Who was St. Patrick? Was this his real name? Was he just the patron saint of green eggs and ham, green beer and just all things green in general?
What we have here is one of the greatest examples in history of a man who won a nation without the force of arms, without a military and helped transform a society of chaos into a society of order and peace.
These are the types of men and women that we so desperately need in our nation today. Men of character, men of faith, so my goal with this message is to teach you a little bit about St. Patrick, the man, who he was, what he stood for. I think there are many misconceptions about who this man was and what he represented.
My hope with this is that you will never be able to look at St. Patrick’s Day the same again and maybe it will inspire you to look at your own faith and character.
Patrick was born in a small village along the coast in England named Maewyn Succat. So, who knew that Patrick was not Irish? He was a Brit, an Englishman. He was also part of the Celtic Christians. His family were members of the family of faith within the Celtic Christians.
Ireland was just outside of the Roman Empire, who ruled the world at that time and during this time Rome was being sacked by the Barbarians. While the Barbarians were taking over these regions, outside and around the Roman Empire, the northern regions of Great Britain, were also very dangerous. You had the Scottish Picts and the Irish slave traders or they would be called Irish pirates roaming around terrorizing the citizens.
These Irish pirates specialized in human trafficking. These Irish pirates were considered monsters among the people, the worst of the worst. 16-year-old Patrick was a prime target for these Irish slave traders.
One evening they came into England and they raided Patrick’s Hamlet (small town). They killed many people and they captured the young, the strong, the beautiful and they dragged them off to sea. They loaded them into their boats, threw them into the belly of their ships like minnows in a bait tank. They took young Patrick all the way back to Ireland. This is what Patrick wrote in his diary:
“At 16 years of age I did not know the true God, I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people.”
He was beaten, he was bloodied as he was taken back to Ireland while being sold into the slave trade. A Druid Warlord named Miluke was his master. At 16 years of age, we can imagine how terrified he must have been. They had these wicked and evil traditions there and as we read through history and we find out that these Druid Warlords, these priests did horrible things as they had the heads of their enemies posted on poles around their camp as trophies of their conquest. These priests would have shrunken heads tied to their belts; they would use the decapitated heads of their enemies as drinking bowls.
The Irish were kept in constant fear by their priests who would perform human sacrifices. They had a very particularly disgusting one to the god of Beltane, the god of the sun. They worshipped Beltane because they believed by sacrificing humans, he would increase their fertility and make them pure. This was a ritual of sacrifice that they knew as the Wickerman ceremony where they had these immense figures in the shape of giant men with limbs made out of twigs, and inside these enormous limbs were human beings in which the druids would fill the limbs with criminals and when they ran out of criminals, they would use innocent people and light this entire wickerman on fire filled with men and women as a sacrifice in this ritual ceremony.
Patrick worked in the fields of this tyrant’s sheep fighting off packs of wolves and bores. Patrick said this of his condition…
“I did not believe in the living God, nor did I so from my childhood, but I lived in death and unbelief until I was severely chastised by God by hunger and wickedness and that daily.”
Imagine being out in the cold in Ireland tending to sheep, fighting off wolves and bores surrounded by a culture of death, witchcraft, without clothes, freezing without food, being starved. This was Patrick’s life every single day.
As Patrick was enduring these terrible conditions, he began to remember the faith of his family, especially that of his father and his grandfather. This is amazing because here is a young man who didn’t have faith in God by his own admission but at his darkest hour he is reminded of the faith of his parents and grandparents. That should be an encouragement to all of us.
Paul when he was writing to Timothy spoke of the faith of his mother and grandmother. He saw this same faith in Timothy as a young man. We never know what kind of impact we are going to have on those around us.
If you are someone who has lived your faith in front of your kids or grandkids, there is hope that in their darkest moments that they will be reminded of your faith in God. Your witness is never in vain.
Patrick said these words:
“After I came to Ireland, I had to tend sheep and many times a day I prayed. The love of God and his fear came to me day after day and my faith was strengthened and 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.”
This godless young man started talking to God, day and night all because he remembered the faith of his mother, his father, his grandfather, his grandmother.
“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 the frost, through the rain and I felt no harm.”
We are talking about a 16-year-old young man. Look at his discipline and dedication in having alone time with God. What happened next was nothing short of miraculous and transformative not only for him but for his nation and the entire world.
He became a visionary and Patrick describes the revival and transformation that occurred within his own heart. As Patrick’s heart was converted so too was his name. He changed it after God saved him.
“And it was there that the Lord opened the sense of my unbelief that I might at last remember my sins and be converted with all of my heart to the Lord my God.”
God sent personal revival into that young man’s heart and converted him and made him a child of God. A member of the family of faith.
After years as a slave, Patrick had a dream and God spoke to him in this dream to travel 200 miles to the seashore where he would find a ship and within that ship would be a man who would take him to safety. Patrick escaped his slave master in Ireland and made it all the way back to England and was reunited with his family.
There in England he was surrounded by his mom and his dad, his family, his friends, as he found himself in a great financial situation. He was able to get married, have a home of his own, have a job, have children…if he desired to do so.
If Patrick had settled down, got a job, and basically decided to live an ordinary life, we probably never would have heard of him. Rather than settle down and live in comfort he decided to answer the uncomfortable call upon his life as a result of this revival that he had in his heart.
Patrick’s words here are as written:
“In the depth of the night I saw a man named Victorious coming as if from Ireland (remember he is back in England now, rescued out of Ireland) coming from Ireland with innumerable letters and I read the heading of one of the letters which read “the cry of the Irish” and while I was reading, I heard the voice of those who were beside the woods of Fochluth”. These were the woods near where Patrick had been enslaved and he heard the voice of this man and the cry of the Irish near the western sea and they called out “please holy youth come and walk among us again.” Their cry pierced me to my very heart and I could read no more and so I awoke. “
He woke up from this dream from the cry of the Irish people calling him back to Ireland, come back walk with us again. And inexplicably, Patrick’s heart was filled with a love for the Irish people. We see here his character and his faith starting to show. He was filled with a love for these people and he spent a decade or more preparing to go back to Ireland, by studying God’s Word, training his heart and mind to go back to the land that had enslaved him, the dangerous place that he had fought so hard to escape. He went back with a mission to spread the good news of Jesus and the whole counsel of God’s word in the Bible.
Over the next 40 years Patrick’s influence would shape the fate of not only Ireland, but all of Europe, all of the western world and America.
Much of what you and I enjoy today in terms of God’s word, in terms of liberty, the form of government that we have today can be traced back to the courage and character of St. Patrick.
We need more men and women with that kind of courage and that kind of character.
I want to discuss more about what Patrick did while he went back to Ireland, the most dangerous, the most frightful and fearful place to face his enemies.
Did he go back with a master plan of causing riots in the streets? Was his plan to cancel out the druid culture because he disagreed with what they stood for?
So how did he do it? How did he face his fears and go back to the place that enslaved him to preach the Gospel message?
Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom in America 