An Example of Devotion

I have hardly, ever heard from any reformed pulpit, read from any reformed material, or was impacted upon by any reformed preacher, a substantial and relevant dwelling upon the subject of prayer drawn from a deep and intimate experience of its source. Is it because we know little of it? Do we not teach that which we only know? Much of what is floating around what I have been in since I was regenerated revolves around higher thinking and academic theology. Knowing about God, than knowing God. Belief in God, than believing God. Sitting in church, than effecting the responsibility of the church.

This is not to say there is little gain in good theology. Truly correct theology is critical in knowing God, and walking in God. Knowing and walking go hand in hand. Most are taught it is perfectly fine just to have one. But study is not practice, as is having a doctorate degree or a pulpit does not equal God's anointing. 

I spoke with a pastor once, and he opened up to me, 'Nag-pepray din naman ako.' (Sometimes I do pray.) I cannot imagine Michael, Kobe, or Lebron saying the same thing about their sport. Or an olympic gold medalist about his training. This sentiment is why our modern pulpits are mere hypnotic theater shows. Clouds without water. Words without power.

The pulpit is incomparable. It is not ordained from On High merely to proclaim God's word but to showcase the anointed power of His very words. It is where mere men are ignited to lay down their lives for the kingdom's cause. Where some become soldiers who willingly choose the battlefront, and those who aren't soldiers are trained to fight with the soldiers on their knees, not hide in the camp singing songs hoping the soldiers can manage on their own. 

Modern Christians are merely surviving, not living.

I remember this one conversation between a preacher and a celebrated actor. The preacher asks the actor why they can move the audience in a variety powerful emotions, whilst he can hardly make his pew react to his message, except when they stand up to go to the restroom. The actor replied, 'it seems because I make artificial things look real, while you make real things look artificial.' 'Oh', but the reader will argue, 'the word of God is not about emotions,' Well for one, the commenter has never experienced the wounding edge of God's word, and two, a person who has been wounded by the word or ecstatic with hope and encouragement cannot help but show reaction and emotion.

God's mighty men in history was hardly, or mostly, not educated in the schools of the world but hidden away in  deserts, in dungeons and prisons, and in prayer closets. Ask any well-meaning professing Christian today to name just three people who inspire them in the discipline of prayer and they can hardly give you one. But if you ask them to name two people known for the sport of basketball they can give you a longer list than you would care to hear. Is there such a fan of the sport who have not heard of its champions, much less was inspired by them? "I play my own way." is an arrogant statement. The same can be said of prayer. How do we know we are doing something right if we do not look to the lives of the people God gave to be our examples? 

The dearth of praying preachers and pastors is the bane of God's cause. There is no other way of living powerfully in the word than in coming before the courts of its Author on our knees consistently and constantly. Oh dear LORD, in your mercy send us again such men to ignite us back to you.

The following is a worthy reprint.

I urge upon you communion with Christ; a growing communion. There are curtains to be drawn aside in Christ that we never saw, and new foldings of love in him. I despair that I shall ever win to the far end of that love, there are so many aspects to it. Therefore dig deep, and sweat and labor and take pains for him, and set by as much time in the day for him as you can. We will be won in the labor.
-Samuel Rutherford

God found one of the men he was looking for in David Brainerd, whose work and name have gone into history. 

God has now, and has had, many of these devoted, prayerful preachers -- men in whose lives prayer has been a mighty, controlling, conspicuous force. The world has felt their power, God has felt and honored their power, God's cause has moved mightily and swiftly by their prayers, holiness has shone out in their characters with a divine effulgence.

God found one of the men he was looking for in David Brainerd, whose work and name have gone into history. He was no ordinary man, but was capable of shining in any company, the peer of the wise and gifted ones, eminently suited to fill the most attractive pulpits and to labor among the most refined and the cultured, who were so anxious to secure him for their pastor. 

...having access to the Indians for a large portion of time only through the bungling medium of a pagan interpreter, with the Word of God in his heart and in his hand...

President Edwards bears testimony that he was "a young man of distinguished talents, had extraordinary knowledge of men and things, had rare conversational powers, excelled in his knowledge of theology, and was truly, for one so young, an extraordinary divine, and especially in all matters relating to experimental religion. I never knew his equal of his age and standing for clear and accurate notions of the nature and essence of true religion. His manner in prayer was almost inimitable, such as I have very rarely known equaled. His learning was very considerable, and he had extraordinary gifts for the pulpit."

No sublimer story has been recorded in earthly annals than that of David Brainerd; no miracle attests with diviner force the truth of Christianity than the life and work of such a man. Alone in the savage wilds of America, struggling day and night with a mortal disease, unschooled in the care of souls, having access to the Indians for a large portion of time only through the bungling medium of a pagan interpreter, with the Word of God in his heart and in his hand, his soul fired with the divine flame, a place and time to pour out his soul to God in prayer, he fully established the worship of God and secured all its gracious results.

The Indians were changed with a great change from the lowest besotments of an ignorant and debased heathenism to pure, devout, intelligent Christians; all vice reformed, the external duties of Christianity at once embraced and acted on; family prayer set up; the Sabbath instituted and religiously observed; the internal graces of religion exhibited with growing sweetness and strength. The solution of these results is found in David Brainerd himself, not in the conditions or accidents but in the man Brainerd. 

He was God's man, for God first and last and all the time. God could flow unhindered through him. The omnipotence of grace was neither arrested nor straightened by the conditions of his heart; the whole channel was broadened and cleaned out for God's fullest and most powerful passage, so that God with all his mighty forces could come down on the hopeless, savage wilderness, and transform it into his blooming and fruitful garden; for nothing is too hard for God to do if he can get the right kind of a man to do it with.

Brainerd lived the life of holiness and prayer. His diary is full and monotonous with the record of his seasons of fasting, meditation, and retirement. The time he spent in private prayer amounted to many hours daily. "When I return home," he said, "and give myself to meditation, prayer, and fasting, my soul longs for mortification, self-denial, humility, and divorcement from all things of the world." "I have nothing to do," he said, "with earth but only to labor in it honestly for God. I do not desire to live one minute for anything which earth can afford." 

After this high order did he pray: 

"Feeling somewhat of the sweetness of communion with God and the constraining force of his love, and how admirably it captivates the soul and makes all the desires and affections to center in God, I set apart this day for secret fasting and prayer, to entreat God to direct and bless me with regard to the great work which I have in view of preaching the gospel, and that the Lord would return to me and show me the light of his countenance. I had little life and power in the forenoon. 

Near the middle of the afternoon God enabled me to wrestle ardently in intercession for my absent friends, but just at night the Lord visited me marvelously in prayer. I think my soul was never in such agony before. I felt no restraint, for the treasures of divine grace were opened to me. I wrestled for absent friends, for the ingathering of souls, for multitudes of poor souls, and for many that I thought were the children of God, personally, in many distant places. 

I was in such agony from sun half an hour high till near dark that I was all over wet with sweat, but yet it seemed to me I had done nothing. O, my dear Saviour did sweat blood for poor souls! I longed for more compassion toward them. I felt still in a sweet frame, under a sense of divine love and grace, and went to bed in such a frame, with my heart set on God." 

It was prayer which gave to his life and ministry their marvelous power.

The men of mighty prayer are men of spiritual might. Prayers never die. Brainerd's whole life was a life of prayer. By day and by night he prayed. Before preaching and after preaching he prayed. Riding through the interminable solitudes of the forests he prayed. On his bed of straw he prayed. Retiring to the dense and lonely forests, he prayed. Hour by hour, day after day, early morn and late at night, he was praying and fasting, pouring out his soul, interceding, communing with God. He was with God mightily in prayer, and God was with him mightily, and by it he being dead yet speaketh and worketh, and will speak and work till the end comes, and among the to glorious ones of that glorious day he will be with the first.

Jonathan Edwards says of him: "His life shows the right way to success in the works of the ministry. He sought it as the soldier seeks victory in a siege or battle; or as a man that runs a race for a great prize. Animated with love to Christ and souls, how did he labor? Always fervently. Not only in word and doctrine, in public and in private, but in prayers by day and night, wrestling with God in secret and travailing in birth with unutterable groans and agonies, until Christ was formed in the hearts of the people to whom he was sent. Like a true son of Jacob, he persevered in wrestling through all the darkness of the night, until the breaking of the day!"

Power Through Prayer. E.M. Bounds.