Isaiah 6:11-13 ESV  Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And he said: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste,  (12)  and the LORD removes people far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.  (13)  And though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak, whose stump remains when it is felled.” The holy seed is its stump.

MEMO: You won’t always like the answers you get when you ask God for a vision of your ministry.

Dear Fellowship of the Burning Heart:

I have already mentioned that God has prepared and forewarned Isaiah to help him face a very difficult ministry. No one wants to hear that their ministry will continue until the country is conquered, the people are carried away captive, and land is laid waste. We want to be involved in “successful” ministry. But God has chosen great people for difficult tasks that seem to be less than fruitful. Consider the following…

David Brainerd: He was born on April 20, 1718 in Haddam, Connecticut, the son of Hezekiah, a Connecticut legislator, and Dorothy. He had nine siblings, one of whom was Dorothy’s from a previous marriage. He was orphaned at the age of fourteen, as his father died in 1727 at the age of forty-six and his mother died five years later.

On July 12, 1739, he recorded having an experience of ‘unspeakable glory’ that prompted in him a ‘hearty desire to exalt [God], to set him on the throne and to “seek first his Kingdom”‘. Two months later, he enrolled at Yale. In his second year at Yale, he was sent home because he was suffering from a serious illness that caused him to spit blood. It is now believed that he was suffering from tuberculosis, the disease which would lead to his death seven years later. Later, after returning to Yale, he was expelled for comments he made criticizing a professor for what he considered was the persecution of the excessive spiritual enthusiasm of some students.

On April 1, 1743, after a brief period serving a church on Long Island, Brainerd began working as a missionary to Native Americans, which he would continue until late 1746 when worsening illness prevented him from working. This illness, generally considered to be tuberculosis, had begun to affect him at Yale, but worsened when he entered the mission field. In his final years, he also suffered from a form of depression that was sometimes immobilizing and which, on at least twenty-two occasions, led him to wish for death. He was also affected by difficulties faced by other missionaries of the period, such as loneliness and lack of food.

In these years, he refused several offers of leaving the mission field to become a church minister, including one from the church at East Hampton on Long Island. He remained determined, however, to continue the work among Native Americans despite the difficulties, writing in his diary:

‘[I] could have no freedom in the thought of any other circumstances or business in life: All my desire was the conversion of the heathen, and all my hope was in God: God does not suffer me to please or comfort myself with hopes of seeing friends, returning to my dear acquaintance, and enjoying worldly comforts’.

In November 1746, he became too ill to continue ministering, and so moved to Jonathan Dickinson’s house in Elizabethtown. After a few months of rest, he travelled to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he stayed at the house of Jonathan Edwards, of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God fame. Apart from a trip to Boston in the summer of that year, he remained at Edwards’s house until his death the following year. In May 1747, he was diagnosed with incurable consumption; in these final months, he suffered greatly. In his diary entry for September 24, Brainerd wrote:

‘In the greatest distress that ever I endured having an uncommon kind of hiccough; which either strangled me or threw me into a straining to vomit’.

During this time, he was nursed by Jerusha Edwards, Jonathan’s seventeen-year-old daughter. The friendship that grew between them was of a kind that has led some to suggest they were romantically attached. He died from tuberculosis on October 9, 1747, at the age of 29. He is buried at Bridge Street Cemetery in Northampton, next to Jerusha, who died in February 1748 as a result of contracting tuberculosis from nursing Brainerd.

Jonathan Edwards compiled and published a biography of David Brainerd using Brainerd’s diary. That biography has been very influential, even moving John Wesley to comment: ‘Let every preacher read carefully over the Life of David Brainerd‘. Other missionaries who have asserted the influence of Jonathan Edwards’s biography of Brainerd on their lives include Henry Martyn, William Carey, Jim Elliot, and Adoniram Judson.

[Information taken from Wikipedia article on David Brainerd, much of which comes from John Piper’s biography of David Brainerd. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brainerd]

Isaiah spent over 40 years in ministry watching two nations, Israel to the north and Judah in the south, deteriorate into spiritual, moral and political chaos. He was forceful, intelligent, direct, and truthful. He spoke for God, and was a powerful force for God in the courts of several kings, though he wasn’t always successful in getting his message across. He knew what God had told him concerning the eventual outcome of his ministry, but he refused to give up. We are not called to assure results; we are called to remain faithful.

Galatians 6:9 ESV  And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.