Slave to Saint: The Life & Legacy of Saint Patrick

Watch the video of St. Patrick’s Breastplate here! 

Cutting through the noise of green beer and shamrocks lies the extraordinary life story of St. Patrick — an enslaved British teenager who found his faith in captivity, escaped through divine guidance, and later returned to Ireland as a missionary priest. Patrick’s life was marked by miraculous power, including eyewitness accounts of raising 33 people from the dead! He left us his “Lorica” or “Breastplate,” a timeless shield-of-faith prayer for spiritual protection that is still recited widely today. What if you prayed St. Patrick’s Breastplate every day for 30 days? How could it transform your life in Christ? Discover the real meaning behind today’s holiday, and share the story of St. Patrick with someone who has never heard it!

Chapters

• 0:00 Happy St. Patrick's Day!
• 1:16 The Story of St. Patrick
• 4:51 St. Patrick's Lorica or Breastplate

Transcript

Michele: 0:00

It's Monday, March 17th, St. Patrick's Day, and this is Today's Kus Word. Welcome to Today's Kus Word, your five minutes a day, five days a week, inspiration blast. Join me, Michele Kus, your spiritual growth coach, every Monday through Friday as I drop on you some piping hot freedom bombs, especially on St. Patrick's Day. Did you like that little Irish jig? Well, happy Monday and happy St. Patrick's Day. I want to start out by just giving a shout out to my friend, Carmen, who sent me this amazing text message last week. She said part of her message said: your episode today is a great reminder to me as a mother trying to be patient and raise three young women to be salt and light in this world. P. S., I'm still trying to be salt and light too, lol. Yes, my friend, we are all learning how to be salt and light in this world and I am also raising three young women, one teenager and two young adults in college, and I know it's not easy. So, girl, you have my blessing. So I want to jump into today's quicker episode and talk a little bit about St. Patrick.

Michele: 1:24

So you may not realize this, but St. Patrick was actually born in Britain. He's British. He's not even Irish. Sorry if that's a letdown, and I don't think that his real name even was Patrick. I think his birth name was something else. But about age 16, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and sold into slavery in Ireland. So that's how he ended up in Ireland, and he was working as a shepherd, and during his captivity in slavery that's when he turned to Christ. He gave his life to Christ and he had this rich, deep prayer life, and so it's interesting, after about six years he escaped and he was reportedly guided by a vision from God that led him to a ship back to his family, but he was still connected to Ireland. He had a dream in which the Irish people called him back. So St. Patrick studied to become a priest and eventually he returned back to Ireland, this time not as a slave, as a missionary. So he was instrumental in spreading the faith all across Ireland. Many people were converted by his ministry. He established many churches in Ireland, and so legend has it that he used a shamrock to explain the concept of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit being three in one, although I'm not sure if there's any concrete evidence for that. So that might be a legend, so you can look that up and let me know.

Michele: 3:10

But there is a famous story of him driving the snakes all the snakes out of Ireland, which is fascinating, and he died on March 17th, probably in the year 461. So you know, it was quite a while ago, and so that date, March 17th, became St. Patrick's Feast Day. So that's today, and so, very interestingly, he is reputed as having raised 33 people from the dead, and one of the most fascinating resurrection stories involves a man who had been dead for many years, some accounts say as many as 100 years. So you know, imagine what this guy looked like when he was resurrected, or don't. But here's the story. So, as it goes, while St. Patrick was preaching in Ireland, he encountered a group of people who doubted the power of Christ and the power of resurrection. And so, to prove God's power, Patrick was led to a burial site where the man had been dead for generations. His body obviously was long since decayed, and so St. Patrick prayed, made the sign of the cross and, miraculously, this man was brought back to life. Pretty amazing and a lot more fascinating than green beer.

Michele: 4:52

Okay, and one of the most interesting things about St. Patrick is he wrote something called a lorica. Loricas were common in Celtic Christianity and it kind of reflected a worldview where spiritual warfare was very real and faith acted as a literal defense against that warfare. So a lorica L-O-R-I-C-A is a type of prayer or hymn that serves as like a spiritual protection, almost like a shield of faith. And so St. Patrick wrote a very famous lorica. Sometimes it's called St Patrick's Breastplate, and what I'm going to do is link for you in the show notes the Breastplate of St. Patrick that I made into a video on my YouTube channel. Watch that once or twice and let it get inside of you. And it starts like this: I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the threeness, through confession of the oneness of the Creator of creation.

Michele: 6:13

Imagine if you said St. Patrick's Breastplate every morning when you woke up for the next 30 days. Do you think that that would make a difference in your life? Do you think that would change the entire atmosphere going into your day? I think it's worth experimenting. So watch that video, check it out, let me know what you think. You can send me a text message if you click down in the show notes where it says Text Michele, you can send the show a text message and let me know what you think of St. Patrick's Breastplate. All right, that's what I got for you today. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and, if you did, you know what to do, raise 33 people from the dead and, when you're done with that, share this episode with a friend who might like to hear this story of St. Patrick. Have an awesome day and I will see you again tomorrow.