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David Brainerd’s Gospel Wakefulness

brainerd

From Robert Caldwell’s Theologies of the American Revivalists:

“In 1739, Brainerd, the future missionary to Native Americans, grew concerned over his soul’s eternal destiny and began to seek God. After several months of employing the means of grace, he came under a deep sense of conviction yet grew increasingly vexed over his spiritual inability. ‘I could not find out how to believe or come to Christ, nor what faith was.’

“After consulting Solomon Stoddard’s Guide to Christ, Brainerd was greatly helped by the author’s directions on conviction, but when it came to trusting Christ, ‘he failed, he did not tell me anything that I could do that would bring me to Christ, but seemed at last to leave me as it were with a great gulf between me and Christ, which I seemed to have no direction to get through.’

“This lack of direction, of course, was by design, for it was intended to draw the soul’s posture face-to-face with its spiritual impotence.

“In his helpless distress Brainerd gradually came to recognize ‘that I deserved nothing but damnation,’ and he began to lose hope in the efficacy of prayer and spiritual duties. It was at this time in July 1739 when Brainerd found himself attempting to pray one evening when something new happened.

[Then], as I was walking in a dark thick grove, ‘unspeakable glory’ seemed to open to the view and apprehension of my soul. By the glory I saw I don’t mean any external brightness, for I saw no such thing, nor do I intend any imagination of a body of light or splendor somewhere away in the third heaven, or anything of that nature. But it was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God; such as I never had before, nor anything that I had the least remembrance of it.

“From this point he came to ‘wonder’ and ‘admire’ at God’s glory and the way of salvation, and he heartily repented and trusted in Christ.” (p.37)

Related:
George Whitefield’s Gospel Wakefulness

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