Expectant parents often look for distinctive names and original spellings to convey uniqueness in their one-of-a-kind newborn. How about the name Asahel who was nephew to King David? The name means “made by God.”
Asahel Nettleton (1783-1844) was an itinerant New England evangelist in the early 1800s. You would have liked his kind and gracious manner. He took exception to the disrespect shown to local clergy by traveling evangelists of the First Great Awakening. That’s why he refused to lead revivals unless he was invited by local clergy. He believed that settled ministers had more authority than itinerant evangelists. While other itinerant evangelists boasted more conversions, the decisions made for Christ under Nettleton’s leadership lasted. Of the eighty-four conversions recorded at an 1818 revival led by Asahel in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, all of them remained faithful according to one pastor’s report twenty-six years later. He took issue with tactics used with the “anxious bench” strategy and emotional altar calls employed by new evangelists like Charles Finney. He also wrestled in theological debate with a Yale professor named Nathaniel Taylor who denied the doctrine of original sin. Taylor rejected the belief that Adam’s sin was imputed to anyone else but was solely the result of a person’s deliberate choices against God. Asahel was gracious in challenging Taylor and wrote him in the last year of his life, “I need not tell you that I love you. You know that I have ever loved you. I impeach not your motives. I judge not your heart. I would cherish the hope that your own religious experience is at variance with some of the things you have published–I say this with the kindest of feelings, and with eternity in view. Receive it as my dying testimony, and as an expression of my sincere love. Farewell, my brother. We shall soon meet the judgment seat of Christ. God grant that we may meet in heaven.” What a gracious way to resolve a dispute!
Asahel published a collection of hymns including one attributed to him written as a prayer: