Epilogue. Patrick's men were true to their word. To this day, no one knows where Patrick is buried. Yet the Irish had never forgotten him. More than 1,500 years after his death, he is still the national hero of Ireland. However, the rest of the world had already forgotten Patrick before he died. In fact, outside of Ireland, few people had even heard of him. Those who had heard of him probably heard mainly negative things.
If someone had told them that someday Patrick would be the most famous person of their age, they would have laughed derisively. No doubt, Patrick would have laughed at the thought, too. However, his name has endured, while those of his critics have disappeared. But what about the conflict between Patrick and Coroticus? Who was right? Who did more for his country? As surprising as it may seem, Patrick helped the British far more than did Coroticus.
That's because Coroticus's savage attack on Ireland didn't stop the pagan Irish raiders from attacking Britain again. But Patrick's work did. Within a few decades after his death, the vast majority of the Irish had become Christians. And once the Irish embraced Christ, they no longer assaulted the British coast. In the end, the man of faith protected his country better than the man of war. But there's more to the story. Patrick's converts and their descendants actively befriended the British people.
They gave considerable help to the struggling British church and allowed many of the British to settle in Ireland as a safe haven from the Saxons. Instead of sending out boatloads of warriors, Ireland began sending out boatloads of missionaries. These missionaries were rugged men of prayer who closely followed the example of Patrick. One such missionary, Columba, sailed to Scotland, bringing the gospel to the pagan Picts there.
After his death, another Irish Christian, Aidan, came to northern England and converted thousands of the pagan Saxons. Inspired by the example of the Irish church, the native British church finally found a way to love their enemies, the Saxons, and to bring them to Christ. So Patrick's mission to the Irish not only forever changed Ireland; it was the seminal event that eventually brought Christianity to Scotland and England. Lessons from Patrick's Life.
Perhaps the most important thing we can learn from Patrick's life is that there is incredible power in prayer. But if we want to fully experience this power, we should not think we can get by with merely praying once or twice for something. No, we've got to pound on the doors of heaven night and day, never letting up, just like Patrick did. Thousands of other Christians were taken captive around the same time as he. No doubt, nearly all of them prayed to God for deliverance.
Yet, very few of them received the same answer that he did. That's because they neither prayed long enough nor often enough. Perhaps some of them prayed diligently for the first six months or so of their captivity. But then, when their prayers weren't answered, they began slacking off. Suppose someone had interviewed them ten years after they had been captured and asked them about the power of prayer. They would have probably said that prayer doesn't work.
However, perhaps the reason they didn't receive an answer to their prayers is because they didn't pray like Patrick. They didn't keep pounding on the doors of heaven. That's a lesson we Christians must never forget. What would have happened if Patrick had only prayed once or twice a day instead of a hundred times or more? He would have probably spent his entire life as a slave in Ireland. What if he had prayed for only six months instead of six years?
The only sheep he would have shepherded would have been Milchu's. What if he had given up on prayer after five and a half years? He may have spent the rest of his life as a bitter man, having lost all confidence in the power of prayer. So if we want to experience God's power, we must pray powerfully. If we want God to do great things through us, as he did in Patrick, we must be great men and women of prayer. God might accomplish through us the same things he did in Patrick if only we would pray like him.
Very few of us ever taste the full power of God because we make too little time or have too little faith to keep knocking on the doors of heaven. Most of us think that if we spend one whole day in prayer and fasting, we've accomplished some Herculean task. We expect God to be so impressed that he will immediately grant our petitions. But it doesn't usually work that way. Praise God that in his mercy, he does frequently answer our prayers favorably even when we don't persist in prayer.
But most Christians never encounter God in his fullness the way Patrick did because we don't pray like Patrick. Another important lesson that Patrick has left us is the need to wait on God. At first glance, it may seem that Patrick would have accomplished more if he had not waited for twenty-five years on the church in Britain to send him. However, in reality, God needed those twenty-five years to finish the work he had begun in him.
In fact, God's normal course of action is to require his servants to learn to wait on him. When he chose Moses, he didn't immediately use him to deliver the children of Israel. No, he made Moses spend forty years in the wilderness. During those forty years, Moses was a seemingly forgotten shepherd. From a human perspective, those years might seem like forty wasted years. But in God's perspective, those years were absolutely essential. God was patiently molding and mellowing this hot-headed firebrand named Moses.
When God was finished, Moses was the meekest man on earth. God can now speak to him face to face. Quite often, God chooses passionate zealots as his instruments. In some ways, Patrick was such a person. But before God can use zealots, he has to first remold them. He doesn't quench their fire, but he does teach them to wait on him. Paul was such a man, too. He began as a hot-headed firebrand who fought against Christianity.
After his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, he became a hot-headed firebrand fighting for Christianity. Yet, before God could use Paul to plant churches and build up the body of Christ, he required him to spend ten or eleven quiet years in places like Syria and the Arabian wilderness. To human eyes, Paul seemed to have dropped out of sight. But he was in the center of God's focus because God was molding and mellowing Paul. When God was finished with his schooling, he let Paul loose.
And the church hasn't been the same ever since. It's so easy to forget that God's timetable is different from ours. We usually want things now. But God operates on a timescale in which a thousand years is only a day. In our eyes, it seems that Patrick had to wait six long years in Ireland before God delivered him from slavery. However, in God's timetable, he waited less than nine minutes. In our eyes, Patrick had to wait twenty-five years before being able to return to Ireland.
However, in God's timetable, he waited only about forty minutes. What would have happened if Patrick had run ahead of God and gone to Ireland as an independent maverick? No doubt he would still have had a measure of success. God doesn't necessarily destroy our work because we run ahead of him. On the other hand, he rarely gives it his full blessing either. If Patrick had run ahead of God, no doubt many of the Irish still would have come to Christ. Maybe a hundred or more. Perhaps even as many as a thousand.
But it's unlikely that thousands would have received the gospel as they did. In other words, if Patrick had begun his work in Ireland sooner, he would have accomplished less. That's because his human contribution to the work was significantly less than God's contribution, just as he so often acknowledged. By waiting on God, he received the full blessing of God. Just like the church in Patrick's day, today's church faces many crises. My prayer is that God will raise up a Patrick for our day.
But if so, who will he be? A famous Christian author or televangelist? Someone heading up a well-known ministry? A familiar speaker who talks at various churches and frequently appears on Christian talk shows? Not likely. If there is a potential Patrick around today, I doubt any of us have ever heard of him. That's because he's off alone tending sheep somewhere or on his knees in his closet, praying to God.