This week in Christian history: Gideon Blackburn born, Isaac Backus converts, St. Augustine dies
Isaac Backus conversion — Aug. 24, 1741
This week marks the anniversary of when Isaac Backus, a Baptist minister in Puritan New England known for opposing state-sponsored churches, had a born-again religious experience.
Backus was raised during the First Great Awakening, a revival that spread through the English-speaking American colonies, fueled by preachers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards.
According to his memoir, on that day, Backus recalled that he was moving a field by himself when he came to the realization that his life “had been filled up with sin.”
“I went and sat down in the shade of a tree, where my prayers and tears, my hearing the Word of God and striving for a better heart, with all my other doings, were set before me in such a light that I perceived I could never make myself better, should I live ever so long,” Backus recounted.
“And while I sat there, I was enabled by divine light to see the perfect righteousness of Christ and the freeness and riches of His grace, with such clearness, that my soul was drawn forth to trust in Him for salvation.”
Backus would go on to found and lead a Baptist church in Massachusetts and to lobby the Continental Congress in the 1770s on behalf of religious freedom.
