Biblical Spirituality From St. Patrick (part 1)

So, Sunday School, for the next three weeks, we'll be taking a break from the financial study. Pastor Steve is away. So, I'll do a two-parter on Biblical spirituality of early Christians, and I'll explain what that is in a minute.

And next week, you'll be having a Sunday School on prayer. Today's material is going to be rather challenging to keep up, especially if you just woke up. So, I'll give you a little bit of placeholder so you know where we are going, and then we'll kind of dive in, and hopefully we will learn some truths that are helpful in your own spiritual walk with the Lord.

What Biblical Spirituality Means

In broad layout, we're going to be looking at spirituality. What does spirituality mean? We'll spend a few minutes talking about that. And then, like John Piper does, we're going to be looking at some key individuals in the early church, and the purpose for doing that is so we can look back at these saints, the way they lived for Christ, some ways in which they exemplified this deep spirituality that we need to also emulate.

And so, we will look at a few characters, and then the way we're going to do that is walking through history as we look at the life and circumstances of these individuals. So, it's going to be a little bit of mix and match, so you'll have to bear with me.

Hopefully, as we look at these people, we will see how they sought to follow Christ and how we can follow Christ today also. Before we get into our material, maybe this is probably the only big question I'm going to ask today.

Can someone tell me what is spirituality? What do you think spirituality is? Excellent. So, one way of looking at it is, in contrast to matter and materials, we're looking at the spiritual, more fundamental aspect of all of our life, especially in the world we live in today.

Everybody just looks at the externals, the things, the stuff you can have, and spirituality says, no, that's not necessarily true. There is something more important. Man has a soul. It's not just his body.

Excellent. That's one definition of spirituality. Anything else that comes to mind? Yes, Amelia? Can you say that again? What you believe, what you think about what you believe, and how you live it out.

And that is going to be an important element of spirituality that we're going to see today, especially for us as Christians. Maybe if I say it as Christian spirituality or biblical spirituality, it talks about, we all have certain beliefs about the Bible, which we know is true.

We all think certain things about the Bible, how Christians ought to live in light of what God has done for us. And then spirituality takes that to the ground and says, this is how we actually live it.

So that's another good way of looking at spirituality, Stephen. That is also a very, it's actually very interesting that these two came together. There is a sense in which the culture today says, just enjoy, tomorrow we die.

There's no goal of looking beyond the present in a more materialistic sense. And the Christian viewpoint is always eternal. It is never just temporal in the here and now. It is, you look for the things that God has revealed to you and what God has promised to you.

And in light of eternity, you live your present. So there is that sense of hope and the future that draws the Christian on. These are all very good elements of spirituality. Anyone else want to take a poke?

Yes, Barbara? Excellent. Meditating on the word of God, meditating on scriptures. I think Barbara is the one who's kind of come narrowing it down to brass tacks here. So how do you actually do this spirituality?

And one of the key elements, we'll see the central elements to living a spiritual life is to be in the word, to commune with God in the word, and to spend that time of intimate relationship with God. And we're going to see those elements all kind of work themselves out as we look at the lives of these saints.

So I think we have a rough idea of what spirituality could mean. I have a few bad definitions here, but since you guys have done a great job, I'll just keep that whole thing up and not corrupt your minds with what is not true.

So as long as you have these definitions, you're good. I'll just give one good definition from a guy who was meditating on Romans 12, 1 and 2, you know, how you want to not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

And he gives this definition, which I think is pretty helpful. He says, an act of worship in response to God's mercy and grace, which involves the intentional transformation of the character to be like Christ, and the intentional transformation of the actions to conform to God's will.

It's a handful, so if you want, I can give it to you later. But the idea is that, you know, this is all gospel-centered. God has done something for us. We respond to him in worship, and that should change your character, and it should change the way you live.

So very often when you talk about spirituality, it's very personal, in some ways very subjective. You know, who knows how many times who's spending that much time in the Word, who is meditating on God's Word that much.

But there is an outward transformation that happens when you have this communion with the Lord, and those things are very obvious for us to see. And so a person who spends a lot of time in the Word, his life, her life is different.

And you can say, oh, you know, like Moses coming out of the presence of the Lord, there is that something that is shining about there, when you want to know what it is. And you learn that there is, God is working in this person's life because they are spending time with him or her.

God is spending time with him or her. Now, let me just use two quick passages, and then we will get into our history. So if someone, one of you can turn to Galatians chapter five, and I have a few verses I want to read from there.

And the other person who wants to read, if you can turn to Colossians chapter one, verse 21. You have the Galatians, who has Colossians, I'd like that passage first, Colossians 121. So if you can read from, I apologize, it's not 21, it's 24.

So if you can read from 24 to 29, that'll just give the context of what we are going to be looking at. Colossians 1, 24 to the end of chapter one. This section, I think, exemplifies the ministry of the people that we're going to look at today.

This is the same characteristic, this Pauline fervor and passion for God and for the saints that these men, we are going to see. What is it that they're doing for the church? What is it that God has called them out to do?

And how they want to bring the gospel to those who haven't heard it and to minister to them. And very quickly in Galatians five, if you do not mind, can you read verse 22, 23 and 24? I'm sorry, go all the way from 22 to 25.

Thank you. So we're going to be seeing both of these, the inner and the outer ministries of these people. And in first Corinthians 11, one, we say, we see Paul saying, be imitators of me just as I also imitate Christ.

And in first Corinthians 10, the series we've been going through, we've seen how we are to watch out for the example of the Israelites so that we do not follow after them, do the same kind of sins they did.

But Paul is going to give an example of how we are to imitate them, him. And we're going to see some examples now of men in the early church that are exemplary in that sense. They're not perfect. They have their own flaws.

We'll see some of them too. But there are certain aspects of the way they followed Christ that should motivate us to follow Christ more faithfully. When you go to the early church, the period that most people are familiar with is the patristics, the Latin church.

You have the Greek and the Roman churches, and you have some great giants there like Augustine and Athanasius and men like that. So some of them you may be familiar with. But one group of people that I wasn't as familiar with was the Celtic church.

Do we have any Irish people here? One? Okay. A few. Half and half. All right. There is one really strong. Andrew was there in the youth group. So I kind of gave a little bit of this in the youth group a little while back.

But we're going to dig deeper into this Irish spirituality, if you will. It's not really any unique spirituality for the Irish. It is that they got something from the Bible and they just, with their typical Irish fervor, lived it out completely.

And I think we can learn how we can do that in our own New England way today. So the men I have in mind are Patrick, which most of you I hope know. And we will see a few things in addition to what most of us know about Patrick.

We'll look at two men called Columba and Columbanus, very obscure men, but giants in their walk with the Lord and the way they influenced the church, the early church. And then we have two other men, Cutbird and Bede, which we may not get to today.

We will hopefully get to next time. So I want to begin with Patrick. Patrick is the one, like I said, I think most of us are familiar with. I'm not going to spend time on Patrick's legends. We will just spend time on what we do know about Patrick and what are some things that we can get edified out of.

Patrick, Britain, and the Collapse of Rome

The context of Patrick, for us, may seem a little odd. We may think that we cannot relate to Patrick as much, you know, fourth century, fifth century in Britain, really, you know, not as modern as we are.

What does the ministry of a Christian in fifth century Britain and Ireland have to do with 21st century Americans? You'd be very surprised to understand what was going on in Britain at that time. Rome was the major, like America was, Rome was the empire that was in control.

Rome had sent its soldiers over to Britain. So there was Roman influence in Britain at this time. And the British people were looking up to these Roman conquerors, if you will, but they were at the government, they were establishing the southern part of the islands.

And they wanted to emulate these Roman cultures and customs. So Latin was getting taught. People understood what was going on. They obviously got the gospel through these British people coming over. Now you had either the soldiers who came, who were Christians, that gave the gospel to the British people, or there could have been merchants, there could have been, we don't exactly know who initially brought the gospel over to the islands.

But by the time Patrick is born, you have Christianity established, you have the church and its structure set up. So you have the Roman government, just as you would see it in Rome, establishing the official way of business.

And you also have the church set up under that, and the way in which they were operating was also pretty structured. This is pretty early, already by the fifth century, this was established. Now, what the people at that time didn't know was Rome was going to fall.

This was a big empire, there was a lot of problems that was going on in it, and you're going to see the collapse of the Roman Empire, and it is in this key transitional period that Patrick was going to have to do his ministry.

So that's just the big background, and with that, let's now get on into Patrick himself. So, Patrick, we think, was probably part of the upper class, because he actually knew some Latin, he knew some stuff that the cultured people would know.

He wasn't very good at it, and we will see why he wasn't as good as some of his contemporaries. But when he got on the scene, you already have some big people in the early church. Anybody here know who Pelagius was?

Who was Pelagius? That's right, if you think Arminianism is difficult, you have to go to Pelagianism. He went all the way back, and he was so popular that he came to Rome, and he disputed with Augustine, and that's what causes Augustine to give us a clear example of the sovereignty of God in salvation and the depravity of man.

Pelagius had no understanding of this, but Pelagius was actually a monk from Britain. By 400, he died, I think, in 400, and by that time, he had already studied, and he had a huge influence. These were smart thinkers already from Britain that were coming back into Rome and trying to influence.

And Pelagius, obviously, for the negative, but there were other men like Faustus and Ninian who were also really scholarly, but were also more biblical. Now, Patrick, he was born into a family that was pretty rich.

His dad, it says, was a deacon. He had a villa, and he was something called a decurion. He was an official in the town. And his responsibility was to take taxes for the town, provide entertainment for the town.

If he didn't get enough taxes, he had to pay out of his own money to take care of the upkeep of the town. It was not really a very... It was an honorable job, but it was pretty difficult. People were spending their money out.

And the Romans had a favorable view of the church. So what they ended up doing was they said, if you are like a deacon or someone serving in the church, you don't have to pay taxes. And obviously, people who are wealthy like this also wanted that position so that they don't have to give up all their money.

And Rome quickly caught on. They said, okay, if you do these types of things, if you want to really be in the church, you need to show that you are spiritual. So you need to give up two-thirds of your money to family or others.

So that shows that you really want to do this. You're not just doing it to get a tax break. But Patrick's dad, it appears, was a deacon in the church, which would give him this exempt status. But he also had plenty of servants, and he had a pretty wealthy lifestyle as a decurian.

And the implication seems to be, one of the guys says, Patrick's family was worldly in spirit, but Christian in name. So his dad was a deacon in the church, serving in the church. He probably got teachings of the church because he was part of it.

But in the lifestyle, they were just basically affluent people who just cared about finding ways to keep their money and enjoying their apple and, or what is it, eating their apple. How does it go? Yes, thank you very much.

So he had it both ways. So that's the lifestyle into which Patrick was born. He didn't think twice about the problems of this kind of a lifestyle. But when he was 16 years old, as many of you would have heard, he gets kidnapped.

He was probably living on the western side of Britain, closer to Ireland. For some of you, you may be like me and not really good with, I think this will be too hard. If you want, you can take a look at the map later.

So I had to go and look at the maps to figure out my knowledge of geography in Britain wasn't that good. But the western side of Britain, closer to Ireland, so you had the people raiding from Ireland.

Irish people would come, raid the coast, grab some slaves for themselves and take them back. And when Patrick was 16, he gets kidnapped. So very traumatic, son of a pretty wealthy kid, living over here, and all of a sudden taken to a place where he has to work as a tender of sheep.

And he does this for six years. Obviously, when he gets there, he has no idea how long he's going to be there. But while he is there, he experiences conversion. So he has some really strong, he has two books that he's written.

I would highly encourage you to find and read them. Confessions of Augustine, both of them are free online, and A Letter to Corodicus. And both of those books are very small, but powerful. You'd think that when you read books like these, so old, archaic, it's actually a lot easier to read than some of your medieval books that we have, which are pretty helpful also, some of them.

And he gets taken out, and when he gets out, here are some of the things that his confession of his conversion. It says, There, in Ireland, the Lord opened the sense of my unbelief, that I might at last remember my sins, and be converted with all my heart to the Lord my God, who had regard for my abjection and mercy on my youth and ignorance.

The idea he conveys here is, you know, 16 years, he was given everything that the church should have already provided for him. He should have been thankful for what God had provided and submitted to God, but instead, he was just living a double life.

And now that he has taken out, torn away from his family, placed in a place of complete suffering, if you will, he has no contact with his family, he doesn't know how long he is going to stay here. And at that point, God's mercy comes upon him, and he seeks God with all of his heart and with all of his might.

And his experience there seems very unique. I'm going to read another small passage here. He says, When this fervor of the Lord came upon him, when he got saved, this is how he communed with God, the spirituality that we talk about.

After I came to Ireland, every day I had to tend sheep, and many times a day I prayed. The idea there is he was just pretty much continually in prayer. He would just finish praying, he would do something, and he'd go back to pray.

And prayer was what just characterized his life of being a shepherd. And he says, The love of God and his fear came upon me more and more, and my faith was strengthened. You know, he already had the teachings, and here now he comes into a situation where God just brings the gospel to bear upon him, his life is now open to God.

And the reason he just loves God is because God's love and his fear, this dual sense of God's favor upon him, and the grand holiness of God both come upon him, and he is just growing in this faith that he has toward God.

He says, My spirit was moved so that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers and almost as many in the night, and this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountains, and I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and I felt no harm, and there was no sloth in me.

And just so you don't think he is boasting of himself, as I now see, because the spirit within me was then fervent. You will see a very grace-oriented understanding by Patrick. Here is this guy who wakes up early in the morning, late at night, he is continually praying in all these adverse conditions, had no sense of sloth because he could see that it was God who was enabling him to pray and to follow after God with all his heart.

Let me just stop here for a minute. This is the way I'm going to apply this to ourselves as we go along. When we think of prayer, let me maybe put a question, that may be easier. As I just gave you a few things on prayer, next week you'll hear more exposition on prayer, but what are some things that struck you as odd?

Things that you say, oh, you know, I never thought of prayer that way. Is that really biblical? Or wow, I know it's biblical and I don't think I do that. Bruce? We don't know for sure, but it's most likely his own, because although he had the environment in which he could have learned many of these prayers, because he does have the Nicene Creed already familiar in Ireland.

We will see in a minute, Trinitarian teaching from Rome had already come here and they had all accepted it. These were not Aryans or, you know, heretics in that way. Yes, they had the Latin Bible, so Jerome's Vulgate was already available to them.

So that's what Patrick will actually learn when he comes back and studies to go back again. Yeah. So, but most likely these were just, because he was not a studied guy at 16, he was just, you know, a child of the church, but he was not really a Christian and he wasn't really studying things.

So it's most likely just genuine inner prayers that he was just praying as he heard. Good, good question. What else on prayer comes to mind as you hear about Patrick's prayers? Oh, this is the first time.

Yeah, yeah. Very true. And I think just following up on what Bruce said, there is a distinction between saying prayers, I'm in trouble. So let me just say Hail Mary's a million times and somehow God will help me.

That's not the point here. This is a genuine communion. And what we heard was that the early church, when you think of Paul and Ananias, these people were just communing with God. And that's what prayer is.

You know, you're speaking with God and there was that intimacy. And so these were genuine prayers. Anything else on prayer? I just want to just point out the fervency of prayer here. It's all of the Lord.

You know, if no non-Christian can generate this on our own and say, you know, I'm just going to pray and God will somehow hear me. It is the spirit of God within him that gives him this passion for God and that he wants to spend this time with God.

And what's unique about Patrick is it's not just at his conversion time. You will see that his love for God just keeps growing with his years and his spirituality would just keep growing as time passes.

We'll see more about prayer as time goes on. But what happens is six years he is here and six years the Lord, almost like Moses for 40 years when he's away, just prepares him, equips him, and he is now fervent.

But there is an opportunity for him to escape and he escapes from the western side of Ireland, runs across Ireland, gets into captivity again, boards a ship, gets into Britain, comes back home. Six years later, he is free and comes home.

And when he comes home, he obviously is a Christian, so he wants to study and be involved with the church. So he studies to be a deacon. And this is the time when he's established in the teachings of the church.

He studies the Bible. He's a strong biblical student. And you'll see that in the writings that he has. When he prays, when he writes, the Bible just kind of flows out. It's very different than most of the writings we see today.

It's just Bible in context. That's basically what he's doing. He studies and he's just fed on the Word. And he wants to serve here. But something unique happens to him. During this period, he feels he has a vision.

He's sleeping in a dream. He sees, just like Paul has this Macedonian call, come and give us the gospel, he feels that the Irish are calling him to come and give him the gospel. He's been there six years.

He's gotten saved while he was there. He knows the state of his lords and the people of that land, pagans in idolatry. And here he is enjoying the richness of God. And this man comes and wants him to go to serve as a missionary.

And he is struggling with this call. He says, should I go, should I not go in the beginning? And his main reason to not go is the holiness of God. He says, I can't go and do this type of work. Who am I to do this type of thing?

This God that we serve is beyond my feeble ability. So he's torn in the beginning. And to help his indecision, the people in the church at that time say, why would you want to go to pagans? Enjoy God's goodness over here.

And obviously, with all its comforts and its safety, because you could die if you go back to the Irish people, you're a runaway slave after all. And you shouldn't go. And in fact, they were strongly urging him not to go.

At that period in time, there was really no missions that was going from Britain to Ireland. 100 to 200 years later, you will have the Roman church sending missionaries. But Patrick is the one big guy.

He's almost an exception in the church to say, Lord has placed upon me. I'm actually going to read you something. Let me say this. This is what he quotes. He leaves for Ireland, never to return back to Britain.

And he says, even, okay, so he's saying, if I wanted to go back to Britain, even if I wish to leave and go to Britain, and how could I have, and how I would have loved to go to my country and my parents, and also to Gaul in order to visit the brethren and see the face of my saints in the Lord.

God knows it, that I much desired it to go from Ireland to Britain. But I am bound by the spirit who gives evidence against me. If I do this, telling me that I shall be guilty. And I'm afraid of losing the labor, which I have begun, nay, not I, but Christ the Lord who bade me come here and stay with them for the rest of my life.

If the Lord will, he, his, his sense of God's calling upon him for this particular ministry was so powerful that it didn't matter what everybody else was saying. He knew he had to go here and minister to these pagans.

And he would spend that his entire life, although he loved his family and everyone else, he would never go back again. And for him personally, it would have been sinful. It would be against his conscience and against the Lord to have gone back again without finishing and fulfilling his ministry here.

That was the sense of his passion for, for this missions that God had placed upon him. And once he knew that for sure, for certain, he never looked back in his entire ministry. He was just there. It was going to press on for the ministry that God had placed him.

He had a deep certainty of God's will in his life. Let me stop here for the second break for today. So we saw about prayer. Let's talk about God's will in our lives. We have some brothers in the church who emphasize this charismatic side of things.

You know, God has called me to do this. And nine times out of ten, it is a subjective sense that comes ephemerally. And then after a point, it dies away. And then you talk to the same person a few years later, they'd be like, what call?

I had no idea what you're talking about. But at that moment, it is so fiery. And it would be like, you know, I am absolutely certain this is what God calls me to do. And for us as biblical Christians, we know that the means by which we discern God's will is always the Bible.

If someone comes and tells me God tells me to do this, and it is not there in the Bible, you and I can very clearly say, well, it doesn't matter how strongly you feel about that. If it is not biblical, you cannot be following God.

You're either following your own wishes or you're following the promptings of the enemy. But that said, so just to set those two sides, mark those boundaries out. Let's talk about ourselves in our own walk.

What kind of commitment to the call of God in your life do you have? And I'm not necessarily. Well, maybe there is someone here who wants to go out and be a missionary. And you have that call of God in your lives, and you're contemplating it.

And I would urge you to pray, and we would pray for you. Come and talk to the elders. We'd love for you to go out as missionaries. But I do not want to somehow say that missionaries are higher class citizens than the rest.

Every single one of you here who is a Christian has a specific calling in the specific place that God has called you to go. But the question is not about what call you have, but about being committed to that particular call that God has called you to, and living it with a decisiveness and a passion like how Patrick lived his life.

You haven't gotten there. I don't think we're going to get past Patrick today. So let's still talk about this, because I think this is important. Absolutely. It's not wrong at all. I think it's good for everybody to just hear what Pam just said.

You know, sometimes when, like the statement I said, I think that's what you were responding to. So I said, when you look for God's will in your life, it has to match up with the scriptures. What I do not mean is you need to open the Bible, and God has to say, you need to go and be a missionary.

That would be pretty cool. That would make my job a lot easier when I'm discerning God's will, because it doesn't say, Pradeep, go be a missionary in this Bible, right? What the Bible does say is what are things that God honors or values in the life of a Christian.

So if I say I'm going to go and be a bartender for the glory of God, and I can come very easily and say, okay, there is something about being drunk and other things that you need to watch out for. But I just came out of my head.

But you know what I mean. There are certain things that the Bible cordons off and says, here are not things that honor God, but there are a lot of things that honor God in the Bible. But the point that Pam was trying to make is the subjective call on individuals.

I think Spurgeon says this for pastors. He says, you know, if you do not have that call, that personal call of God upon your life to be a minister of God, you have no business in the ministry. You don't just say, I studied this, and I think I can figure out what the Bible says, and I can do this work, and let me go be a minister.

You need to be absolutely certain that God has placed a call upon your life subjectively to know that this is my ministry. This is what God has called me to do. Does everybody just one day wake up, pray, and then say, yes, I have this call?

No. The Lord prepares each individual along the path that we walk down, and there is a time when the church confirms the gifts that God has placed in your life. And over a period of time, like Hudson Taylor, there are people that had this specific calls to different places that God had placed upon their hearts.

And God uses the inner convictions of your heart when it is aligned with the Bible. It shouldn't conflict with the Bible. That's basically what I was talking about. But that's very true. So each of you, I know like you, for example, have a passion for evangelism.

And it is a calling. And the way in which you commit your life to dedicating your resources, your time, and your energies, it's not just a certain part of your life. It pervades the way in which you live.

And that's a great example. And I think it's not wrong to call out some of the gifts that we have in the body that God has blessed us with so we can learn from them. And we should also look at those gifts that God has placed in our lives that we will be faithful with using those gifts of that same commitment that God has called us to.

So let me just take maybe one or two and then we'll move on. Anything else on the will of God in your life?

Yes. Excellent point.

And I think that gives a good example of the Bible. Whoa, is that a sign from the Lord or something? I'll refrain from comments. But that's a classic example of a biblically informed call. So, you know, as a mother, you are looking at what are the priorities that God has called you to.

Thank you. And you are looking at what, at this point in time, what would honor God the most. And that's the whole point of Romans 12, 1 and 2 is this, to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. As you study the word, in your circumstance, you look for God's guidance and you say, you know, this is the priority that God would have me do and I will do it with great joy.

It doesn't matter if the world wants me to do X, Y, and Z. I know that at this point in time, God wants me to do this and I will do this with as much excellence as I can. And that would be just as honoring as Patrick dropping everything and getting off to Ireland.

Excellent example. Thank you. Yes, Peggy. And I think that's Patrick's comment, too, when he says he's bound by the spirit. He was a slave in Ireland and he is now a slave of Christ. And he will go wherever God sends him because he knows God sustained him six years before and God will sustain him wherever he goes.

Yeah, yeah. That's very true. You know, especially, you know what? We'll probably just stop with this for the sake of time. We'll continue, Patrick, next time. But I think this is helpful because it's not about Patrick that we have our lesson here.

It's about spirituality. How do we walk in light of examples like these men? When you read about Patrick or the older saints, the problem is this. You will very rarely see something negative about what Patrick did or many of the great giants did.

Unless it's like Patrick himself, he will write something about his flaws. Augustine would say, you know, this is who I was. But most other people writing about Patrick or Augustine would just talk about their excellencies, not really about their, you know.

Yeah, he went to this town and he tried to evangelize and he did this horrible thing that dishonored God. And then later he repented. Very rarely will you see that because historians like to just give the best face of all these saints.

You know, whereas the Bible is very different. When you if you want like realistic stuff, people who put their foot in their mouth or people who had a big falling out. I'm talking about Peter. I'm talking about Paul and Barnabas.

You can see that in the Bible. No Christian is infallible in his calling in the way he goes. But every Christian ought to be humble and looking for God's guidance as you walk through it. Great examples.

And and I think it's always good to temper our views when we look at these giants is these men were not perfect either. We're just looking at those areas where they were so much more stronger than we are.