Beeson Podcast, Episode 415 Nik and Ruth Ripken October 23, 2018 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, your host, Timothy George. Kristen Padilla: Welcome to day's Beeson podcast. Well, if you're a regular listener of the podcast, you'll right away that I am not Timothy George, the host of the podcast. I'm Kristen Padilla, the producer of the Beeson podcast, filling in for Dr. George as he is away this week delivering some lectures. But I'm thrilled to be here to have a conversation with two guest, Nik and Ruth Ripken. Nik and Ruth with their three children served for more than 32 years sharing Jesus across the globe, and I would say are still sharing Jesus across the globe. They began with the Foreign Mission Board, an institution of the Southern Baptist convention, and now they're still serving with the same organization, but called the International Mission Board. And you may have heard of Nik Ripken, because of his book, The Insanity of God, a True Story of Faith Resurrected, which is what we hope to discuss today on the podcast. So, Nik and Ruth, welcome. Nik Ripken: Thank you. Ruth Ripken: Thank so much. Kristen Padilla: Now, Nik and Ruth are not your real names. I find that very interesting. I've never met someone who has gone by a different name. Why is that? Why did you change your name? Nik Ripken: Back in the early years in Somalia, there were just four of us working in country. So we were training a lot of people coming in for short periods of time. And so, once I trained a group of people on a certain subject, I would just write it down, and then I just started sending it in to Mission Magazines, and 100% of the things we've now for now 35 years has been printed. And because we're the only ones in Somalia, if that was published under our real names, our ability to work in country would have been jeopardized, believer's ability to live their lives out would be jeopardized, and so, I just asked the evangelical mission quarterly to pick a name for us, and they did. And later on, my supervisor said it sounded like a serial killer, so I said, "Well, that's probably really good." So we've operated under a pen name in the hard places since 19, man that almost gives my age. 1993, but even today, we can travel to the hard places under our real names with our passport whereas if it were Nik Ripken, a lot of the world would be shut out to us. Ruth Ripken: Yeah, and I think one of the really good things is God's wisdom in that. Because we don't want the stories of believers that have shared their stories with us to be in harm. And by doing this, God has blessed all these years, and as far as we know, no one has been hurt because of our presence. Kristen Padilla: And we are calling you Nik and Ruth Ripken while you are here, and I should tell our listeners that the Ripkens are here for our Go Global missions emphasis week, which we have every fall semester. It's put on by our global center, so we're really glad to have you as our guests. I would love for us to hear a little bit about your testimonies, your stories. Where you come from, how did you come to know the Lord, and how did God call you to missions? Nik Ripken: Well, as I said in the movie The Insanity of God, both Ruth and I are PKs. She's a pastor's kid, and I'm a pagan's kid. She can't remember not knowing Christ, but I found Christ working nights in a cheese factory. I was going to school, I think for a 14 weeks, my senior year. I worked from 7:00 at night to 3:30 in the morning, and it was in that factory working by myself, you know I had to drop out of sports, senior play, all those things that people look forward to, but if I was going to go to college, I had to save some money. And in that factory in the middle of the night, is when Jesus spoke directly to me. I knew almost nothing about the Bible, the Kingdom of God. I knew no church language, but three times having him speak to me in that factory at night. The third time I just, there was no doubt that this wasn't the voice of God demanding my life. Kristen Padilla: And I found that very intriguing when I was reading your book you described hearing a voice and looking around and not finding anyone. And then hearing it again, and it made me think of Samuel in scripture hearing the voice of the Lord calling him. So that's wonderful to hear how the Lord just spoke to you at a time when you really weren't searching for him. Nik Ripken: And I hate to say, it wasn't exciting. It wasn't this other worldly, oh, my sins have been forgiven, because all I knew were little country churches. I knew what my family said about churches and church people and pastors. And it was just routinely negative as it could be. And I felt by giving my life to Christ, that it was like a sentence of a terrible crime, because I'd be stuck in rural Kentucky all of my life. Never allowed out of rural Kentucky. So I had to say, "God, you're God and I can't deny that any longer, but why have you done this to me?" And now, last, two weeks ago I think we went to our 86th country. And so when I think back to that initial conversation with God, if there ever is laughter in heaven, there must have been a lot of laughter that day, knowing what was coming because I certainly did not know. Kristen Padilla: And so that changed your trajectory. You were headed to the University of Kentucky, but then you decided to go to a liberal arts Christian college. Nik Ripken: I wish it was my decision. The third pastor I went to that affirmed ... This is what God does, even today, because two other pastors wouldn't confirm it. And he said, "Sounds like to me, Nik, that you want to be full-time in the Gospel." And I said, I asked myself, "I can be part-time." And he's trying to explain what it meant to be full-time and I didn't get it, but he was the nearest thing I had to a spiritual mentor, and when he told me I had to go to a Baptist college to be a pastor, I didn't know how to get out of it. And so I went. Kristen Padilla: So you went. And that's where you met your wife, Ruth. Nik Ripken: And before that, my second week at college, I began to read the Bible for the first time, and I read in one sitting Genesis, I read in one sitting the book of Matthew. And when I got to what I now know as the Great Commission, and I read God's command, Jesus's command to go into all the world, I said, "Wow. I can get out of Kentucky." And that was, from then to now, my realizing Jesus's command to go to the nations was not debatable. What is negotiable is where, not if, and after 35 years of missions and all these countries later, I still believe it's God's command for every believer, and then we get to negotiate the call being where, for what season of life. Kristen Padilla: And so, Ruth, before you met Nik, at that college, tell us a little bit about your story. Nik said that you grew up as a pastor's kid. So did I. Ruth Ripken: Well, then you know this story, then. Kristen Padilla: Yes. Ruth Ripken: It was something that I loved, being a pastor's daughter. And as a third grader, that's when i began to feel God leading me to do missions. As a sixth grader when I wrote a paper about Africa, I said, "God, I want that to be in Africa." As a junior in college, I got to go to Africa. And all of that. Nik Ripken: I raised her money, by the way. So that she could go. Ruth Ripken: But all of that was woven in this deep heritage that I have as a pastor's daughter, where my parents taught me about missions. My dad brought missionaries in our home. My dad put a map of the world every morning on the breakfast table and we prayed over missionaries and where they were and what was happening. Nik Ripken: And my family didn't even have a map. Ruth Ripken: But when Nik and I got together, and we chose that this was our journey that we wanted to do together, we could see how God's hand had brought us through each step of this to allow our journey to merge and to head to the nations. Kristen Padilla: That's great. And so where in Africa did you first go? Ruth Ripken: We went to Malawi in east Africa first, and that's where I thought I would be the rest of my life, and as Nik and I began to see people come to Christ, people begging us to come to their village to bring Christ to their village, we began to experience malaria. And became very very sick. And so it was two years into Malawi that we were told, "You just can't stay here." And a dear friend said, "Remember serving God's not a matter of location, it's a matter of obedience." Nik Ripken: And Irish Catholic doctor came to me and said, "Nik, do you want to see Jesus?" And I thought, "Okay, that's not a normal question, but I know the answer." I said, "Of course." And he said, "If you don't get out of this country, you're going to see him in a couple weeks." So he called our mission headquarters and they gave us about three weeks to get out. And so, we were allowed to go back to America, or to go to South Africa where there was no malaria, so we went to South Africa for eight years and served in a black homeland under apartheid. That was a necessary stop for me. Because I was raised a complete racist. And under apartheid I saw what that did, not only to those outside the kingdom, but inside the kingdom. And it was a preparation for me to go to Somalia that was killing people, that are the same race of people, just racially 2% different and different clans, and yet racism was killing millions of people. Starving millions and killing hundreds of thousands. So I needed that piece to deal with my own heart. Kristen Padilla: Well let's go to Somalia. Your book, The Insanity of God, really begins, your story begins with a trip that you took to what you called Somaliland. Tell us about that trip. You described it as descending into Hell, which really caught my attention. Why were you going to Somaliland, and even give us some of the history of that country, Somalia. Nik Ripken: They told us it would take three to five years to get into Somalia. And the things is, doors are always closed if you're not ready to walk through them obediently. And so, two months after we started trying from Kenya, I got into Somaliland. Somaliland is the old British part of Somalia, and what we know as the other part, was the Italian part, and so in 1962 those two were brought together under the dictator Siad Barre, and then when the civil war came in the late 80s they split apart again. I want you to imagine, there was no mechanism for going in there, so we were just Somalis around in downtown Nairobi, making friends, having tea with them. And they told us to go out to Wilson Airport, which is just a tiny little airport that opened at dawn and closed before the night fell, and we would go out there at 4:00, 4:30, 5:00 in the morning, and I would just walk up to planes taking off, like with Red Cross on the side, or UNICEF on the side, and this one morning, I went up to a Red Cross plane, asked them where they are going, and they were filled with medicines and a little bit of food. They're saying, "We're going to Somaliland." And I said, "Can I go?" They said, "We always need help." So I walked over to the fence, and told my wife, "I'm going to go in." And she held me and prayed for me, and I got on a plane. Three hours, four hours later I landed in Somalia, into Somaliland. Kristen Padilla: Did you have any belongings with you? Nik Ripken: I had maybe two changes of clothes. If I'd known it, I'd at least taken a Snickers bar or something. A bottle of water. I don't think I took anything with me. Slept on the floor. I had heard there was an orphanage there, so I was going to go looking for that, but here was a city of 70,000 homes, only seven of them had roofs remaining. And everything was in past tense. The broken down taxi I rode into town into the city, would say, "There's where the Pepsi plant used to be. There's where a school used to be. There's where a hospital used to be." There was no food. We were finding 50 landmines a day, and it was just a place that I could imagine existed on Earth. After three nights, three days there, I was ready to quit. And I had to have another nighttime visit for God that spoke truth in my heart. That allowed me to make a decision to stay the course that defined the next eight years of our lives. Kristen Padilla: And, Ruth, what was that experience like for you? Your husband is in this country, and there's no cell phones, no email, so you're not hearing from him. And you have three sons. What was that like for you? Ruth Ripken: That is a question I'm asked a lot. And I try to think back. What was life like then? But we were so committed that this was what God wanted us to do- Nik Ripken: I think we should have been committed. Ruth Ripken: Maybe that's it, really. But I think we had such an urgency for the task, and we saw so much desperate need that it just seemed like whatever it took, we were going to do this. I think I, as Nik said, I prayed for him, I hugged him, and I walked back to the car and sat in the car, and I just said, "God, I don't know what we're doing, but you do, and we're going to walking obedience." And so praying your husband through these kinds of things became a real unifying thing for us. Even though we were in different countries and doing different things, but God certainly was very very close. Nik Ripken: But one of the lesson we learned that allows us to challenge the church, sending is harder than going. I'd rather go to Somalia 1000 times than send my wife in there once. Or send my kids in there. You know, we often ask young couples and singles, what's hardest, dying on a cross or sending your only son to die on the cross? And in the nature of God, you have both the Father who sends, and the son who dies. But if the church would just recognize the importance of sending, and the responsibility of sending, it would either transform them to the very core of their being, or they'll stop sending altogether because sending is much harder than going. And we were to learn that when we started sending scores of volunteers in there, and we became their prayer system, their support system, and they leaned on us. I don't know how she did what she did. I could not have sent her in there. Going was easy. Sending was tough. And that's what she did for eight years. Kristen Padilla: Well, you talk in your book about, I believe in the first chapter, about how things were very clear at the beginning of your call to ministry, the next steps you were to take, and now you're in a place that you describe as Hell, which I'd like you to talk about, why was it Hell, the separation from God, but it caused questions of belief. Describe those for us, this going from certainty as young man, to now, you're faced with ... You're in a new country in what you described as Hell, and now you have all of these new questions. Nik Ripken: That phrase in the book has been criticized, both in the book and in the movie. But, you know, Hell is the absence of God. And in all of those year in and around, most of the time in and out of Somalia. I never knew of more than 150 believers in Somalia out of 10 million people. And by the time we were kicked out of there, those 150 believers had been reduced to four. And in Somaliland at this time, I found three other believers from Europe, two nurses and a dingle man, but other than the four of us, at that time in the whole country, I did not know of any other believers in the whole place. And if, indeed, Hell is the absence of God and the presence of God, then Somaliland was the closest that I've ever been to anything like that. And I realized how sinful we as churches had been to allow a people group to go 2000 years without any Christian witness. And I remember coming back during one of those broken months trying to find anybody that could to help me to help us, and I went back to my seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and one of my mentors, professor there I was sort of whining to him all of things we were seeing, and he put his arms around me, and said, "Nik, why are you surprised when pagans act like pagans?" And he went on to say, "You should just be surprised when Christians act like pagans." But I've been struck over the years of what it's like to be perpetually in the Old Testament. Somalis today live in the Old Testament. And everything you read in the Old Testament is in present active tense there. And so, what we've discovered, the only way we can combat the reality of the Old Testament, and that Hellish like environment, is with a New Testament light. And yet still, those who are willing to go to places like Somalia are in the dozens, when we should be in our thousands. But still, not withstanding, the International Mission Board has made a great effort to change this, but still 70% plus of missionaries from across Christianity are in Christian countries. When you look at Afghanistan and you look at Syria and you look at Iraq and you look at Yemen and you look at Somalia, even today, these are the places where the church has ignored. And if you look at where, now this could be construed to be political, but it's not. But if we look where our military is dying by the thousands today, are exactly the exact places where the church has failed to go. And the cost in blood for being disobedient to going as we've been commanded is a thousand times more the cost of blood if we had been obedient because we know now what God does with blood shed in the name of Jesus Christ. And he multiplies that in lives. It's not the same when blood is shed for reasons other than who Jesus is. Kristen Padilla: Did either of you have a crisis of faith? Nik Ripken: Yeah, just because it was Tuesday, you know. I mean, I can't remember a day I didn't have a crisis of faith. But, the day they killed four of my best friends, I ask my guards to give me some space so I could walk in the rubble. What little you know of us already, you won't be surprised to know that Ruth every day has a quiet time with the Lord. I have a loud time. And I was having one of those loud times. And I just cried out to God, "Are you asleep? Are you not aware?" They had published a list of 150 names to be killed in two weeks in Somalia. And three of my guards were on that list, who were just very strong Muslims, but I was saying God, "If you don't wake up and do something, everything, everyone that loves you is going to be killed here." I crossed the line, I promise you I've never crossed it again, when I said to God, "These Somalis are not worthy of the blood of Jesus Christ." And God's Holy Spirit said to me, "Neither are you." And I said, "How dare you, to put me in the same boat as these killers." And I was reminded by God that I'd had complete access to the Kingdom of God for eight years, and I had denied his kingdom, I had criticized his body, his church, his bride. And God said, "Who should I, if I'm going to annihilate people, who should I annihilate first? A nation that's had access to Jesus for centuries and is increasingly turning their backs on me or should I wipe out a people group that's never had a chance to hear?" And that was the question the Holy Spirit put before me, and as a citizen of a certain country, that terrifies me. Kristen Padilla: What about you, Ruth? Ruth Ripken: Well, I think the crisis of faith came the day that our son died. I had always thought, you be obedient, you go to the mission field, and God's going to take care of all the things that might happen. And then the reality was that God uses things like that to show himself faithful. And it was on Easter Sunday morning, and so the thoughts of what God must have gone through the day that he saw Jesus on the cross was so real to me, and I think as I look back, I see God's hand through it all. But when you're walking through the desert, you don't see it and it takes time. God has been faithful. He has used those crisis times in our life. And as a result of that, we had a voice when we went to believers in persecution and said, when they asked us, "How did you know about us, how did you hear about us?" And we could talk about all those things that we do in the church in the West to remember them, then they wanted to know, how do you even understand what we're going through? And we could share the reality of our four friends being killed on one day, but also our son's death. Nik Ripken: And what's changed us forever, we, even standing in the room in which our son died. I was saying to God, "Why not me? Why do I still have a wife that's not been molested eight or 10 times? Why do I still have two living sons?" Most of our Christian world want to ask why me, Lord? And we flipped that. God has flipped that. Why not me? Why do I have two living kids? Why do I have a home that functions? Why do I have a country that functions? Why do I have the favor of God? A lot of people around us seem to say, "well, somehow because we're a certain race of people from a certain country. We deserve God's grace." No. We deserve hell. We deserve God's fist, not God's son. And so, I think what God has really erased from our souls is any sense that God owes us anything. And that we owe him everything. Kristen Padilla: What are some other lessons that the two of you learned from Christians who are suffering that you think Christians in the United States, especially need to hear and be reminded of. Nik Ripken: That persecution is normal. It's like the sun coming up. It was normal in the Bible. It's normal today. Where there is a great witness, where there is a great harvest, there's a great persecution. Where there's little witness, little harvest, little persecution, and the question we in the west should be asking is not why are those people persecuted, why are we not? And it's not because we have a better government. It's not because we have a better brand of Christianity. It's because we have a anemic witness. Why would Satan have to use persecution to wake us up when he's already shut us up? Ruth Ripken: I think another lesson that has been big in my life is that there's no such thing as a church in freedom and a church in persecution. There's just the church. And believers in persecution remind us constantly that we are a body. And no part of the body knows everything about being a follower of Jesus. But if you put the whole body, globally, we do know how to be a follower of Jesus. Nik Ripken: So we get to connect the dots. Ruth Ripken: And that's been exciting for us. And what they remind us of is there's parts of your body that you don't ever see. Your lungs, your heart, your brain. All those things. But we do see our hands, and our feet and our eyes. But they say, remember that you can't do without those parts of the body that you can't see. And that helps me everyday to remember how to pray for believers in persecution. So that we can hold up their arms, because they cannot survive without this part of the body that we're in. And we should be aware that we can't survive without them. Nik Ripken: Normal Christianity is persecuted. It's estimated that 70% of everyone practicing their faith lives in environments of persecution. So if you want normal Christianity, you go to China. You go to parts of India. You go to those believers in Islam from Communist background, Buddhist background, and they remind us that everything that God has ever done in the Bible, God's still doing. We don't serve a past tense God. If you do, stay home. If you don't, then the world is your place to serve. Kristen Padilla: Tell us about a term that you coined, "heartsong." What is that? What is the story behind that word? Nik Ripken: I wish I could take credit for that. But I was with a pastor, we call him Dmitri in the book, actually, he was an engineer. But he was in a Russian prison for 17 years, and he talked about how every morning he stood at attention by his bed in this little cell, faced the east, and he raised his arms in praise, and he sang his heartsong to Jesus. And we didn't know it at that time, but we would find consistently that those who live the resurrection and persecution, they have their heartsongs that they sing to Jesus. No believer in persecution, when we asked them, "What helped you to grow, what kept you strong?" said, "I remember a sermon that I heard." Or "that I preached." None of them did. 100% of them, usually singing God's word back to him, is what they call their heartsongs. And they might have had maybe 90% of the songs beaten out of them. But there's always those songs that are chiseled on the walls of their soul that even death does not erase those. Kristen Padilla: Would you like to add anything to that, Ruth? Ruth Ripken: Well, I think it's been fun to get to go to these believers and Nik with say, at the end of the interviews, or discussions, or whatever we're having with them, "Would you sing me one of your heartsongs?" And- Nik Ripken: They'll look at me like I'm asking them for their firstborn. Ruth Ripken: But they'll usually stand up, very shakily, and they'll start singing that heartsong, and even though we can't understand the words, you can sure see in their face, they're totally connected with glorifying God in that situation. Nik Ripken: I sat with Constantine in one of the Eastern European places, and he was put in prison, he was part of a charismatic movement within the Orthodox church in his country, and at that time, they're singing Western hymns. And singing them in a very unexciting way, just not a lot of heart in that. And while he was in prison, he wrote 600 songs, choruses, hymns, praise songs. And today if you go to his country, they're singing, in the Orthodox church, his prison music. And I got to sit with him, he was 83 years of age when I caught up with him, his wife's already dead, and I asked Constantine, "Would you sing me one of those songs that you wrote in prison?" And he stands up, and he's trembling, because of his age, but then it's just like I was sitting in the presence of one of God's angels as he sang one of those songs that he'd written in prison that all over Eastern Europe they're singing now. Those are songs that will have an eternal nature to them. Kristen Padilla: Well, we're almost out of time, but let me ask you one more question. Why did you write this book, and what do you hope it will continue to accomplish? What is your prayer how God will use this book? Nik Ripken: What the persecutors do is they get you, put you in jail, put you under house arrest with seven kids for the same amount of time that your husband or brother or sister is in prison, and they tell you, "Your story is going to die in this cell." Or "In this house." Or "in this hole in the ground." Or wherever they have you. And what we wanted to do with this book is give them their voice back. And I called one of the main characters, the guy who'd been in prison for 17 years, not too many months ago I heard he had died, and his son said, "No," got back to me through the internet. Said, "Dad's still alive. But he's an old man now. He's in his upper 80s and he's so, hurts every morning because of the broken bones he has and the beating he had in prison," but he said, "Dad wakes up every morning smiling, knowing that his story didn't die in that prison cell. That his story and his song has gone to bless Christians all over the world and to help them have courage." And I'm smiling and rejoicing because the book and the movie's had that kind of effect. But his son said, before I could hang up, he said, "Nik, I need to tell you something else." He said, "I'm now the chaplain of the prison that held my father for 17 years." See, another reason for writing The Insanity of God is to point people back to the Bible and to let them know that there is an eternal component to their suffering when it's for who Jesus is, and that people will be telling our stories for centuries to come if we live full out, sacrifice, give our lives a living sacrifice for Christ, holy and acceptable unto him, then maybe my children and my children's children's children will be singing my story the same way that Dmitri's kids are singing his story. Kristen Padilla: Well, our guests today on the Beeson podcast have been Nik and Ruth Ripken. Nik is the author of a book called The Insanity of God, A True Story of Faith Resurrected, published by B and H. You can get the book on Amazon, and if they wanted to see the movie, how could our listeners watch The Insanity of God movie? Ruth Ripken: They can also go to Lifeway Films website, and it's right there where they can access it. Kristen Padilla: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Nik Ripken: It's been a real pleasure. Ruth Ripken: Thanks so much. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast, with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.