Patrick was a Protestant, not a Roman Catholic, and Ireland
in his day wasn’t Catholic. Patrick’s name wasn’t even Patrick; it was Maewyn Succat.
Succat was born in Scotland (372 AD), not Ireland.
“His granddad was an elder in the Celtic church, his dad was
a deacon and his mother raised him to be a Believer but (in his teens) he
rebelled against it,” informed Jordan in his Sunday sermon yesterday. “He and
his two sisters were playing on the beach one day and some Irish pirates came
along and scooped them up, took them to Ireland and sold them into slavery.
“He lived there for a number of days, and it was while he
was tending to some sheep and cattle as a slave, that his mother’s
preaching of the gospel came back to his mind.
“The point came when he trusted Christ and wrote a testimony
that is published in Miller’s Church History. He said his sins came before him
and he realized what was going on, and like the Prodigal, he trusted Christ and
came to know the joys of his sins forgiven.
“He began to preach the gospel across the country and was set free from slavery, taken back to Scotland. He was there awhile but his heart
yearned for the folks in Ireland who were in such darkness and paganism.
“That’s why they talk about how he got the Leprechauns and
all the screwball stuff, but what he really did was not those make-believe things;
he went in and preached the gospel about light in the darkness.
“He became known as the ‘Apostle of Ireland,’ spreading the
gospel all around. He began to start local churches and those local churches
began to train people to preach the gospel, and when he died there was a guy
named Columba who he had trained, and literally between 350-400 and 900 AD,
they took the gospel all across Ireland and Britain and over into the continent
through France and Germany and down into northern Italy.
“They met up with a group of people called the Pauliceans
who had been run out of Armenia, north of Turkey, and were pushed up into
Europe. The Pauliceans, after Patrick’s group began to wane away, spread the
gospel through the Dark Ages until the 1300s when they were finally slaughtered.
“It was in the 9th Century that the pope finally
decided to canonize Patrick who, by the way, was buried in a Protestant
churchyard in Dublin. The pope canonized him, made him the patron saint of
Rome, saying anywhere the name of Christ is, Rome deserves to rule it and he
ceded the island of Ireland to King Henry II and got control over it.
*****
“There’s a cycle historians recognize that runs through
these kinds of things. First, you start with paganism. Then you have evangelism
where you preach the gospel. Patrick did that. He went into a pagan land,
preached the gospel, saw people getting saved, saw churches established, and then
he begins to teach them, instills God’s Word into them, and they begin to go out
and do evangelism all over Europe, in fact.
“There’s a little island, Iona, that was one of their
mainstays. Did you ever read the book, ‘How the Irish Saved History’? The guy
who wrote it is a lost guy but what he says is when the Visigoths and the Vandals
took over Europe and just destroyed the Roman Empire, they got to the ocean, looked out and jumped over to invade England, and when they got to the edge
of England, they looked over to Ireland and said, ‘There’s nothing on that God-forsaken
piece of rock over there anybody would want!’
"And so they didn’t invade Ireland
because of the inhospitable climate and inaccessibleness. While much of the
history books of European history were destroyed, they were preserved in
Ireland. That’s how the Irish preserved history.
“That was one of the ways they couldn’t destroy the
evangelism centers that were there. And Columba had on Iona an advanced school
of the Bible that was sending preachers all over.
“The teaching ministry grows, but once it gets to be big
enough that the culture notices it, it then begins to get cultured. It begins
to want to be like everybody else. You remember Israel: ‘We want a king like
everybody else.’
“When that happens, apostasy comes in and it’s followed by
paganism again and now you’ve gone full circle.*****
“The paganism that began in the 5th and 6th centuries lasted for a thousand years and was called the Dark Ages. During the Dark Ages, Bible-believing Christianity became an underground movement.
“That apostasy that resulted in the destruction of the ministry
that Patrick and his followers had as Rome came on and assimilated it into the
culture, and corrupted it by making it just a corrupted form of Judaism (just as
Jeroboam had done with Israel), made Christianity an underground thing and you
just had sporadic, disconnected efforts of individual Christians to win people
to Christ. Bible-teaching fell to individuals; people considered heretics for
the most part.
“The administration and the propagation of the local assemblies
came to be the task of local pastors. You know what it looked like? It looked a
lot like where we are today.“You think about the culture we live in as its re-paganizing itself, listen, that cycle . . . what’s going to happen to the Bible-believing church is we’re going to become an underground movement again, maybe for centuries.
“A thousand years between these guys back in the 5th
Century and the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s and yet you’ve got a great
example of it in Brother Barlow’s ministry in Communist China.
“In Communist China, before the communists took over, there
was a hundred years of China inland preaching, taking the gospel to the Chinese.
C. R. Stam’s brother, John, and his wife, Betty, were some of the first martyrs
in China. Her dad was the head of China Inland Mission and they took the gospel
all over China. When the Chi-coms came in and began to run them off, they could
put out the foreign missionaries, but they couldn’t put out the Chinese Believers.
“When the country got opened up about 20 years ago, you know
what you found out? Instead of there being hundreds of thousands of Christians in China today, there are
hundreds of millions! You don’t kill the Body of
Christ. It might be all underground, but it’s there and that might be where we
wind up.”
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