54. Early Christian Martyrs

The Early Christian

Martyrs

The Story of Saint Perpetua

Early Christian Martyrs Discourse

Friends are friends no matter what, right?

Well, you sure hope so. You hope that your friends won’t let you down when you need them most. You depend on them to not reveal your secrets or make fun of you in a mean way.

Friendships can feel really strong and easy to keep in good times. But the test of a friendship happens when, for some reason, we’re tempted to betray our friends. If we can stick out the temptation, we know that our friendship is real.

It’s good to remember that faith is a friendship—a close, trusting friendship with God. We’re loved, supported, and helped by God all day long. We tell him our troubles and our joys. You and God go through each day together, and he will be with you for the rest of your life. That's a friendship. That’s faith.

Sometimes you might be tempted to betray that friendship, just a little bit. You might be embarrassed to admit that you go to church or pray. You might think it wouldn’t be so bad to hurt someone else’s feelings—just this one time. You might stop reading the Bible or praying at night because you've got other things to do. You’re not the first to feel that way, you know. And you won’t be the last.

In fact, Christians have been tempted to betray their friendships with God ever since the beginning, in both big and small ways. And just like any friendship, every time we resist that temptation and stay faithful to that friendship, our faith grows stronger.

For the first three hundred years of Christianity, the followers of Jesus were under great pressure to betray their friendships with him. They lived in what was known as the Roman Empire, which extended from northern Africa all the way up to England at that time. For almost the entire period from A.D. 100 to 313, it was illegal to be a Christian in most of the Roman Empire.

Notes:

1. Every person in the Roman Empire was supposed to honor the Roman emperor as a god.

2. Christians refused to do this. They knew there was only one God, and to say anything anything else was a god was a betrayal of their friendship with God. 

3. When they stood true and when they refused to honor false gods or the emperor as a god, the Christians were put in jail, sent into exile, or forced to work in mines. Worst of all, if they still wouldn’t deny their friendship with Jesus, they were put to death.

4. The leaders of the Roman Empire did this because they really wanted to discourage others from following Christianity. 

5. They also wanted to provide entertainment for the ¬people of the empire. So when they executed Christians, they often did it in public, in the middle of huge crowds gathered in arenas.

6. These Christians are called martyrs,” a word that means “witnesses.” They’re called witnesses because that’s exactly what they were doing through their deaths

7. St. Lucy, St. Perpetua, St. Agnes, St. Agatha, St. Cecilia, St. Timothy, St. Maura, St. Marcellinus friendship with God was very, very deep.

8. Over the past two thousand years, many Christians have decided to die rather than betray their friendship with Jesus. Even today, Christians still suffer martyrdom in some countries.

Final Discourse.

Well, when you’re tempted to betray your faith—your friendship with God—remember that feeling. And remember the martyrs of early Christianity. Just imagine if they had all chosen to deny their friendship with God instead of staying true.

Would anyone else have bothered to even look into friendship with Jesus if the Christians had betrayed him? Would it have seemed worth living for, if it wasn’t worth dying for?