Eighty-Six Years of Refuge

When Roman authorities dragged the elderly bishop Polycarp before the proconsul in Smyrna around 155 AD, they offered him a simple bargain: curse Christ and walk free. Polycarp, now in his eighties, had been a disciple of the Apostle John himself. He had learned to pray at John's knee as a young boy, had watched his mentor's weathered hands break bread, had absorbed a faith that ran marrow-deep.

The proconsul pressed harder. "Swear by Caesar. Revile Christ, and I will release you."

Polycarp's reply has echoed through nearly two thousand years of church history: "Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?"

Eighty-six years. Not a faith picked up in middle age or discovered in crisis, but a trust woven into the very fabric of his life from boyhood. Through persecution, through the loss of friends to martyrdom, through decades of shepherding a church under the shadow of empire, the Almighty had been his refuge. Every single year.

That is the testimony of Psalm 71. "From birth I have relied on You," the psalmist declares. "You brought me forth from my mother's womb." This is not fair-weather faith. It is the deep, settled confidence of someone who has leaned on God so long that trusting Him has become as natural as breathing — and who, even in old age, finds that the refuge has never once failed.