http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15193980/should-we-be-motivated-by-degrees-of-reward

My days were slow yet full. Feed the baby; change the diaper; do the dishes; replace the paci. Task by task, the day ticked by. I was thrilled to be a first-time mom, but these newborn days were filled with a monotony that appeared to lack eternal purpose. My desire was to raise little image-bearers who would glorify God and have hearts for the least of these. But where did discipleship fit with sleep schedules, bottle types, and swaddling?

In the midst of my discouragement, I received a liturgy written for changing diapers. These lines jumped off the page:

By love and serviceI am tending a budding heart that,rooted early in such grace-filled devotion,might one day be more readily inclinedto bow to your compassionate conviction. (Every Moment Holy, 1:53)

A spark was lit, and a new belief began to form. I was much nearer to tending a budding heart than I realized. The first twelve months of my daughter’s life were not just about keeping her alive, but about laying a foundation of faithfulness from which the rest of our family discipleship could rise.

Hard, High, Happy Calling

I know the late-afternoon dread that creeps over you because the night ahead may be filled with loneliness and void of deep rest. I have fought the irrational fear that refuses to budge no matter how many promises you throw at it. I have looked in the mirror and had the disorienting experience of not recognizing whom I saw. I have wrestled to make the right decision without finding peace. I get it. So isn’t adding the task of discipleship overcomplicating this already-fraught season of motherhood?

I want to squeeze your shoulders and say that intentional early discipleship will not make these struggles worse; instead, it will bring light and life. The imperative for parents is to make known God’s works to our children and our children’s children (Deuteronomy 4:9). Tell of his salvation, that he heard our cries for help, came down from heaven, and set us free from our bondage to sin so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord (Psalm 102:18–20). Go and make disciples (even little ones!) by teaching them to obey God’s word (Matthew 28:19–20).

What a high calling. One with eternal implications. When we keep this end in mind, the newborn challenges will bloom into moments of steadfastness and purpose (James 1:3–4). Will they still be hard? Yes, but we will be saved from much fruitless navel-gazing that leads only to more pain. We will be welcomed into a life of significance and joy even when our baby is strapped to our hip.

If you are a first-time mom, please know that this season does not have to drag by. The baby days, like the rest of motherhood, offer a space in which God can be magnified and enjoyed — right now by moms, and later (we pray) by our children. So, consider with me two ways that a mom can care for a baby’s body while attending to her (and her child’s) soul.

1. Stay active while still.

Shortly after my daughter was born, I was mourning how unproductive I felt while nursing. Hours of each day (and night), my body was still — and my mind mostly empty. I began to be convicted that seemingly boring moments like these were times to steward to the glory of God. Instead of gazing at my phone or worrying about the stage of my daughter’s development, I could speak with my heavenly Father. What a glorious way to spend my still moments!

The habit of prayer blesses our children; it also blesses us. Prayer is not a throwaway habit, only useful when we need something. It’s a privilege and a lifeline to praise and petition the God of the universe (Hebrews 4:16). We can spend these early days of our children’s lives training our souls to turn to our Maker in all of life’s moments. The result will be an anchored mother who glorifies God as she calls upon and happily submits to him (Hebrews 6:19).

Discipling our newborns begins here — with prayer. We can receive these mundane days as a good gift from our compassionate Father. He is giving us hours upon hours to learn to call out to him. And if we let it, this habit can shape our mothering for the rest of our days. No matter our child’s age, season, or proximity to us, praying will always tune our hearts to the melody of God’s goodness and sovereignty.

What a beautiful foundation we lay for our babies when we bathe their lives in prayer. What if, from their earliest moments, they saw and heard their momma crying out to God? They will see what it looks like to believe that God hears us (1 John 5:14), they will hear what it sounds like to believe that he revives the contrite heart (Isaiah 57:15), and they will rest in the comfort of a mother who does not fear anything that is frightening (1 Peter 3:6). For in the mundane stillness of motherhood, they have heard her cast all her anxieties on the Lord (1 Peter 5:7).

“Every sleepy step you take without grumbling glorifies God. Every bottle washed with prayerfulness glorifies God.”

If you are unsure of how to begin this spiritual discipline, may I encourage you to start with God’s words to us? I learned to pray Scripture from my mother, as I watched her faithfully pray Colossians 1:9–13 over our family for many years. I can testify that my own prayer life has been transformed by praying God’s word. It guides me away from the self-centered prayers that naturally come to my lips and pulls me up to pray with God at the center. Can I challenge you to start small? Try jotting Colossians 1:9 on a sticky note and putting it by your sink where you do dishes. Trust me, you will begin to see your prayer life grow.

2. See glory in tiny toes.

Jonathan Edwards believed that “the tiniest details in everything, from spiders and silkworms to rainbows and roses, all pour forth the knowledge about Christ and his ways” (Rejoicing in Christ, 25). Encouraged by his vision of seeing everything in the world as a pointer to God’s glory, I began to strain my eyes to see past my never-ending tasks to what I could learn about Christ. Soon, God was revealing his awesome character, no matter how trivial the moment or how hidden I felt. My thoughts began to change from stressing about how well my daughter slept to God-inspired awe.

Look with me at some examples of how the newborn days pour forth the knowledge of Christ (Psalm 19:2). The way her little hand grasps your finger can remind you of how we ourselves can grasp the mighty hand of our Father (Psalm 63:8). The first time he smiles, we can remember that as believers God has made his face to shine upon us (Numbers 6:25). And when our children cry out to communicate that they need us, we can remember that we are likewise able (and commanded) to make our requests known to our Lord (Philippians 4:5–7).

As mothers, we get the privilege of drawing our children’s attention to these realities from the earliest moments. Seeing and speaking about the glory of God — both in the world and in the gospel — will weave discipleship into the routines of family life. Before you know it, your little one will point to the sky and say, “God made that!” because she has been watching and listening to you enjoy the glory of Christ.

Fellowship of Discipling Moms

Every sleepy step you take without grumbling glorifies God. Every bottle washed with prayerfulness glorifies God. Every rock and bounce while you sing songs of praise glorifies God. Every tear you cry while you fight to rest in God’s providence glorifies him. Faithfulness to little souls is not wasted. It has the potential to bear fruit for generations.

As Christian mothers, we can model and call each other to this kind of joyful intentionality. I mourn the amount of time I wasted complaining about my newborn woes to other moms. Gospel friendship connected by shared experience disintegrated into discussions of whose baby slept the worst. But what if we lamented the pain, turned to the only one who can help, and then shared ideas for how to root our children (and ourselves) in the truth? Flooding the newborn days with discipleship would help us communally fight for obedience when we feel the impulse to grumble (Philippians 2:14). Imagine the ripple effects through our families and churches if our motherhood circles became think tanks for intentional discipleship!

Right now, you are laying kindling from which your little one’s faith may one day spark. Salvation is not ours to give, but we are tasked with the high and holy charge of discipling in such a way that makes God’s glorious character clear. My prayer is that we see a new generation of Christians whose whole life was built on knowing and loving God, even from the newborn days.

Of the multitude of feasts celebrated in the popular culture of medieval Europe — wherein lie some of the key roots of the modern West — only two remain in popular North American culture today: Saint Patrick’s Day (March 17) and Saint Valentine’s Day (February 14). With Saint Patrick, we have two important texts by Patrick himself that reveal the true man. But who was Saint Valentine?

The name was a popular one in the Roman world, for the adjective valens expressed the idea of being vigorous and robust. In fact, we know of about a dozen early Christians who bore this name. Our Saint Valentine was an Italian bishop who was martyred on February 14, 269, after a trial before the Roman emperor Claudius Gothicus (reign 268–270). According to the meager accounts that we have, Valentine’s body was hastily buried, but a few nights later some of his associates retrieved it and returned it to his home town of Terni in central Italy. Other accounts list him as an elder in Rome. One embellishment has him writing a letter before his death and signing it, “your Valentine.”

“Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life.”

What seems clear, though, from all that we can determine, is that Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life for his commitment to Christ. For Christians to adequately remember Saint Valentine, then, we would do well to consider what it meant to be a martyr in the early church.

Witnesses and Martyrs

Our word martyr is derived from the Greek martys, originally a juridical term that was used of a witness in a court of law. Such a person was one “who has direct knowledge or experience of certain persons, events or circumstances and is therefore in a position to speak out and does so.”1 In the New Testament, the term and its cognates are frequently applied to Christians, who bear witness to Christ, often in real courts of law, when his claims are disputed and their fidelity is tested by persecution.

The transition of this word within the early Christian communities from witness to what the English term martyr” entails serves as an excellent gauge of what was happening to Christians as they bore witness to Christ. In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the apostles that they are to be his “witnesses” (martyres) in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the end of the earth. At this point, the word does not have the association of death, although in Acts 22:20 we do read of the “blood of Stephen,” the Lord’s “witness” (Greek martyros), being shed. But it is really not until the end of the writing of the New Testament canon that the term martys acquires the association with death.2

At the very close of the apostolic era, the risen Christ in Revelation 2 commends his servant Antipas, his “faithful witness,” who was slain for his faith at Pergamum, “where Satan dwells” (Revelation 2:12–13). Pergamum, it should be noted, was a key center of emperor worship in Asia Minor, and the first town in that area to build a temple to a Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. It may well have been Antipas’s refusal to confess Caesar as Lord and worship him that led to his martyrdom.3 It has been estimated that by the mid-first century, eighty or so cities in Asia Minor had erected temples devoted to the cult of the emperor.4

The word martys seems thus to have acquired its future meaning first in the Christian communities in Asia Minor, where the violent encounter between church and empire was particularly intense.5 In this regard, it was certainly not fortuitous that Asia Minor was “unusually fond” of the violent entertainment of the gladiatorial shows. There was, in fact, a training school for gladiators at Pergamum. Along with fascination with such violence, there would have been a demand for victims over and above the requisite gladiators. Thus, recourse was had to Christians, among others.6

And so, the word martys became restricted in its usage to a single signification: bearing witness to the person and work of Christ to the point of death. Stephen and Antipas were the first of many such martyrs in the Roman Empire.

Neronian Persecution

One of the most memorable clashes between church and empire was what has come to be called the Neronian persecution. In mid-July 64, a fire began in the heart of Rome that raged out of control for nearly a week and gutted most of the city. After it had been extinguished, it was rumored that the emperor Nero (reign 54–68) himself had started it, for it was common knowledge that Nero wanted to level the capital of the empire in order to rebuild the city in a style in keeping with his conception of his own greatness. Conscious that he had to allay suspicions against him, Nero fixed the blame on the Christians.

The fullest description that we have of this violence against the church is from the Roman historian Tacitus (about 55–117), who describes the execution of these Christians as follows:

To scotch the rumour [that he had started the fire], Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor; and the pernicious superstition was checked for a short time, only to break out afresh, not only in Judaea, the home of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible and shameful things in the world collect and find a home.

First of all, those who confessed were arrested; then, on their information, a huge multitude was convicted, not so much on the ground of incendiarism as for hatred of the human race. Their execution was made a matter of sport: some were sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and savaged to death by dogs; others were fastened to crosses as living torches, to serve as lights when daylight failed. Nero made his gardens available for the show and held games in the Circus, mingling with the crowd or standing in his chariot in charioteer’s uniform. Hence, although the victims were criminals deserving the severest punishment, pity began to be felt for them because it seemed that they were being sacrificed to gratify one man’s lust for cruelty rather than for the public weal.7

A number of Christians — including the apostle Peter, according to an early Christian tradition that seems to be genuine8 — were arrested and executed. Their crime was ostensibly arson. Tacitus seems to doubt the reality of this accusation, though he does believe that Christians are rightly “loathed for their vices.” Tacitus’s text mentions only one vice explicitly: “hatred of the human race.” Why would Christians, who preached a message of divine love and who were commanded to love even their enemies, be accused of such a vice?

Well, if one looks at it through the eyes of Roman paganism, the logic seems irrefutable. It was, after all, the Roman gods who kept the empire secure. But the Christians refused to worship these gods — thus the charge of “atheism” that was sometimes leveled at them.9 Therefore, many of their pagan neighbors reasoned, they cannot love the emperor or the empire’s inhabitants. Christians thus were viewed as fundamentally anti-Roman and so a positive danger to the empire.10

‘Blood of Christians Is Seed’

This attack on the church was a turning-point in the relationship between the church and the Roman state in these early years. It set an important precedent. Christianity was now considered illegal, and over the next 140 years the Roman state had recourse to sporadic persecution of the church. It is noteworthy, though, that no emperor initiated an empire-wide persecution until the beginning of the third century, and that with Septimius Severus (reign 193–211).11 Nonetheless, martyrdom was a reality that believers had to constantly bear in mind during this period of the ancient church.

“Instead of stamping out Christianity, persecution often caused it to flourish.”

But persecution did not always have the effect the Romans hoped for. Instead of stamping out Christianity, persecution often caused it to flourish. As Tertullian (born about 155), the first Christian theologian to write in Latin, put it, “The more you mow us down, the more we grow: the blood of Christians is seed.”12 And as he said on another occasion: “whoever beholds such noble endurance [of the martyrs] will first, as though struck by some kind of uneasiness, be driven to enquire what is the matter in question, and, then, when he knows the truth, immediately follow the same way.”13

Surpassing All Earthly Loves

It was during the Middle Ages that the various stories of Saint Valentine circulated and were embellished, solidifying the remembrance of him as a martyr. But it was a medieval writer, Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s–1400), who explicitly linked romantic love to Saint Valentine in a poem entitled “Parliament of Fowls” that described the gathering of a group of birds on “seynt valentynes day” to choose their mates.

To what degree Chaucer influenced the later link between Saint Valentine’s Day and lovers is not exactly clear, but as early as the fifteenth century lovers were sending each other love notes on Saint Valentine’s Day. Of course, with the rise of the commercial cultures of the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this practice was commodified and became an important part of the commercial world we see today. There is nothing inherently wrong with modern commercial traditions, but Saint Valentine’s Day is a good day to also remember that there is a love that surpasses all earthly loves: our love for our great God and our Savior, his dear divine Son, Jesus.