St. Patrick - 2013 Call to Worship

(HT – George Grant) - St. Patrick was not an Irishman – he was a missionary to the Irish, a nation full of pagan religion and fear of the gods.  He was apparently born in the 4th Century AD, into a patrician Roman family in one of the little Christian towns near present day Glasglow.   Although his pious parents nurtured him the Christian faith, he later confessed that he much preferred the passing pleasures of sin.

One day while playing by the sea as a teen, marauding pirates captured Patrick and sold him into slavery to a petty Celtic tribal king, named Milchu. During the next six years of captivity he suffered great adversity, hunger, nakedness, loneliness, and sorrow while tending his master's flocks in the valleys of Ireland.

It was amidst such dire straits that Patrick began to remember the Word of God his mother had taught him. Regretting his past life of selfish pleasure seeking, he turned to Christ as his Savior.

Of his conversion he later wrote, “I was sixteen years old and knew not the true God and was carried away captive; but in that strange land the Lord opened my unbelieving eyes, and although late I called my sins to mind, and was converted with my whole heart to the Lord my God, who regarded my low estate, had pity on my youth and ignorance, and consoled me as a father consoles his children….”

Amazingly, Patrick came to love the very people who humiliated him, abused him, and taunted him. He yearned for them to know the blessed peace he had found in the Gospel of Christ. Eventually rescued through a remarkable turn of events, Patrick returned to his family in Britain. But his heart increasingly dwelt upon the fierce Celtic peoples he had come to know so well. He was stunned to realize that he actually longed to return to Ireland and share the Gospel with them.

Though his parents were grieved to see him leave home once again, they reluctantly supported his efforts to gain theological training on the continent.

Thus, Patrick returned to Ireland. He preached to the pagan tribes in the Irish language he had learned as a slave. His willingness to take the Gospel to the least likely and the least lovely people imaginable was met with extraordinary success. And that success would continue for over the course of nearly half a century of evangelization, church planting, and social reform. He would later write that God’s grace had so blessed his efforts that “many thousands were born again unto God.”

We have come to worship God,  the same God Patrick worshipped and served.  This God transforms our lives by the work of His Spirit, applying to us the blood of Jesus, shed for our sins, and granting us resurrection lives – lives that give themselves away in love, in hope, in great trust, fear, and delight in the God Who saved us.  Come and worship our God.