As a follower of Jesus, do you see your life as expendable or defendable? Are you defending your freedom to avoid persecution or willingly laying it all on the line for those who have never heard of Jesus? In this interview, author and former missionary Nik Ripken explains what bold faith looks like. Serving in some of the most dangerous countries in the world as well as losing one of his sons on the mission field, Nik has seen unimaginable tragedy. However, he has also seen how faith can radically transform people's lives, even in the darkest places of the world. Our God doesn't call us to play it safe; He commands us to make disciples of all nations. Yet, no matter where we go, He is always with us. With that in mind, what would radical obedience to Jesus look like in your life?
Continue reading for highlights from this conversation, or watch the full interview below.
Nik, tell us about beginning your life in ministry.
Well, my wife and I are both PKs. She's a pastor's kid, and I'm a pagan's kid. My wife knew Jesus probably when she was 6 years of age. At 9, she met a missionary from China, and that's all she's ever wanted to do.
I grew up in a construction farming family, no access to the gospel in the Bible Belt because no one thought we were worthy of a witness. I had a very tough growing up. My dad came and got me off the baseball field my senior year and said, “Son, I got good news and bad news.” I said, “What's the good news?” When he put me in the pickup truck, he said, “Well, the job you applied for in the factory, you got it. So you're going to be able to save enough money to go at least your first semester of college,” and I would be the second one in the history of my family to go further than high school. And I said, “What's the bad news?” He said, “You start tonight in the factory.” I said, “Dad, I have 11 weeks of high school left.” He said, “Don't be stupid. Of course, I know that. Do you want to go to college or not?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “You start tonight.”
So I worked from 7 p.m. to 3:30 in the morning. I never missed a day of high school. I did go to sleep one day in my 8 o'clock class and woke up in the 3:30 class with a different class. The teacher never turned the light on and said, “If you wake Nik up, I will fail you,” because they knew how hard I was working.
I was working by myself. The nearest person was probably 50 or 100 yards away. But Jesus hunted me down, and I gave my life to Him in that factory. In a period of 45 minutes, three times, I heard someone say, “Nik, are you tired of running? Are you ready to follow Me?” And I thought somebody had snuck up behind me. So the second time that happened, about 30 minutes later, I was ready to turn quicker. No one was there. The third time, I kneeled in that factory and gave my life to Christ. So that's how I started my walk with him.
The next day, between school and factory, I went to two of the biggest churches, where I didn't know the pastor, and said, “Here's what's happened to me.” So the first two pastors told me I was not a Christian because God does not speak directly to people in these days. He has ceased doing that. Now, I'm really messing with the theological world. And so, they told me I was not yet a Christian—that you can only come to Christ through the preaching of the Word and through the Bible. And so, I found a young pastor who really invested in me and said, “I want you to read a chapter in the Old Testament and a chapter in the New Testament.” And I asked him, “What's the Old Testament, and what's the New Testament?” He said, “Well, let's start at the beginning.” And so, when I read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and earth (Genesis 1:1),” I couldn't breathe. I got goose bumps all over my body. I did not know where that came from I think even now, jumping ahead to places like Somalia and things that we've done that we sort of pioneered, it's always in my heart that, in the beginning, God created, and He still is. He's always creating and He's always bringing new opportunities and teaching you new things. And so, in a nutshell, that's my story and my wife's story.
You have been in ministry for 40 years, traveled the world, and founded your own ministry. You have lived with extraordinary purpose. Was that always inside of you, or was that a work of the Lord in your life?
From the first time I read Matthew 28, and Jesus said to go, I saw that as the command it was. I said, “I can get out of rural Kentucky. Just let me go.” But I didn't know anybody that had done that. I think just the way God created me was that I have endless curiosity and a need to know. And then you add the imperative of the Great Commission, then I get to do this anywhere God will let me in the Earth.
See, if you are a follower in Christ, you don't get a choice of whether you go or not. That's the command. People come to me all the time and say, “I would do what you're doing and what your family's doing if only God would call me.” I say, “Read Matthew 28. He's commanded you. Is it Jerusalem? Is it Judea? Is it Samaria? Is it the ends of the Earth?”
Tell us about your time on the mission field and the loss you experienced.
We had been in Somalia for almost seven years. Timothy, our middle son, woke his mom up. He hadn't had an asthma attack for a year. But he woke her up at 1:30 on Easter Sunday morning, and then she came and got me, and I heard him. And I knew this was deadly, so I didn't even let her get her clothes on. I just picked Tim up, put him in the car, and started toward a children's hospital that was halfway decent. And along the way, his heart stopped, and he stopped breathing.
There was this one shopping center. Now, it's closer to 3 a.m. in the morning, and the gates open on that shopping center, and a car pulls out. So I pull over and pull in front of it, and an Asian guy jumps out. I quickly told him what happened, and he got in the front and drove the vehicle, and I got in the back and did CPR on my son and got him breathing again, his heart going. We got to the hospital, and that guy dropped us off. I don't know where he went. I don't know how he got where he was. God put this angel in the road that night to get us to the hospital.
I called my wife, and she came with our oldest son. I called our best friend in Somalia, and he came. And about 45 minutes after they got there, we went upstairs, and he had just died. I've got our youngest son next to me, and our oldest son next to me, and I've got my arms around them. By the time our youngest was 18, he'd been to 18 countries. I'd never left Kentucky until I was 18. I said, “Boys, I've jerked you around to different countries, in different languages, and you've had to bury your brother. Along the way, if I've done anything to hurt you, or if you've got stuff stored up over every place I've drug you around, I just want to be able to be forgiven for that.” And my two boys wept, put their arms around me and said, “Dad, the greatest life a kid could ever have is the one that we had growing up in Africa. Don't ever let us regret that.”
I think if I knew the hell that I was flying into, I probably wouldn't have gotten on the plane. On my third night, I told God I was done. Because everything was in past tense. People in Somalia would say, “Here's where a Pepsi plant used to be. Here's where a school used to be. Here's where a hospital used to be. Here's where a store used to be.” If you were lucky, you could go to the market and buy some gristle off of a goat to boil. I was hearing about 35-plus landmines going off a day by some animals stepping on it or, usually, some kid. We were burying 20 kids a day. I had fathers come out of the bush, and I'd say, “What do you need? Do you need water? I've got water. I've got food. I've got medicine. I can plow your ground. We can dig wells.” He said, they raped and they killed my daughters and wife in front of me, and they left me alive as the worst punishment. And I have no one to talk to. I have no one to tell my story. Sit here on this pile of rubble, and let me tell you my story.”
And I sat there for four hours, and he tells his story, and his story matters to someone. It's like his humanity descended upon him, and he became a person again. And a woman would say, “They killed my husband, they killed my sons, my daughters.” And before they let me give them a glass of water, she would say, “Can I tell you my story?” And she'd tell me all of that story for hours. Again, it's just like her personhood came back because someone cared enough to listen to her story. And really, that is the foundation of witness—listening and finding out their brokenness, their pain, their aspirations, and discovering what God's already doing in their lives and building on that.
I loved telling people the story from Luke 15. I'd tell them to imagine a man had 100 camels, cattle, sheep, or goats, and he finds one is missing. And he leaves the 99, and he went looking for that one sheep, goat, camel, cow. They would look at me and say, “That is the dumbest story we've ever heard. If one of our young men or young women left the sheep, left the 99, to go looking for one, they can walk off a cliff, or somebody could steal them. We would take the life of the person that went after the one and left the 99.”
See, the church has refused to deal with that story that those of us who are in Christ, we're expendable for that one lost al-Qaeda, that one Taliban family, that Muslim family, that Buddhist family, that Hindu family. We're expendable by God for the sake of other's salvation. Now, that's an expendable that I can buy into. We can't imagine that God would allow 99 Christians to perish so that that one Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese can be found. But that's the essence of the Bible. We have eternal life. It doesn't matter what they do to us. We, who have experienced the grace of Jesus Christ, are expendable.
What would you say to someone who grew up in a Western church culture and hasn't experienced what you have?
What Ruth and I can say—after being in the countries that we have and being New Testament people in the Old Testament world—is that everything that God has done in the Old and New Testament, God is still doing. Perhaps you have to go to the edge of lostness where God is doing this in order to witness it. I think God is doing different miracles in our midsts, but because we have the freedom to embrace the gospel without persecution, the freedom to gather together, the freedom to have all these multiple translations of the Bible, to have it on radio, on TV, we don't even cross the street to Old Testament people that don't believe.
For me, it just seemed like a no-brainer because that's what Jesus did. Why wouldn't I want to be like him? In Matthew 10, it talks about being sheep among wolves. We have so organized ourselves as Christians that we're just with Christians.
What do you say to the person in church who is facing obstacles to sharing the gospel?
Cross the street and have lost people in your home and have meals with them in their home. My wife does. When she goes to Walmart and she meets Muslim women, she'll just go up and down the international aisle and pick up the couscous. She's cooked that many times, but a Muslim woman walks by, and my wife will say, “I wonder how you cook this?” And that Muslim woman will say, “I know how to cook this. I cook this every day. Come, get in my car. We'll go to my house, and I'll show you how to cook this.” And she leaves her cart in the grocery store.
My wife shared this: It's not brain surgery, it's heart surgery. The No. 1 tool of Satan is fear. The No. 2 tool is fear, the No. 3 tool is fear. And God casts out all fear. We're afraid of our fear. And so, we have to try to get a grasp on what we're afraid of and then fight through that and just find the absolute joy of finding those lost sheep. When you go and have meals in people's homes and have them in your homes, all the temperature comes down. The barriers come down.
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