The Power of a Hidden Life
by A.J. Gordon

In passing through Northampton, Massachusetts, I went into the old cemetery, swept off the snow that lay on top of the slab and I read these simple words:

Sacred to the memory of David Brainerd, the faithful and devoted missionary to the Susquehanna, Delaware, and Stockbridge Indians of America, who died in this town, October 8th, 1717.

That was all there was on the slab. Now that great man did his greatest work by prayer. He was in the depths of those forests alone, unable to speak the language of the Indians, but he spent whole days literally in prayer. What was he praying for? He knew he could not reach these savages, for he did not understand their language. If he wanted to speak at all, he must find somebody who could vaguely interpret his thought. Therefore he knew that anything he could do must be absolutely dependent upon God. So he spent whole days in praying, simply that the power of the Holy Spirit might come upon him so unmistakably that these people would not be able to stand before him.

What was his answer? Once he preached through a drunken interpreter, a man so intoxicated that he could hardly stand up. This was the best he could do. Yet scores were converted through that sermon. We can account for it only that it was the tremendous power of God behind him.

Now this man prayed in secret in the forest. A little while afterward, William Carey read his life, and by its impulse he went to India. Edward Payson read it as a young man, over twenty years old, and he said that he had never been so impressed by anything in his life as by the story of Brainerd. Robert Murray McCheyne read it, and he likewise was impressed by it.

But all I care is simply to enforce this thought, that the hidden life, a life whose days are spent in communion with God, in trying to reach the source of power, is life that moves the world. Those living such lives may be soon forgotten. There may be no one to speak a eulogy over them when they are dead. The great world may take no account of them. But by and by, the great moving current of their lives will begin to tell, as in the case of this young man, who died at about thirty years of age. The missionary spirit of the nineteenth century is more due to the prayers and consecration of this one man than to any other.

So I say. And yet that most remarkable thing is that Jonathan Edwards, who watched over him all those months while he was slowly dying of consumption, should also say: “I praise God that it was in His providence that he should die in my house, that I might hear his prayers, and that I might witness his consecration, and that I might be inspired by his example.”

When Jonathan Edwards wrote that great appeal to Christendom to unite in prayer for the conversion of the world, which has been the trumpet call of modern missions, undoubtedly it was inspired by this dying missionary.

A.J. Gordon

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