Polycarp: The Old Man Who Would Not Burn Incense

The old man had eighty-six years behind him and a fire in front of him, and all he had to do to walk away was say a few words. He would not say them.

His name was Polycarp. He was the bishop of Smyrna, in what is now Turkey, and he was not a legend or a general or a king. He was an old pastor who had been discipled by the apostle John himself, a living link back to the men who walked with Jesus. Around the year 155, Rome came for him.

The demand was simple, and by Roman standards generous. Swear by the fortune of Caesar. Curse Christ. Do that, and go home. Nobody wanted to kill a harmless old man. They practically begged him to save himself. Just revile Christ, the proconsul told him, and you are released.

Polycarp gave the answer men have remembered for nearly nineteen hundred years: "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury. How then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?"

Eighty-six years. Maybe that was his age, maybe it was his years since he first followed Christ, the account leaves it open. Either way the point stands. A lifetime following a King who never once failed him, and they were asking him to spit on it at the finish line to buy a few more years. He would not. They threatened him with fire. He told them their fire burns for an hour and goes out, and they should be more afraid of the fire that does not.

So they burned him. And the church that watched him die wrote it down, and one detail should stop a man cold. Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna. And decades before, when the risen Christ dictated seven letters to seven churches, one was addressed to Smyrna, to Polycarp's own city, and it said this: "Do not fear what you are about to suffer... Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life" (Revelation 2:10). His church had been handed those words two generations before he died in it. Be faithful until death. And when death came for him with an easy way out attached, the old man did exactly what his King had told his city to do.

Here is why this matters to you. Nobody is going to ask you to burn incense to Caesar. Your test looks smaller and it comes every day. Say the thing to keep the job. Laugh at the joke so you are not the odd one out. Stay quiet when speaking up would cost you. The pinch of incense is smaller now. The question underneath it is exactly the same. Is Christ your King when it costs you something, or only when it is free.

Polycarp answered that with a fire at his feet at eighty-six. Most men never get a moment that dramatic. We get a thousand small ones instead. Stand your watch in the small ones, and you will not have to wonder what you would do in the big one. You will already know.