Faith Comes By Hearing
” Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Romans 10:17
Jonathan Edwards, wrote The Life and Diary of David Brainerd: With Notes and Reflections.
Click on the link below to read the diary. May you become familiar with a man on a great mission to proclaim the Good News.
David Brainerd (1718–1747) was an early American missionary to the American Indians in New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania. Christians all over the world continue to be inspired by his life of self-denial, his sincere and strenuous labor on behalf of others, and his devotion to prayer.
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was an American Puritan theologian, preacher and prolific author. When Brainerd died at the age of 29, Jonathan Edwards preached the funeral sermon and published the diary which David had kept.
Oh, That I May Never Loiter On My Heavenly Journey!
A Summary of David Brainered’s Life by John Piper 
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David Brainerd was born on April 20, 1718 in Haddam, Connecticut. That year John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards turned 14. Benjamin Franklin turned 12 and George Whitefield 3. The Great Awakening was just over the horizon and Brainerd would live through both waves of it in the mid thirties and early forties, then die of tuberculosis in Jonathan Edwards’ house at the age of 29 on October 9, 1747.
Brainerd’s father Hezekiah was a Connecticut legislator and died when David was nine year’s old. Judging by my own son’s attachment to me over the years, I think that might be the hardest year of all to lose father. He had been a rigorous Puritan with strong views of authority and strictness at home; and he pursued a very earnest devotion that included days of private fasting to promote spiritual welfare (see note 1).
Brainerd was the sixth child and third son born to Hezekiah and Dorothy. After him came three more children. Dorothy had brought one little boy from a previous marriage, and so there were twelve of them in the home —but not for long. Five years after his father died at the age of 46, his mother died when he was 14.
It seems that there was an unusual strain of weakness and depression in the family. Not only did the parents die early, David’s brother Nehemiah died at 32, his brother Israel died at 23, his sister Jerusha died at 34, and he died at 29. In 1865 a descendant, Thomas Brainerd (in a biography of John Brainerd), said, “In the whole Brainerd family for two hundred years there has been a tendency to a morbid depression, akin to hypochondria (p. 64).”
So on top of having an austere father, and suffering the loss of both parents as a sensitive child, he probably inherited some kind of tendency of depression. Whatever the cause, he suffered from the blackest dejection off and on throughout his short life. He says at the very beginning of his diary, “I was, I think, from my youth something sober and inclined rather to melancholy than the other extreme (p. 101).”
You can read the rest of David Brainered’s Bio here.
Seeking His Kingdom,
Soli Deo gloria
Amy
