How are you celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day today? Wearing green? Pinching someone who doesn’t? Hoisting a mug of green beer?
Maybe the best way to celebrate the day is by sharing your faith.
Truly.
The man we celebrate today wasn’t Irish; he was raised in a well-to-do home in Roman Britain. His father was a church deacon and his grandfather was an elder, but Patrick had never been very serious about the Christian faith himself. Then pirates kidnapped him in his teen years and sold him to a farmer in Ireland. There, as a slave tending livestock, Patrick encountered the living God.
When he saw a chance to escape his slavery, he took it. Back in Britain, he settled into a comfortable life as a priest surrounded by Christians. But one night in a dream he heard an Irish voice calling out, “Holy boy, we are asking you to come home and walk among us again.”
At first, he was reluctant to return to the land of his enslavement. But he was finally “struck to the heart” with compassion for the Irish, he later wrote. He saw his former slavers as enslaved themselves, in bondage to pagan superstition and Druid worship. And so, he brought the gospel to Ireland. Traveling throughout the land, he witnessed to kings in their courts and peasants in their fields. He preached, established churches, trained leaders, and baptized thousands of converts. When he died in 461, his gospel movement had transformed the Emerald Isle.
At Hillcrest, we’re engaged in “Thirty Days of Prayer for our One.” Each of us is praying for one person who needs Jesus and who needs a church home. Sometime in these thirty days, I’m convinced you’ll have a chance to invite your One to our Easter worship service on April 9.
It would make Patrick proud.
(For more information on Patrick of Ireland, I recommend Stephen Lawhead’s historical novel, Patrick: Son of Ireland or Philip Freeman’s St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography. Or, for lighter fare, maybe just start with the VeggieTales cartoon of Patrick’s life.)
Tom
Tom Goodman serves as pastor at Hillcrest Church in Austin, Texas. His sermons are available on YouTube and the HillcrestToGo Podcast and you can find him on Facebook and Twitter. If someone forwarded this email newsletter to you, sign up here to receive Tom’s weekly devotional in your email inbox.