He has done by gently revealing to us the Wisdom of His ways and giving us His Spirit of understanding. Then all that we can to is praise Him. Oh, and the Love that comes with understanding! I think that the heavenly pattern for love is that when we love someone, we seek to know everything there is to know about the person. We note the things they love, the things they hate, the things that make their eyes shine, or make them laugh. Our eyes follow theirs to see what they care about. We love to listen to them talk about the things they delight in. We seek to know the things that make them weep so that we might weep with them. And we do not study them just for head knowledge about them! We take it to our heart, and then the end result is meant to be one thing: greater love.

Such is how our relationship with God is meant to be. That our love "may abound still more and more in knowledge and discernment." That we may approve the things that are excellent!!!

The Love Of God

"God is Love.
No one but God could have revealed that to the world, for men, and we all indeed, see nothing but its contradiction in our own limited world of experience. It needs but little imagination to construe the life of hundreds of this city's inhabitants into a vehement laughter at such a declaration as 'God is love.' From shattered, broken lives, from caverns of despair where fiends seem living rather than men, comes the existing contradiction to any such statement. no wonder the carnal mind, the merely intellectually cultured, consider us infatuated, mere dreamers, talking of love when murder and war and famine and lust and pestilence, and all the refinement of selfish cruelty abroad in the earth. But, oh the sublimity of the Abraham-like faith that dares to place the centre of its life and confidence and action and hope in an unseen and apparently unknown God, saying, 'God is love,' in spite of all appearances to the contrary; saying 'Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him.' Such faith is counted to a man for righteousness.
Look back over your own history as revealed to you by grace, and you will see one central fact growing large---God is love. No matter how often your faith in such an announcement was clouded, no matter how the pain and suffering of the moment made you speak in a wrong mood, still this statement has borne its own evidence along with it most persistently---God is love. In the future, when trial and difficulties await you, do not be fearful, whatever and whoever you may lose faith in, let not this faith slip from You---God is love; whisper it not only to your heart in its hour of darkness, but here in your corner of God's earth and man's great city, live in the belief of it; preach it by your sweetened, chastened, happy life; sing it in the consecrated moments of peaceful joy, sing until all the world around you

is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

The world does not bid you sing, but God does.

Song is the sign of an unburdened heart; then sing your songs of love unbidden, ever rising higher and higher into fuller conception of the greatest, grandest fact on the stage of Time---God is love

But words and emotions pass, precious as their influence may be for a time, so when the duller moments come and the mind comes to require something more certain and sure to consider than memory of mere emotions and stirring sentiments---consider this revelation, the eternal fact that God is Love, not, God is loving. God and love are synonymous. Love is not an attribute of God, it is God; whatever God is, love is. If your conception of love does not agree with the justice of judgement and purity and holiness, then your idea of love is wrong. It is not love you conceive of in your mind, but some vague infinite foolishness, all tears and softness and infinite weakness."

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(an excerpt from Oswald Chambers' book The Love of God)

(more to come)

"Whithersoever He Goeth"

God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. (Gal. 6:14)

"They were living to themselves; self with its hopes, and promises and dreams, still had hold of them; but the Lord began to fulfill their prayers. They had asked for contrition, and had surrendered for it to be given them at any cost, and He sent them sorrow; they had asked for purity, and He sent them thrilling anguish; they had asked to be meek, and He had broken their hearts; they had asked to be dead to the world, and He slew all their living hopes; they had asked to be made like Him, and He placed them in the furnace, sitting by 'as a refiner and purifier of silver,' until they should reflect His image; they had asked to lay hold of His cross, and when He had reached it to them it lacerated their hands.

They had asked they knew not what, nor how, but He had taken them at their word, and granted the all their petitions. They were hardly willing to follow Him so far, or to draw so nigh to Him. They had upon them an awe and fear, as Jacob at Bethel, or Eliphaz in the night visions, or as the apostles when they thought that they had seen a spirit, and knew not that it was Jesus. They could almost pray Him to depart from them, or to hide His awfulness. They found it easier to obey than to suffer, to do than to give up, to bear the cross than to hang upon it. But they cannot go back, for they have come too near the unseen cross, and its virtues have pierced too deeply within them. He is fulfilling to them His promise, 'And if, I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me' (John 12:32).

But now at last their turn has come. Before, they had only heard of the mystery, but now they feel it. He has fastened on them His look of love, as He did Mary and Peter, and they can but choose to follow.

Little by little, from time to time, by flitting gleams, they mystery of His cross shines out upon them. They behold Him lifted up, they gaze on the glory which rays from the wounds of His holy passion; and as they gaze they advance, and are changed into His likeness, and as His name shines through them, for He dwells in them. They live alone with Him above, in unspeakable fellowship; willing to lack what others own (and what they might have had), and to be unlike all, so that they are only like Him.

Such are they in all ages, 'who follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.'

Had they chosen for themselves, of their friends chosen for them, they would have chosen otherwise. They would have been brighter here, but less glorious in His kingdom. They would have had Lot's portion, not Abraham's. If they had halted anywhere---if God had taken off His hand and let them stray back---what would they have lost? What forfeits in resurrection?

But He stayed them up, even against themselves. Many a time their foot had well nigh slipped; but He in mercy held them up. Now, even in this life, they know that all He did was done well. It was good to suffer here, that they might reign hereafter; to bear the cross below, for they shall wear the crown above; and that not their will but His was done on them and in them."

Anonymous

Streams In The Desert, pg. 320

Gracious Uncertainty

"Certainty is the mark of the common sense life: gracious uncertainty is a mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways; we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation. We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. Immediately when we abandon to God, and do the duty that lies nearest, He packs our life with surprises all the time. When we become advocates of a creed, something dies; we do not believe God, we only belive our belief about Him. Jesus said, "Except ye... become as little children." Spiritual life is the life of a child. We are not uncertain of God, but uncertain of what He is going to do next. If we are only certain in our beliefs, we get dignified and severe and have the ban of finality about our views; but when we are rightly related to God, life is full of spontaneous, joyful uncertainty and expectancy. "Believe also in Me," said Jesus, not---"Believe certain things about Me." Leave the whole thing to Him, it is gloriously uncertain how He will come in, but He will come.

Remain loyal to Him."

-Oswald Chambers

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This quote really caught my attention. This world teaches us that we must make our plans, believe in and trust our plans, stand up on our plans, be completely certain of ourselves...and then we will be something. We all heard it when we were little: "What do you want to be when you grow up?", and when we were older it was supposed that we had gained our self-certainty: "What are you going to be?" (Notice the thread running through all of this: it's all about me.)

As I grew up, and my answer continued to be "I don't know", people would seem to kind of pause at my answer for a minute, and then with a little knowing look they would say, "Well, you are still young; you still have time to decide." (As I learn more from my Lord, I realize how different "Time" is in His eyes than in the world's.)

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How about loving Jesus and saying, "I delight to do Your will, O my God" ?

How about leaving all our plans and desires and letting Him be certain of them? How about saying,

When I grow up, I want to be

Certain of my God.

Joy

Listen to this quote (sorry if it is a bit paraphrased) :

"Joy is central in the Christian's life, while sorrow is peripheral. The fundamental questions of life have been answered, while only the peripheral ones have not.

For the unbeliever, sorrow is central while joy is peripheral, because the fundamental questions of life for the skeptic are still unanswered; only the peripheral ones for the skeptic may be answered.

Joy, which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian."

G.K. Chesterton

When I heard this quote, I was caught by surprise. I love it. It makes me want to shout. Isn't this so true?! Even in the most sorrowful of circumstances on the outside, are we not filled with joy on the inside? If we are not, then it is only because we don't know our Lord well enough. For when we know Him, even if we cry ourselves to sleep in pain and sorrow, we can still rise at midnight and give thanks to Him, and joy still comes in the morning. Perhaps you would say that I am young and have not really known sorrow, but I am not too young to have known joy. And in the end, joy overcomes sorrow, for truly death has lost its sting.....and is swallowed up in victory.