The Power of a Successful Christian Life

David Brainerd was a man who lived a short life, dying at the age of 29, and in his lifetime reaching very few people for Christ. Many would count him a failure. But David Brainerd’s life was totally sur- rendered to God and for over two hundred years God has used his life to reach many other lives through Brainerd’s Diary, which was read by William Carey, who was so moved by it that he went as a missionary to India.

Henry Martyn read it and went as a missionary to India. Robert Murray McCheyne read it and was powerfully im- pressed by it. Payson read it and said he had never been so impressed by anything in his life as by the story. Oswald J.

Smith read it and was so influenced by it that he named his youngest son after Brainerd, and when he was but eighteen years of age, Smith became a mission- ary to the Indians 3,000 miles from his home. A. J. Gordon writes of Brainerd, “Those living such lives may soon be forgotten.

The world may take no note of them. But by and by the great moving current of these lives will begin to tell as in the case of this young man not quite thirty years of age.

The marvelous mis- sionary revival of the nineteenth century is due more to his prayers than to any other thing.” Some of the statements he made in his Diary that have challenged men for over two centuries are: “My heaven is to please God and glorify Him and to give my all to Him, and to be wholly devoted to His glory.” “There is nothing in the world worth living for but doing good and finishing God’s work, doing the work that Christ did.

I see noth- ing else in the world that can yield any satisfaction besides living to God, pleasing Him, and doing His whole will.” “There appeared to be nothing of any importance to me but holi- ness of heart and life, and the conversion of the heathen to God.

I cared not where or how I lived, or what hardships I went through so that I could but gain souls to Christ.”