Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to be talking about the 5th century missionary to Ireland named Patrick. In the English-speaking world, he is easily the most famous person from his age. Virtually everyone in English-speaking countries has heard of the man commonly known today as St. Patrick. However, during his lifetime, if you had asked someone in Europe about Saint Patrick or even Patrick, the missionary to Ireland, they would have had no idea whom you were talking about.
You see, in his own day, outside of Ireland, he was an obscure person. Those who knew him back in his native church in Roman Britain were very critical of him. Yet he rightly deserves the fame that he has today, because he is arguably the greatest missionary the church has ever had since Paul. My own interest in Patrick began back in 1983 when I read a little bit about him in an article in a Christian magazine. So I decided to do a Sunday school lesson about him.
And to research his life, I went down to the local city library and found a biography about him there and checked it out and read it. Well, the biography portrayed him as this wonder working Roman Catholic saint who performed all sorts of miracles and had dramatic showdowns with the Druid priests. Well, not knowing any better, that was the man I presented in my Sunday school lesson. Unfortunately, there were no lessons we could draw from his life since none of us had performed any miracles.
So it was, you know, interesting to talk about, but nothing we could particularly learn from. Well, then in 1985, when I was reading the writings of the early Christians for the first time, I came across his autobiography. It's a fairly brief work. It's usually entitled The Confession of Patrick, although I think the testimony of Patrick would be a much more accurate title. Confession originally meant simply a testimony.
Today, it tends to mean that you're talking about something wrong you have done, confessing a wrong, and that's not at all what his work is. Well, when I read it, I was really stirred inside. I thought to myself, the story of the real Patrick needs to get out. You see, the real Patrick was an ordinary man like the rest of us. He performed no miracles. Rather, he was a humble man of deep faith and a real man of prayer, a prayer warrior.
Now, he did receive a number of very marvelous answers to his prayers, but this was primarily before he went to Ireland as a missionary. Yet because of his work in Ireland, an entire nation of people were transformed. I know of no other missionary in history who has had such a dramatic impact on an entire country. And surprisingly, I discovered that Patrick was not a Roman Catholic. He belonged to the separate Celtic Church of Britain that was around in those days.
Patrick begins his testimony with these words: " I am Patrick, a sinner, most unlearned, the least of all the faithful, and utterly despised by many. " My father was Calpornius, a deacon, son of Potitus, an elder of the village of Bannavem Taburniae. Now today we don't know where this village of Bannavem Taburniae is. It was obviously located somewhere along the west coast of Britain, but exactly where we don't know. The village was entirely destroyed, and if it was ever rebuilt, it was under a different name.
So all we can do is guess. Now we do know the time period when Patrick begins his account. It was after the Roman armies or around the time that the Roman armies left Britain. This was in the late 300s and the Roman Empire was collapsing. And in order to protect Rome itself, the emperor had made the decision to bring in the troops from Britain and bring them closer to Rome.
They had been there in Britain to protect the inhabitants of Britain from the Scots and Picts who would come down and raid from what is today Scotland. That's why they had built Hadrian's wall across the north end of Britain to protect the people there. The native Britain people who were of Celtic origin by the time of Patrick's day, I mean, they were thoroughly Romans. They thought of themselves as Romans.
Well, when the Roman armies left, the pagans in Ireland became rather bold about raiding the West Coast, and of course the Scots and Picts began raiding coming down from the north. It was definitely a time of terror for the people who lived in Britain. And one day, a raiding party from Ireland landed near Patrick's village of Bannavem Taburniae, and he was taken captive along with hundreds of others. And he was made a slave. He was taken back to Ireland.
From what we can tell, he was taken somewhere on the west end of Ireland, that is the part furthest away from Britain. He was just 16 years old at the time, and he was put in charge of attending his master's sheep. Now in his confession, he doesn't give the name of very many people. Legend and tradition have filled in a lot of these names. We don't know if they are just made up or if they actually were handed down from generation to generation.
But he does tell us that he was made a slave and he was put in charge of tending sheep. Well, up to that point, even though he was raised as a Christian, he had no real personal relationship with God. He certainly had no strong commitment to God. But his ordeal, and you can imagine how terrifying that would be as a 16-year-old teenager, he turned to God in total earnestness. And he relates in his testimony that he would fast and pray a hundred times a day and a hundred times throughout the night.
He did this for an entire week. Now, have you ever prayed about something that hard, that long, that you fasted for a full week, that you prayed a hundred times during the day, and throughout the night, you prayed another 100 times? I've spent days in prayer, but I don't know that I've ever prayed quite that many times for that long. Well, you might think with that kind of devotion, God, you know, answered his prayer, but he didn't. Nothing happened. He was still a slave. So he kept on.
He didn't fast every day, but he fast quite regularly every week. And he did this for now an entire month. Can you imagine praying that much for a whole month for something? I wonder in my own life if I had done that in certain situations, if the results might have turned out differently. But at the end of the month, still nothing. No answer to his prayer, no word from God, nothing. So Patrick kept on, and he kept on, and he kept on persevering in prayer. Finally, a year passed.
He had been doing this for an entire year of praying a hundred times a day, 100 times a night. I mean, that's just an estimate on his part, but he doesn't seem to exaggerate in his testimony, so I assume it's fairly accurate. Well, guess what? After that much prayer, after an entire year of praying that much and fasting regularly throughout the week, every week for 52 weeks, nothing happened. Not a thing. He was still a slave, still cut off by himself, no word from his parents, and they knew nothing of him.
They had no idea if he was alive or not. Well, most of us, if we had had that kind of commitment, and there's nothing I have ever in my life prayed for that many times, that long with that much fasting. I think most of us would have given up at that point and just decided God's answer is obviously no. In fact, we would probably come to that conclusion after a day or maybe a week of that kind of prayer and fasting. But Patrick didn't give up. He carried it on for another full year.
And at the end of that year, nothing happened. So he continued on for another year of doing the same thing, praying every day throughout the day. And of course, with his job, this was very doable because he was tending sheep. You're out there in a pasture by yourself, watching them, making sure they don't stray off. If they get caught in a thicket, you free them and you make sure that no wolves or anything like that come to harm them. But you have lots of time for prayer.
And often he would spend the night out with the sheep in the pasture and, you know, would be praying in the dark until he went to sleep. And then during the night, every time he would stir, he would get up and pray more and more and that sort of thing. This is how Patrick described it. He said, " My spirit was moved so that in a single day, I would say as many as 100 prayers and almost as many in the night. And this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountain.
I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and I felt no harm. So prayer was a comfort to him, even though he didn't get freed. He knew God was with him. He sensed that presence of God. Well, a third year went by. Nothing. A fourth year went by. A fifth year went by. Nothing. A sixth year went by. What do you think happened at the end of six years of doing this? He writes this, " Then one night I heard in my sleep a voice saying to me, " It is well that you fast.
Soon you will go to your own country. " So six years of intense praying and fasting, and finally, he hears from God in the way that is typical in the Scriptures when people do actually hear from God. It wasn't just something that he had a vague sense and said, " Oh, God spoke to me. " No, it was in a dream, an actual voice in his dream, and that's one of the ways God would speak to his prophets of old was in dreams. But nothing happened that day.
So, Patrick, he continued to pray, continued to wait, continued to fast. But a short time later, again in his sleep, he heard a voice saying, " Look, your ship is ready. " Well, he took that to mean that it was time to go. And so one night when he was out there alone in the pasture, he ran off and he had to travel about 200 miles to get to the east coast of Ireland. All of this on foot. And all of this, while you know people are out looking for you, and if you get captured, you're gonna be punished very severely.
More than likely, Patrick did most of his traveling at nighttime. And let's say if he made 20 miles a day, it would have taken him about 10 days to get to the coast. Well, the amazing thing when he finally arrived at the East Coast, there was a ship docked there and he thought, this is it. God has answered my prayer. He said my ship was waiting. He ran down eagerly and told him, " I'm Patrick, I'm the one you're waiting for. Let me get on the ship. " And they just looked at him like, " Who are you?
We don't take passengers. " So they, you know, scolded him and sent him away. Of course, you can imagine the dejection that he felt, but then suddenly they changed their mind and they called back to him and they said, " We'll take you on board. " Well, they were pagan Irish themselves. And even though by this time, Patrick could speak Gaelic fluently, the language of Ireland. Either something he said to them, I mean, he may have said, " Hey, I was captured as a slave. I'm trying to get back home to Britain.
" Or maybe just certain clues gave it away. But the sailors soon figured out that he was a runaway slave, and they decided to make him their slave. You can imagine how dejected he would have felt to think he was finally released from slavery, only now to be taken on a ship of perhaps pirates and made a slave again. But he didn't lose faith in God. And that night again, in a dream, God spoke to him, saying, " You will be with these men only two months.
" Patrick had total confidence now in these communications from God in his dreams, so he didn't worry. He knew in two months he would be free and gone from them. I said they may have been pirates, perhaps tradesmen, a combination of both. Merchants at one dock and in another place they might raid and steal stuff that they would go and sell somewhere else. They landed as far as we know on the coast of Gaul. Patrick doesn't identify the place in his testimony.
It could have been Spain perhaps, but looking at all the historical evidence in that, most scholars have concluded that it was Gaul, what would be modern-day France. But to their surprise, when they landed there, expecting there to be a lot of villages and people, they found everything was totally deserted. No people, no food, no livestock, nothing. Well, now they weren't sure. What should we do? Get back on the boat, try another port, or maybe go further inland. Maybe there was a plague here or something.
Well, they decided they would go further inland. They only had a limited amount of supplies, but they thought surely there's going to be people. They had been here before. Now, most historians are assuming, given the time period, that this was when the Vandals had swept through that region. They were a Germanic tribe who swept down from what would be modern-day Germany on down through France, Spain, and many of them ended up in North Africa.
And when they swept through a region, I mean, they just killed, pillaged, totally decimated the entire area. If they didn't kill everyone, they took the rest as slaves. Well, this band of sailors with their slave Patrick, they keep going further and further and further. And pretty soon, they're out of food. It's too late to turn back to the ship because they'd used up all of their supplies, feeling certain they were going to run into civilization at some point. Finally now, they turn to Patrick.
He is obviously witness to them. They know that he is a Christian, not a pagan. And they ask him, " Will you pray to your God for us? " So Patrick prays, " Father, please deliver us from the situation we're in that we do not starve to death. " Well, as soon as he finished praying, the men looked up and there they noticed that there was a herd of pigs, abandoned pigs, coming down the road. So, of course, they fell upon them and they were saved.
They had enough meat to then take with them for the rest of the trip until they did eventually come upon civilization. Well, then Patrick was confronted with a test a short time after that. He was still with this band of sailors. He was still loosely a slave, although his relationship had now changed somewhat since he had saved their life through his prayer. But they found a tree full of honey. And they dedicated it to the sun as their god, the SUN sun, not the son of God.
And then they offered some to Patrick, and he started to eat it, and then he was told that they had sacrificed this to the sun god. And he refused to eat it and told him that he served Christ alone and that he didn't eat food that were sacrificed to other gods. This obviously offended his captors, but nothing further happened. And they did finally come to civilization and Patrick was freed. Now he doesn't give us a lot of details exactly how he got home from there.
A lot we have to just fill in from surmise, from knowing the area and the time period, et cetera. But we do know this. He finally did make it back to his actual home. His parents were still alive. He was now 22. He had been gone a bit over six years. His parents hadn't given up that he wasn't alive, but they certainly had given up hope that they would ever see him again. It wasn't often that Britons captured and taken as slaves to Ireland ever saw home again. Well, of course, everyone is excited.
You can imagine the wonderful homecoming, the people of the village being excited, all of his relatives, and all of that. And he's just basking and enjoying his freedom, enjoying being with his own people again, safe in his parents ' house, and then the very unexpected happens. One night when he was sleeping in his own bed, he had another dream. This time, in his dream, he saw one of the local Christians named Victoricus coming from Ireland in a boat. And he was carrying this heavy leather satchel.
When he landed in Britain, he came to Patrick's house and he handed the satchel over to Patrick. Patrick opened up the satchel not knowing what on earth it could be, and he found that it was full of letters from the people of Ireland. And he started reading them. And one after another, they all said the same thing, " We beg you, young man, come and walk among us again. " And that was it. That was the end of the dream.
Well, having had these dreams from God that all came about, he had no doubt that this one was from God and what its meaning was, that God wanted him to go back as a missionary and convert the Irish. Now in his testimony, Patrick does not fill in very many details. The reason most people have never read it is that it would never be a bestseller. He doesn't make it an interesting story. He tells you certain facts, kind of matter of fact kind of way. And some of the things are out of chronological order.
So you have a little difficulty putting them together. But a lot of these things that he could dramatize and, you know, really fill in details and make exciting, he just kind of tells you in a matter of fact way. You can imagine his parents ' reaction when he told them, " I'm gonna go back to Ireland. God wants me to go back as a missionary. " Now, Patrick didn't just pack up and leave for Ireland the next day or something, because it was important that he be sent by the church.
In his day, only bishops could ordain others. So before a missionary was sent out, he was first ordained as a bishop. He would become, in a sense, an apostle, not like the twelve or even like Paul, but someone with authority to plant churches and to make ordinations all under the authority of the church. You didn't just have Mavericks going out starting churches here and there. I mean, there may have been some who did that, but if so, nothing came from their work.
All of the churches we know of were planted by missionaries actually sent out by the church. Well, the leaders were skeptical of Patrick and his dream. I mean, he's still a young man, 22 years old. They had known him as this carefree teenager who had not been very close to God. And they weren't real warm to the idea of going over to try to convert the Irish. They unfortunately had forgotten Jesus ' words about loving your enemy.
As far as we know, they weren't having any wars with the Irish, but they weren't thinking about let's go convert those people. Their main thought was let's stay away from them and try to stay out of their hands. So even when Patrick was prepared spiritually and mentally to go, the church wasn't willing to ordain him. Well, then something else happened as he was waiting. He confessed to a close Christian friend about a sin he committed as a young teenager before he'd ever gone to Ireland.
And this so-called friend now brought it up to the attention of the church leaders. We don't know what the sin was. Patrick gives us no clue whether it was some kind of sexual immorality or if he stole something, committed some sacrilege, we just don't know. And we don't know why his friend betrayed him. Maybe he thought he was doing Patrick a favor, that he didn't want to see Patrick go to Ireland. And so he thought, well, I'll torpedo his plans by telling this to the whole church.
Well, when the sin got out, the leadership held it against Patrick, and they refused to ordain him or send him to Ireland. Well, Patrick had learned from his years in Ireland to wait on God. He didn't get impatient. He didn't get all upset or anything. He just kept praying about it, confident that if God wanted him in Ireland, God would change the minds of the leaders. I think most of us would be willing to wait a few months or even a year or so in order to do things in God's perfect timing.
Patrick ended up having to wait 25 years. If you thought his six-year wait in Ireland was long, can you imagine 25 years? And being a man of prayer, I'm sure he was praying about it every day and fasting several days a week. But he never lost sight of his goal. He knew God had called him to go to Ireland as a missionary, and he was determined he would not do it as a maverick.
He would do it as an ordained missionary, an ordained bishop by the church, so that the churches he planted would be part of the larger Celtic church. It wouldn't be a split-off or some independent maverick thing. And because of his commitment to do this, Patrick made the decision never to marry. Now, today, marriage doesn't hold someone back from being a missionary. In fact, an awful lot of missionaries, I know, are, you know, married couples, married families.
But in that day and age, missionary work was much, much more difficult. Extremely dangerous, particularly going to Ireland. It wasn't the type of thing you would normally try to bring a wife with you because of the danger and the hardship it would entail. So he had enough faith in God that he would end up in Ireland. He decided not to marry, just trusting in God that he would work things out.
Well, finally, when Patrick was 47 years old, the Roman Catholic Church sent a bishop named Palladius to Southern Ireland to minister to the thousands of Christian slaves there. Well, this woke up the Celtic Church in Britain, and they now decided to ordain Patrick as a bishop and at last send him to Ireland. There was a bit of rivalry between the Roman Catholic Church and the Celtic Church.
And the Celtic church didn't want to see Ireland become Roman Catholic, or all of the Christian slaves that had been kidnapped from Britain all end up as Roman Catholic converts. It makes me think of Paul's words in Philippians that whether Christ is preached out of pure motives or out of jealousy, the important thing is Christ gets preached. And that's basically what happened here. So they ordained Patrick as a bishop and sent him off to Ireland.
Now, there were no showdowns with the Druids, all these various legends. Almost everything people have heard are false. I mean, one of them was that he lit his fire first on a holy night when neither the king or the high druid priest was supposed to light his bonfire first. So there was a big showdown with the High King of Ireland and all of that and the Druids. And that's totally made up. There's nothing in his writings about that.
Nothing in his writings about using the shamrock to explain the Trinity, and he didn't drive the snakes out of Ireland. Actually, he doesn't even record any more miraculously answered prayers during his time in Ireland as a missionary bishop. We do know this, that he didn't want the Irish to become nominal converts to Christianity. He wanted to plant a dynamic church made up of Christians who had the same kind of faith he had, who would be the same kind of prayer warriors that he had.
So from the very beginning, the Irish church that Patrick planted was a very rigorous church that was willing to suffer for Christ. Now in his testimony, Patrick doesn't mention converting any actual kings, but he does say that he did convert the sons and daughters of various Irish kings, which made their parents quite angry at Patrick. We know he was imprisoned by one king. He relates that in his testimony. My guess is that he was probably in prison many times. Ireland wasn't ruled by just one king.
It was a clan society and there were various kings over various clans. So every time he traveled very far, he was entering the territory of another clan, having to deal with another king and facing possible persecution. Now, one of the principles that Patrick followed from day one is that he would depend solely upon God and his fellow Christians to finance the work in Ireland. He refused to accept donations from pagan rulers because he felt it would lead him to compromise.
If they were financing his work, well, they would say, " Hey, look, you know, we've given you all this money. We've given you this help. Could you let us just at least keep our idols or would you be not quite so strict about immorality or raiding and killing others? " See, he didn't want to have that kind of pressure. So the only money or supplies he would accept would be from his Christian converts or from his church back home in Britain.
Patrick also refused to accept gifts from anyone who had been excommunicated. Because again, there would be that pressure to let them back in the church before they fully repented or before enough time had elapsed, depending on the severity of their sin. Now, Patrick was severely criticized by the church leaders back in Britain because of these policies. You know, I was thinking, wait a minute, we're having to send you all of this money and these supplies.
And it was hard times in Britain with the Roman legions all gone. And you're turning down money while asking us for money. They didn't like that at all. And then someone made up a rumor that he was charging people in order to baptize him. They had to pay him money. Of course, it was just the exact opposite. He wouldn't accept money from anybody. But like you say, he was not a popular person. He wasn't popular before they sent him as a missionary. They had not wanted to do it.
They did it more out of rivalry with Rome. And then they criticized him about everything that he did. In fact, the whole reason why he wrote his testimony was to defend himself from his many critics in Britain. He didn't write an autobiography because, hey, I'm a famous person and people are going to want to read about my life. No, he wanted to defend himself from all of these charges that people were making against him. Meanwhile, while Patrick was in Ireland, Roman Britain continued to deteriorate.
It was cut off now from the Roman government, and the Scots and the Picts were continually raiding it, as well as the Irish coming across the Irish Sea and raiding the coast. And about this time a British hero rose up. He was a Christian king. I put Christian in quotation marks. His name was Coroticus, and he defeated the Picts in several battles. By now, the Christians in Britain were losing their original belief in non-resistance, and they were fighting back against their enemies.
Not very successfully, because for so many centuries, the Romans had given them all of the protection they needed. They never had had to learn war, never had a reason to, in addition to their Christian convictions, because the Roman legions protected them. And so anyway, that finally one of their people was able to raise up and bring them some military victories, made him quite a hero. Well, he didn't just stop there. He decided he would teach the Irish a lesson as well.
So he sent a small fleet of ships over, and they turned the tables on the Irish by raiding the Irish coast. Unfortunately, the people they raided were not pagan Irish. They were Christian converts that Patrick had made. They'd slaughtered most of the men and took the women as slaves. It was a group who had just been baptized, and he was furious. And he sent a number of letters to Coroticus demanding that he return the Christian captives he had taken.
And when he refused to do so, he finally wrote a letter to him and excommunicated him. And we have that letter. It's been preserved. Well, as far as we know, the church in Britain did not honor Patrick's letter of excommunication. They never forced Coroticus to return the slaves he had taken or to repent of the sins that he had committed in murdering innocent people.
Just as a side note, after I wrote a dramatized biography of Patrick, of all these events I've been telling you about, it's in a book I wrote back in the late 1990s called Let Me Die in Ireland. I visited one of my uncles who had been doing a lot of research on our family genealogy. On my mother's side, my forefathers were Scots-Irish. On my father's side, they're French. Well, anyway, he had spent years, you know, tracking down our family tree, tracking our ancestors back to Scotland.
The Scots Irish are Scottish people who settled in Northern Ireland by the invitation of the government in England who had conquered Ireland. And it turned out that I'm actually a descendant of this Coroticus. I could not believe the irony. I had just finished writing the book and denouncing him, and my opinion of him doesn't change one iota, that I'm related, or at least supposedly related to him, a distant descendant of his.
Well, his small victories weren't enough, and the entire country was suffering greatly from the raids from the pagans. And so some brilliant, I'll put brilliant in quotation marks, a British leader came up with an idea. And that idea was, let's invite the Angles and Saxons to come and settle in northern Britain between us and the Scots and Picts. Now, the Anglo-Saxons were pagans. They were cruel, vicious, dreadful people.
But the idea was they would be plenty powerful enough to protect the local British people from the Scots and Picts. And the raids from the Irish were diminishing because of Patrick's work there. When they became Christians, they quit, of course, raiding the coast of Britain. In other words, these Angles and Saxons would serve the same way the Roman legions had served as a buffer between the native people and the Scots and Picts.
Well, they sent some emissaries over to Germany, made this offer to the Anglo-Saxons who were looking for more land to settle. They were running short on land that was capable to be used for agriculture. And so they agreed to it. And then a number of shiploads of Anglo-Saxons came over and they settled on the land that was given to them. And when the Scots and Picts attacked them, they paid back evil for evil with a vengeance.
And the Scots and Picts decided we better just stay here in Scotland and leave Britain alone. But then the unexpected happened. Once the Anglo-Saxons had secured their land, had beaten off the Scots and the Picts, they realized how weak and helpless the native Britons were. And they decided, hey, why don't we just take this whole country for ourselves? And so then they turned their military prowess on the native Britons and just slaughtered them. Far worse than anything the Scots and Picts had ever done.
I mean, they massacred villages. They would attack churches in the middle of their service would burst in and kill everybody in the building, burn the building down. And they eventually took over the whole island other than the northern part, Scotland. It's known as Scotland today. It wasn't back then. And the Britons who survived all fled to the West Coast into what is today Wales. Why Wales is a separate country is because this is where the native Britons ended up taking refuge.
And there's a mountain range that today wouldn't keep back any armies, but in that day, it was enough to give them protection from the Angles and the Saxons. And that's why Wales is still a Celtic Gaelic speaking country. Well, they're coming back learning to speak Gaelic. I mean, obviously they've been part of the British Empire for many centuries, but there's kind of a return to learning their ancient language of Gaelic.
But despite hearing all of these reports that I'm sure were heart rending to Patrick, he continued on his mission work faithfully. Now I want to tell you about perhaps one of the most interesting legacies of Patrick, and that's how he ended up saving Britain without ever using the sword. Jesus had said that there would be those who would, figuratively speaking, become eunuchs for the kingdom of God.
That is, there would be people who would remain celibate, who would stay single, so they could devote themselves more fully to the work of the kingdom. And Patrick was such a person, as I've already mentioned. Well, because of his example, a sizable number of his converts, both men and women, remained single as well to devote themselves to the kingdom work. It became one of the striking features of the Irish Church that made it different from any of the other churches around in that time.
I mean, all of the other churches certainly had many people who remained celibate and devoted their life to God's work. That in itself wasn't unusual. It was the large percentage of people in Ireland who did that. Back in 1995, my wife and I visited Ireland. It was when I was doing research for my book about Patrick. And we visited these cells that the Irish monks lived in, these celibate men. And they're like little beehive huts. They're made just out of rocks being stacked up. No mortar.
They had this ingenious way of stacking the rocks in such a way that they could build an arch and make a dome without ever using a bit of mortar. And those beehive little cells, these ones we looked at, dated back to, I think like the 700s, and they're still remaining there. I've posted some of the pictures I took of them on the Scroll Publishing website. If you go to www.scrollpublishing.com/store slash Patrick, you will see them there.
Well, Patrick was so successful as a missionary that he converted thousands and thousands of the Irish to Christianity. And he made such vigorous disciples that after he died, his disciples completed his work until all of Ireland was Christian. Now, of course, some of the Irish were only nominal Christians, but for the most part, they were real Christians. He wasn't out making rice Christians, that's for sure, or making people who accepted Christ because there was some benefit.
He preached a very disciplined kind of Christianity. When, of course, after the Irish all converted to Christianity, they stopped raiding Britain. So here by doing his work, this humble man that was so despised by his fellow church people back in Britain, ended up being their physical savior, bringing an end to the raids from Ireland. But he did even more than that for Britain, because those Irish Christians weren't content to stop evangelizing once all of Ireland was converted.
They wanted to convert the rest of Europe. In fact, for a century or two after Patrick's death, the Irish Church was easily the most mission-minded branch of Christianity in the entire world. Sometime after Patrick's death, an Irish missionary named Columba, he sailed to Scotland, and he brought Christianity to the Scots and Picts who lived there.
Now, although the pagan Scots and Picts were no longer raiding the part of Britain controlled by the Anglo-Saxons, they were still carrying on raids against Wales, where the native Celtic British people lived. But once Columba converted them to Christianity, then those raids ceased. Well, then there was the one last problem. That was the Angles and Saxons who had taken over most of Britain at that point.
Well, another Irish missionary named Aidan, he began a mission work among the Anglo-Saxons to bring them to Christianity. And he was successful in making a number of converts. And then you got into this rivalry again between Rome and the Celtic church. Rome wanted to see England. By now, it was definitely England. It was the land of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of the Britons, like I say, were dead or were living in what's now Wales. And so they sent missionaries to England.
And in the end, the Anglo-Saxons decided to join with the Roman Catholics rather than with the Celtic Church. But it was the Celtic church that had begun the conversion process. And together, they converted the entire island to Christianity. Now, by that time when it happened, Christianity was no longer a non-resistant religion. Most of these people were not kingdom Christians, but it did bring considerable relief to Wales as far as having to worry about the Anglo-Saxons now attacking them.
In fact, Wales remained independent for centuries and centuries until the Norman conquest. After the Normans had come and conquered England, then eventually they crossed over the mountains and they conquered Wales as well. And eventually, not during the days of William the Conqueror, but during the days of his descendants, the Normans went over and conquered Ireland, and that's when Ireland became Roman Catholic. Now let's talk about lessons we can learn from Patrick's life.
Perhaps the most important thing we can learn from his life is that there is incredible power in prayer. But if we want to fully experience this power, we shouldn't think we can get it by 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 at the same time that he was, and no doubt nearly all of them prayed to God for deliverance.
Yet very few of them received the same answer that Patrick 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 10 years after they had been captured and had asked them about the power of prayer. They would have probably said, well, prayer doesn't really 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? Well, 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?
Well, the only sheep he would have shepherd would have been those of his owner there in Ireland. What if he had given up on prayer after five and a half years? Well, he may have spent the rest of his life as a bitter man, having lost confidence in the power of prayer. So an important lesson from Patrick's life is that 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 to us the very same things He did in Patrick if we would only 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 at the doors of heaven. Most of us think, including myself, 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 you know, 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. Now there's another important lesson that we can learn from Patrick's life, and that is learning to wait on God. You know, at first glance, it might seem that Patrick would have accomplished much more if he hadn't waited for 25 years on the church in Britain to send him.
However, in reality, God needed those 25 years to finish the work he had begun in Patrick. You know, 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 40 years in the wilderness. During those 40 years, Moses was a seemingly forgotten shepherd. From a human perspective, those years might seem like 40 wasted years.
But in God's perspective, those years were absolutely essential. God was patiently molding and mellowing Moses from the hot-headed firebrand that he had once been. And when God was finished with him, Moses was the meekest man on earth. God could 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. God doesn't quench their fire, but he does teach them to wait on him.
He did this with the Apostle Paul as well. Another lesson is what a difference it makes how we respond to adversity. For Patrick, it softened him. It made him turn to God. It made this great man of God out of him. But for a lot of those other captives, it made them bitter. It made them lose their faith in God. And it's that way still today for Christians. When bad things happen to them, some Christians lose their faith in God. They give up on things. Others become only stronger.
And we need to learn to become stronger in the face of disappointments rather than to let it cause us to lose faith in God. Another lesson is how God prepares us for kingdom work. We've already mentioned one of the things is he teaches us patience and he teaches us how to wait. But he also does things that from our human perspective would seem to have no purpose. And yet he has a plan in mind. I mean, what did he have to do to prepare Patrick to be a missionary?
Well, one of the things besides patience and prayer, which Patrick learned both of those during his time in Ireland, is he needed to learn the Gaelic language. I mean, he couldn't be much of a missionary if he couldn't speak their language. He had to learn their customs and what life was like in their country so that he didn't bring Roman culture over to Ireland. He created an Irish church, not a Roman church there.
I'm not talking about Roman Catholic, but Britain had a Roman culture at that time because it had been part of the Roman Empire. So God was working in these ways that Patrick at the time could have never imagined. It would have seemed like six wasted years out of his life when instead it was six years in missionary school, why God had him over there.
So, you know, you never know what God is doing in your life, what things he has in mind for the future, that present adversity is actually part of God's plan, working towards that. Finally, there's the lesson of humility. Patrick wasn't famous in his day because he didn't want to be famous. He only wanted to serve the Irish people and bring them the gospel.
In fact, no one even knows where Patrick was buried, which was surely upon his own request because he was so famous in Ireland and so well loved by the Irish Christians that they would have wanted to make pilgrimages to his place of burial. Instead, nowadays, when you go to Ireland, there's about four or five different places that claim to be his burial place. In other words, we don't even know where he's buried, and we don't even know what year he died.
There is one thing we do know about him, that he died on March 17th. So the next time St. Patrick's Day comes around, which is March 17th, think about the humble man of God who ended up becoming one of the greatest missionaries of all time next to Paul.