“God enabled me so to agonize in prayer, that I was quite wet with perspiration,
“I feel some faint hopes that God will, of his infinite mercy, return again with showers of converting grace to poor, gospel-abusing sinners; and my hopes of being employed in the cause of God, which of late have been almost extinct, seem now a little revived. O that all my late distresses and awful apprehensions might prove but Christ’s school, to make me fit for greater service, by teaching me the great lesson of humility!”
Saturday, April 10, 1742
“I walked out this morning to the same place where I was last night, and felt as I did then; but was somewhat relieved by reading some passages in my diary, and seemed to feel as if I might pray to the great God again with freedom; but was suddenly struck with a damp, from the sense I had of my own vileness.
Then I cried to God to cleanse me from my exceeding filthiness, to give me repentance and pardon. I then began to find it sweet to pray; and could think of undergoing the greatest sufferings, in the cause of Christ, with pleasure; and found myself willing, if God should so order it, to suffer banishment from my native land, among the heathen, that I might do something for their salvation, in distresses and deaths of any kind.
Then God gave me to wrestle earnestly for others, for the kingdom of Christ in the world, and for dear Christian friends. I felt weaned from the world, and from my own reputation amongst men, willing to be despised, and to be a gazing-stock for the world to behold. It is impossible for me to express how I then felt: I had not much joy, but some sense of the majesty of God, which made me as it were tremble. I saw myself mean and vile, which made me more willing that God should do what he would with me; it was all infinitely reasonable.”
Tuesday, April 6 1742
“In the afternoon I felt, in secret prayer, much resigned, calm and serene.
“One day I remember in particular, (I think it was in June 1740) I walked to a considerable distance from the college, in the fields alone at noon,
In the beginning of September I went to college (Yale, in New Haven)
Upon salvation having flooded into his soul, Brainerd wrote,
The modern missionary movement owes much to David Brainerd, a man who lived as one my friends would say, a “blue flame “existence.