What God Does with a Life
Great accomplishments with God are never determined by age because God always looks at the heart of a person before their success or stature, as 1st Samuel mentions. So was the life of a David born April 20, 1718, in Hartford, Connecticut.
The sixth child of nine, David was continually sickly during his life. Yet God placed His mighty hand upon this man, a man who was expelled from Yale University because of his continual sickness and because he stood up to ungodly teachers and leadership that compromised the gospel. Yet David attached him to teachers of religion in order to learn the application of the Gospel of Christ and was eventually accepted by a missions group to have his papers to become the first of many teachers among the American Indians.
David was fatherless and motherless by the time he was 14. He never married and gave what wealth he had on this earth to evangelize and help the Indians in those early days of American growth.
All through David’s years after his late teens and into his twenties, he forged forward on horseback across the rivers and through the forests of the Northeast, over 3,000 miles, to reach the lost souls and sometimes the dishonest treatment of different tribes to defend their rights as humans, and show them the gospel being lived out in the manner he treated them. And he taught them the Bible while living among the villages year after year, season after season. All the while he was fighting a bitter enemy that was called, at that time, consumption, now known as tuberculosis, until it took his life at age 29.
David Brainerd became the real first missionary-evangelist for only 8 years, but God used him in helping be a part of this nation’s first Great Awakening movement of the 1730s and 40s. Never underestimate what God wants to do in your life, despite age or circumstances, health or position.
God is always looking for more Davids that will step forth in their time before us today.