Polycarp was the Bishop of Smyrna (Izmir, Turkey) in Asia Minor. He lived from about AD 70 to 155. Tensions had risen between the Christians and those who venerated Caesar. The Christians were called atheists because they refused to worship any of the Roman gods and had no images or shrines of their own.

At one point, a mob cried out, “Away with the atheists; let search be made of Polycarp.” At a cottage outside the city, he remained in prayer and did not flee. The authorities sought him, and he was betrayed to them by one of his servants under torture. In the town of Smyrna, the sheriff met him and took him into his carriage and tried to persuade him to deny Christ: “Now what harm is there in saying ‘Lord Caesar,’ and in offering incense . . . and thus saving yourself?” He answered, “I do not intend to do what you advise.”

Angered, they hastened him to the stadium, where there was a great tumult. The proconsul tried again to persuade him to save himself: “Have respect to thine age. . . . Swear by the genius of Caesar. . . . Repent. . . . Swear, and I will release thee; curse the Christ.” To this, Polycarp gave his most famous response: “Eighty and six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my king who saved me?”

And they killed him.

Outside the Bible, these words are among my favorite: “Eighty and six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my king who saved me?”

He Has Done Us No Wrong

Neither you nor I have quite reached the 86-year mark, though I am getting close. A little over seven years to go. But these words, I think, are the kinds of words that you and I want to speak when we come to milestones like forty years of pastoral ministry. We want to say, “Forty years have I served him among his people, and he has done me no wrong. How then could I ever blaspheme my king who saved me?”

Surely, when Polycarp said, “He has done me no wrong,” he meant,

At every turn of my life, in every crisis of my life, in every heartache and loss and frustration and perplexity of my life, he has never failed me. He has always provided what I needed. He has never treated me badly. He has always been for me and not against me. He has chastised me with a father’s care. In all his painful, disciplinary love to me, he has never looked upon me with contempt. He has dealt with me, even in the most painful seasons, as the son in whom he delights. He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my king who saved me?

“Who saved me”! He was about to be burned at the stake. What did he mean by that? He saved me? He saved me, but he will let me be burned? It did not enter Polycarp’s mind that being burned at the stake was a failure of God to save him. Why is that? Because he loved, and you love, and I love, the great reality of Christian salvation by Jesus Christ not from death but through death — the great Reformation discovery in the Bible that we are saved by God’s sovereign grace from start to finish, eternity to eternity.

He chose you, Gregg, before the foundation of the world. He predestined you for sonship and likeness to Christ. He died for you, bearing all your sin and punishment. He rose from the dead for you. He took your condemnation. He called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. He caused your new birth. He gave you the gift of saving faith. He forgave all your sins. He adopted you as a son forever. He guards you and sustains you and keeps you. He is sanctifying you. He will perfect you and present you blameless before the presence of his glory. And he will bring you finally and forever to God, where there is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. This is his work. He saved you.

And whatever contribution you make to this salvation in the obedience of faith, it is not you but the grace of God working in you what is pleasing in his sight so that your salvation, from start to finish, from eternity to eternity, is radiant with the glory of his sovereign grace. “Forty years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my king who saved me — right through death?”

He has done you no wrong. He has done me no wrong. Nor will he ever. He has only done us good.

Stories of His Goodness

We believe that glorious promise that God works all things together for our good because we are called and because we love him (Romans 8:28). And some of the good that he has done to us, Gregg, he has done to us together. I suppose I wouldn’t be here if God had not significantly woven our lives together, especially in those early formative years (1980–1984 and beyond). It was formative for you as a seminary student and formative for me as a brand-new, green pastor at Bethlehem.

1. Wrestling with Scripture

My journal from February 7, 1981, says,

I meet fortnightly with the interns, Tom Steller, Dave Shelley, Gregg Heinsch, and Gene Ohman to discuss our ministry and read our Greek text together. The problem that emerged last time was how anxiety can be prohibited as, for example, in Matthew 6:25 and Philippians 4:6 and yet Paul refers (in 2 Corinthians 11:28), evidently with no remorse, to his “anxiety for all the churches.”

Such things we wrestled with together with our Greek text in front of us: What is holy anxiety?

2. Teaching and Church Planting

That same February, you were called as intern for our junior-high ministry. Thinking back on it, I couldn’t help but remember that I cut my teeth during my own seminary days teaching seventh-grade boys for one year, and then ninth-grade boys for another year, and then I graduated to teaching an adult young-marriage class. You served faithfully and effectively with us till God called you to plant Faith Community Church in Hudson, about thirty miles east, in 1984, where you served a growing, healthy church for twenty years.

3. Watching Life and Ministry

That summer (1984), you gave me the privilege to speak at your ordination service. The text was 1 Timothy 4:16: “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.” You have obeyed that for forty years and, oh, how many people have been saved from making shipwreck of their faith because of it.

4. Starting a Prayer Movement

About six years into your pastoral work in Hudson, we linked arms with others like Dana Olson in seeking to support and spread the prayer movement of those days. I wrote in my journal on July 4, 1990,

Dana and Christa came in today and gave us a report on the annual meeting of the BGC. I don’t think I missed too much, except that he said Gregg Heinsch, who spoke at the day of prayer, was very powerful and that I would have loved it.

5. Conducting a Wedding

During those years of your ministry in Hudson, God wove you into the life of one of those early junior-high students more deeply, and you performed the wedding of one of my sons in May of 1995.

6. Fighting Theological Battles

We fought some battles together. When open theism was pressing into the life of our conference, we took a stand that said this view (that God does not have exhaustive knowledge of all future events) is outside of biblical orthodoxy and should not characterize the pastors of our churches or the faculty of our school. About fifty pastors gathered in February, 2000, to establish the Edgren Fellowship, named after one of the founders of Converge. We adopted a constitution and voted on an executive council: Carey Olson, Brent Nelson, Gregg Heinsch, and Bob Buchanan. I am deeply thankful to this day for your partnership in that battle for the truth.

7. Recommending a Pastoral Candidate

You grew to be an esteemed and competent and faithful pastor in Hudson so that, in 2003, when Grace Church in the Twin Cities was seeking a new pastor, I was asked if I could recommend someone. Here’s what I wrote to their committee in February 2003:

Greatness is different than the world realizes, as you know. So, it will be crucial that you find a radically counter-cultural, Bible-saturated, God-centered, Christ-exalting, truth-driven, doctrine-admiring, people-loving, heaven-cherishing, self-effacing, broken-hearted, bold man.

I will mention two names.

Gregg Heinsch, the pastor of Faith Community Church in Hudson. Gregg worked with us in the early 80s and has gone on to build a church of a thousand or so and plant four churches. He mingles true, God-centered biblical theology with an incredibly winsome and humble demeanor. A rare find. I will faint if he even considers leaving Hudson. But he is the kind of person I would love to see at Grace.

That didn’t happen, and I’m sure that everyone in this room is glad it didn’t. Because God called you here instead. And what a blessing it has been.

Three Truths for the Last Season

So, looking back on all these ways that God has woven our lives together, we don’t just say individually, but together, “All these decades we have served him, and he has done us no wrong; how then can we blaspheme our king who saved us?”

“Knowing Jesus Christ is more precious than anything this world has to offer.”

Polycarp said that just hours before he was put to death for Christ’s sake. So, he said it knowing that he was about to die. He said it knowing that Christ would not save him from death. But he said it anyway: “He has done me no wrong. And in letting me die in the flames, he will do me no wrong.” How can he talk like that? How can you and I, Gregg, talk like that as we face the last season of our lives?

Polycarp, and you and I, can talk like this because we know three great truths from the Bible.

1. The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life.

The first is found in Psalm 63:1–3:

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
     my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
     as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
So, I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
     beholding your power and glory.
Because your steadfast love is better than life,
     my lips will praise you.

The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life. This means that if the Lord takes our life, he does not take what is best. The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life, which means that you and I are destined for something better than staying alive — infinitely better. What a way to live out our days. We do not need to be afraid of death. Death does not rob us of what is best for us. We will be loved beyond death. We will be conscious of being loved beyond death.

And to be loved by an infinitely wise, infinitely powerful, infinitely good, and infinitely rich God is the best possible eternity anyone can imagine. That’s why Psalm 16:11 says, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life because it is the spring of all life, all good, all joy, and all pleasure.

This hope frees us (does it not, Gregg?) from all prudential calculations for how to hedge ourselves about with protections and securities and comforts, and it catapults us, with a kind of risk-taking abandon, into a season of ministry that could be the most fruitful of our lives. Our king will do us no wrong, not even in the hour of our death, and we know it because the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life.

2. Knowing Jesus is more precious than anything in this world.

The second great truth that we know from the Bible is that, if the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life, then when that steadfast love appears in the person of Jesus Christ, we know that he must be more precious than anything life has to offer. If the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life, then the incarnation of that love in Jesus Christ, and the demonstration of that love in the death of Jesus Christ, is more valuable than all the treasures and accolades of earth. Here’s the way Paul said it:

Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ. (Philippians 3:7–8)

This is Paul’s way of saying, “The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life.” For Paul, Jesus Christ is the greatest manifestation of the steadfast love of the Lord. You can hear it in the words of Titus 3:4–5, “When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy.” Jesus is the goodness, loving kindness, and steadfast love of God. To be in him is to be in the love of God. To be in him is to have the unsearchable riches of the glory of God.

That’s why we sing,

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
     Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
     High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

Compared to the high king of heaven, everything this world offers is rubbish.

I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold;
     I’d rather be His than have riches untold;
I’d rather have Jesus than houses or lands;
     I’d rather be led by His nail-pierced hand.

Than to be the king of a vast domain
     Or be held in sin’s dread sway.
I’d rather have Jesus than anything
     This world affords today.

Greg, you and Heidi have Jesus. Therefore, you have everything — everything that is good for you. That’s why you can talk like Polycarp in your sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties. “Forty years have we served him, and he has done us no wrong; how then can we blaspheme our king who saved us?” And he will save you. And he will do you no wrong, but only good.

3. Our lives are precious only in the service of God’s steadfast love.

There is one more great truth from the Bible that will help you be like Polycarp in the days ahead. The truth is that your life is only precious in the service of this steadfast love of God in Christ. Someday you will say farewell to your pastoral role at Celebration Community Church, just like Paul said farewell to the elders of Ephesus. He said in Acts 20:24 what you can say:

I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.

The grace of God is the steadfast love of God. The gospel of the grace of God is the good news of God’s love for sinners. This is what gives our remaining life value: trusting this love, cherishing this love, magnifying this love, enjoying this love — testifying to the steadfast love of God.

1. The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life.
2. Knowing Jesus Christ is more precious than anything this world has to offer.
3. Our lives are precious only in the service of the steadfast love of God.

Because these things are true, you and Heidi and I may speak like Polycarp: “Eighty and six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my king who saved me?”

“Forty years have we served him [twenty at Faith, twenty at Celebration], and he has done us no wrong; how then can we blaspheme our king who saved us?”