In this conversation, I sit down with Nik Ripken to talk about missions, persecution, and what it actually means to follow Jesus when following Him costs you something.

Nik has spent decades working among believers in some of the hardest places in the world, and he shares stories from places like Somalia and North Korea that challenge many of the assumptions we have about discipleship in the West. These aren’t simply inspiring stories about Christians somewhere else. They force us to ask some uncomfortable questions about our own faith, our understanding of blessing, and how much our comfort has shaped what we think the Christian life is supposed to look like.

One of the central ideas Nik presses home is that the mission of God is not determined by governments, borders, or whether a country gives Christians permission to share their faith. Our freedom to tell others about Jesus doesn’t ultimately come from a government. It comes from Christ. The question is whether we are willing to obey Him.

That raises another difficult question: Have we confused comfort with blessing?

We tend to assume that when life is going well, God must be blessing us, and when life becomes difficult, something has gone wrong. But when you listen to the stories of persecuted believers around the world, that assumption becomes much harder to maintain. In many of the places where following Jesus costs the most, the church is demonstrating a depth of faith, courage, and dependence on God that should cause those of us in the West to pay attention.

Maybe we have as much to learn from the persecuted church as we have to teach.

This conversation is about more than persecution. It is about discipleship. It is about obedience. And ultimately, it is about whether we really believe that the mission of God belongs to all of us—not simply missionaries who go somewhere else.

Nik’s stories challenge us to reconsider what it means to follow Jesus, what we call blessing, and whether the comforts we have worked so hard to protect might actually be keeping us from experiencing the kind of faith Jesus calls us to.

What does it mean to follow Christ when following Him costs you something?

And what might the persecuted church have to teach the rest of us about following Jesus?

Takeaways:

• The freedom to share one's faith transcends political boundaries, emphasizing that obedience to God is paramount in all contexts.
• Experiencing the Gospel in radically different cultures exposes our complacency and challenges our understanding of faith.
• Understanding church history and the experiences of believers in persecution enriches our perspective on the Gospel's impact today.
• The mission of God encompasses all of life; it is about both the tasks we accomplish and the transformation we undergo in the process.
• Learning from believers who suffer for their faith can provide profound insights into the nature of true discipleship and sacrifice.
• The stories of those who have endured persecution illuminate the eternal truths of the Gospel and challenge our Western perspectives on comfort and blessing.

Keep up with updates from Apollos Watered: The Center for Discipleship & Cultural Apologetics.

Get Travis's book Blueprint: Kingdom Living in the Modern World.

Join Travis's Substack, Deep Roots Society.

Help support the ministry of Apollos Watered and transform your world today!

Today's episode is brought to you by the Bodine family.

May the Lord our God grant you victory against the kingdom of darkness.

You are as free today to share Jesus in Saudi Arabia as you are in South Carolina.

You are as free to share Jesus in North Korea as you are in North Carolina because it's not about political freedom, it's about obedience.

Mark Twain was once purported to have said that the cure for racism was travel.

I think there's something actually to that because when we get outside of our own world, our assumptions, experiences, ways of seeing things, we see things differently.

And I want to add this, the cure for stagnant faith is the gospel going to the nations, period.

There is something about seeing the gospel at work in places radically different from our own that simply shakes us out of our complacency.

It exposes some of the assumptions we've made about Christianity, challenges what we think that we need in order to follow Jesus, and really reminds us that the Gospel is so much bigger than our little corner of the world.

At Apollos Water.

We believe that the way forward for Christianity today is to think different, because we have all the resources, we got all the pieces, we just need to put them together.

And in order to really see things differently, we need different lenses through which to look.

And we use four.

First and foremost is scripture.

This is our primary lens and the one through which everything else must be evaluated.

And these others actually come as a result of this first one.

And it's through that that we see the Gospel, the kingdom, church and culture.

And second, we look at church history, listening to those who have gone before us and learning how Christians in other times and places have lived, struggled, suffered and served.

Third, we look to the hard fought victories of those on the mission field.

We have to learn from our brothers and sisters around the world who have followed Jesus in context very different from our own and often at tremendous cost.

And fourth, we're looking at neuroscience, paying attention to what we're learning about how God has created our minds, our bodies, and the ways that we're formed.

Now, when those four lenses operate together again, all under the authority of the Word, they help us to see something bigger.

We call it Missio holism, the mission of God for all of life that cares not only about the task that's being accomplished, but who we're becoming in the process.

Now today we're looking through one of those lenses, the third one, and that's the mission field.

Now my guest is missionary and author Nick Ripken.

Nick has spent decades serving believers in some of the most difficult places in the world.

And he has listened to the stories of Christians who have endured persecution for their faith.

And he's going to share some of those stories in this episode today.

And some of them are a little shocking.

But his experiences became the basis for his book, the Insanity of God.

Now, if you've not read it, you need to order it right now.

Just stop.

Go to Amazon, order it.

And he's written other things.

And there all of them are examining what it actually means to follow Jesus when faith costs you something.

This is a conversation I had with Nick some time ago, but I wanted to bring it back because the lessons here are timeless.

In fact, I think they may be even more important for the Western church today than when we first recorded it.

Now, because Nick's story forces us to wrestle with some very uncomfortable questions, like what happens to our faith when following Jesus actually costs us something?

Secondly, have we confused comfort with blessing?

And third, what can Christians who have suffered for the gospel teach those of us who largely haven't?

Nick's story is going to challenge you to go deeper and serve greater.

So grab your gear, buckle up.

It's time for another ministry deep dive.

Nick Ripken, welcome to Apollo's Water.

Wow.

What a joy to be here with you, brother.

Are you ready for the Fast5?

As ready as anybody can be.

Okay, here we go.

Here's your Fast 5 questions that we have for you today.

Number one, Kentucky Wildcats or Louisville Cardinals?

Yes.

I grew up Wildcat.

My wife's family grew up Louisville Cardinal on my truck, license plate, half Kentucky, half Cardinals.

My family hates me.

But I did not survive Kentucky.

I did not survive Somalia to get killed in Kentucky.

So you're in an unequally yoked marriage, is that it?

No.

She's crazier about Kentucky than I am.

Oh, yeah.

But I learned, like I said, if I'm going to get shot, I want it to be by pagans.

You know, get into basketball in Kentucky, and it's a whole nother world.

Yeah, a little bit crazy.

A little bit crazy.

But here we go.

Second question.

I had to look this up, but since you're from Kentucky, and maybe you don't know this or not, but there are two Kentucky dishes, and I need to know which one you prefer, the hot brown sandwich or a Kentucky butter cake?

I don't know that I know Kentucky butter cake.

So it'd have to be the hot brown, and my wife just adores that.

But.

It's something you eat and go see the cardiologist so what is the Kentucky?

I had to look this up.

What is the hot brown sandwich?

It's just a lot of bread, a lot of meat, usually ham or roast beef, and a lot of gravy.

Wow.

Sounds wonderful.

Probably 2 or 3,000 calories.

Well, it's a quick way to meet Jesus.

Yeah, right.

All right, here's the next question then for you.

What is your favorite hobby?

Probably reading and until all these surgeries, horseback riding.

And I love to fish.

I'm not a good fisherman, but I love to be on water.

I don't care to stand on the land and fish.

But I just got back from Florida where some friends took me fishing three days out of 10 and I was in heaven.

Oh.

Oh, I love to fish.

Where'd you guys go fishing?

We went to Intercoastal because I've had some serious back surgery and I, I can't take the deep water right now.

And, and, but intercoastal fishing for reds and, and grouper and things like that.

So I had a really good time fishing.

Awesome.

That's great.

Okay, how about this one?

What is one habit that you have that drives your wife crazy?

Just one of them.

You can pick a couple.

Feel free.

One that drives her crazy.

I can hear her knocking at the door, saying, tell him this, tell him this one.

Tell him this.

But I think that I can read and World War 3 can break out and I wouldn't even be aware of it.

I can get so immersed in reading.

Okay, all right, that's bad.

It's also the same thing like this.

I can get talking with someone like you and, and probably talk the clock around and, and, And.

Oh, I know the one.

I call it recreational arguing.

I think it should be an Olympic sport.

She sees it as sin.

I see it as.

I see it as an Olympic sport.

What is recreational arguing?

It's just getting an idea on the table and no hose bar.

I mean, you're going to be, you're not going to be using nasty language, anything like that, but you're just going at each other.

And you can argue both sides of the equation and you can hold opposing viewpoints at the same time.

Because in Africa it doesn't have to make sense.

That's a western field.

But recreational arguing is one of my favorite things.

Recreational arguing.

I'm going to.

I've never heard that term before, but I'm going to use it in the future.

All right, here we go.

This is the last question of the fast five.

You've had a great many cross cultural Experiences.

But what is the strangest food you have ever eaten in all your travels?

The strangest food I've ever eaten?

Well, it'd have to be one of the worms, you know, like a fat worm.

Or when the.

Before the rains come in Malawi, they'll burn the fields to get ready for planting.

And you can go alongside the road and there'll be a split.

Kids holding a split bamboo piece of bamboo.

And in that will be the tails of about six or eight mice that they've caught and killed.

And you take that and you mash that up and you make a dish out of that.

Then you eat it with a stiff pop with your hands.

And so some of the big worms and the mice, I don't think they'll ever make it into the finer restaurants.

What's the name of that dish?

So I make sure that I never eat it.

Well, it wouldn't make any sense to you, but it's just.

I think in English it's sort of mopani M O P A N I. Worms.

And, and even they'll put out lights on the side of the road when the, when the.

Oh, shoot.

The bugs are coming with the little wings.

I can't think what they're called.

Grasshoppers.

No, Tiny bugs attracted to the light.

And we call them African popcorn.

And they'll even pick them off the grill of your truck or your car.

But they have a lot of protein in them in a protein starved culture.

They're just stand and eat that.

And they'll put a light on the side of the road and just harvest them and eat them.

And the little wings get caught in your teeth.

But you know, they'll work their way out.

But, but the mice, the mice and the worms are not my favorite.

But rancid camel for breakfast, that's not something that I would recommend.

But you know, you, you know, like, like they say, where he leads me, I will follow.

What he feeds me, I will swallow.

And sometimes you get to.

Sometimes you get to swallow it twice if it's really nasty.

I've never heard that terminology before.

What was it again?

Where he leads me, I will follow.

I will follow.

What he feeds me, I will swallow.

Oh, that's really good.

I really like that one.

Okay, I'm not gonna forget that one.

All right, let's get to.

Let's get to your story.

Nick, you've got a pretty phenomenal story.

I know you've written pretty much an entire book about it.

You're from Kentucky.

But tell us just a brief.

Give us A brief bio of who you are and what God has, has really led you to do.

It may paint a good photograph for your listeners to know that Ruth and I are both PKs.

She's a pastor's kid and I'm a pagan's kid.

And she cannot remember not knowing Jesus around her breakfast table, dinner table.

You know, having missionaries in their house, spending nights, it's just normal for her.

And knowing Christ at a very early age, writing papers about being a missionary by 9, 10 years of age.

And, and, and I'm raised in a constitution construction farming family.

Six boys.

A little girl came along about the time I went to college.

My dad came and got me off of a baseball field pretty good.

Too small to play football though I played it.

And, and so I've got good news and bad news.

My dad's a tough guy, I mean rough tough guy.

He said, I've got good news and bad news.

I said, what's the good news?

He said, kraft Foods cheese factory has hired you so you're going to get to go to college.

It was supposed to be a good summer job.

I said, well then what's the bad news?

He said, you start tonight.

I said, well, I, I got 11 weeks of high school left.

He said, you want to go to school or not?

I said, yes.

He said, and you start tonight.

So from 7 in the evening to 3:30 in the morning, last 11, last 11 weeks of high school, I worked in a cheese factory, walked off the baseball field, walked away from girlfriends, walked away from everything that teenagers do.

And Jesus cornered me in that cheese factory and audibly spoke to my heart three times in a 45 minute period.

And that's where I knelt, gave my life to Christ, left there, went to see two local pastors the next day.

Never met them, told them what had happened to me.

They said to me, travis, you're not a Christian.

God doesn't speak to people directly.

He speaks to them through the preaching of the Word and the church.

And I didn't know what that was.

And I found a young man, young pastor.

He said, well, it sounds like Jesus has captured your heart.

And I said yes.

He said, well, give up your scholarship to University of Kentucky to be a veterinarian and you need to go to the Baptist college.

I said, why would I want to be that?

He said, well, you need to be a pastor.

I said, why?

He said, well, it sounds like you want to be full time in the gospel.

And I just was puzzled.

I said I didn't know I could be part Time.

And so my background is just very much pagan.

First believer in my family, first one in the ministry.

My father.

I came home.

We came home after five years in Africa and he said, well, boy, now you can get you a big church.

I said, dad, I'm, I'm going back.

He said, I didn't raise you to be that stupid.

And the only way he could see that was in terms of, of building a resume.

But he came to really appreciate, appreciate and love what we're doing.

Though you just, I don't know how you can comprehend the racism that I grew up with.

Yeah.

And that's why God allowed us to serve eight years under apartheid in South Africa.

Because if I didn't finally deal with that racism that was in the depths of my soul that I'd papered over, we would have never made it to Somalia.

You and I would never be talking now.

And I just had had to deal with that.

I remember dad and my brothers coming to me and just saying, explain to us why are you doing this?

There was no spiritual connection.

I said, well, dad, if we don't reach African people for Christ in their country, they're going to come here looking for him.

And my dad said, son, I'm going to pray for your ministry every day.

Oh, wow.

And that's probably the hardest thing in coming home.

My kids were raised by African people and our homes are filled with Asians and Africans, Somalis, Cushitic people, Bantu peoples.

And one of the most transformative things that ever happened, brother.

Under apartheid, we're in a rural village and our two younger boys, or out playing with village kids who were in this bush church and men on one side, women on the other.

And, and my wife never gets upset at nothing.

And she's made for the mission field and she's made for loving people.

She's made for loving all people.

She doesn't take sides.

And, and I look back and, and she had this look of horror on her face, Travis.

And, and that was so out of the ordinary.

I'm going, what's going on?

I could hear the boy's voices and all of a sudden I thought, where's the baby?

Our youngest was three months old and he's gone.

And I looked across this little hut of a church.

There was an 80 some year old grandmother, maybe three or four teeth in her head, wrinkled, dried up.

Just has been through everything life can throw at her.

Probably never had a nickel to, you know, 5 cents to her name.

And she's nursing our baby.

She's got you know, I can't describe what this old woman looked like physically, but she's got this black stretched breast in the mouth of our little white blonde haired baby.

And this is under apartheid.

Races don't sit together, they don't touch.

White missionaries didn't let black missionaries in their house.

I mean, pastors, they met them on the porch, they had separate dishes for the black pastors to eat on.

All of this stuff that went to make up racism that certainly apartheid in South Africa doesn't have a monopoly on.

And I looked at that baby nursing as a pacifier, that old granny lady and, and she's got a smile on her face and that baby's just content.

And I looked at my wife and said, basically, he's happy, she's happy, let's just go with it.

And you know what?

That swept through that culture and among the closest speaking people, that here, where you didn't touch, you didn't let people in your house, you didn't share dishes, you didn't kiss them on the cheek.

And here, the greatest act of missiology, of mission, applied love, applied letting that little newborn white kid from America nurse that old granny lady was the biggest open door to ministry we've ever had.

I'll never forget it.

Her act of love to him, wanting to help my wife out of a fussy baby.

And I didn't know how closely they were watching for my reaction.

They fully expected for me to come down off of that little platform, run and get that baby, jerk that baby away from that woman and get him back to his white mother and just to see us smile and be content with it.

I'll never preach a sermon better than that.

Never.

Can't do it.

That's pretty incredible.

Just what you've seen in South Africa.

But you didn't stay there.

Where did you guys go after that?

Well, my wife and I did a foolish thing.

We read the Book of Acts together again.

And no matter what, I know it's not a biblical term, this word, missionary, but we never had anybody interpret it, not the mission board, not seminary.

So we're struggling in a country that's had almost 300 years of missionary activity.

And I'm not made for that.

I'm not made for a pastorate.

I'm made as an evangelist, church planter.

I'm not a pastor teacher.

And, and, and that's part of my problem.

I, I've got a bachelor's, master's and a doctorate.

But all of that poured into me even though Jesus said I'm Sending you a sheep among wolves.

They trained me to be a sheep among sheep.

That's why Somalia ate my lunch.

I had no tools, no way of thinking my way through the wolves of this world.

And, and so we studied the book of acts together.

And I wrote on a piece of paper the word missionary.

And at the end of those weeks, as we studied it, I wrote down for us, as we talked about it, that for us a sent out one was to go where people had little or no chance to hear.

And that week we wrote our mission support organization and said we've got to get out of places where they have access to the gospel.

It looks like the nearest places that need us is northern Sudan or Somalia.

I had almost, we had almost died of malaria.

We've been, that's why we ended up from Malawi and South Africa.

They said, you will never be allowed back in malaria country.

But because of the desperate need there, they said, we'll let you go there.

If you get really sick again, we're going to pull you out immediately.

But from reading the book of Acts, writing that word missionary on a piece of paper, we are to go where people have little or no chance to hear.

And two months later, were in Kenya studying Swahili, studying Somalia.

And they said, take your time.

It's going to take you three or five years to get in there.

Four months after we started trying to get in there, we were in there.

I mean, my first trip in six months.

Eight of us are feeding 50,000 people a day.

We're bearing 20 children and old people every morning before we can feed that's left alive.

We're in there six, eight months before.

And I think it didn't change.

I just stopped counting.

Six, eight months before we ever met a lady over 13 years of age that hadn't been raped 8, 10, 12 times.

It was part of their daily dialogue.

They didn't talk about when they went to get water, whether or not they'd be raped.

What they would talk about is who they hoped that would be.

Because the guys that staked out those water spots, some were kinder than others.

And, and, and for that to watch sin spiral a culture down that low to where you're parsing your death, defying sinful acts.

What do you do when everything's crucifixion and nothing's resurrection?

And I never understood, here's, here's our problem, brother.

Satan has sold us a lie and, and, and a lot.

One of the, one of the lies goes like this.

The Bible is inerrant and Infallible.

Hold on, don't get mad at me.

I'm a. I got a point here.

The Bible is an authoritative word of God.

It's a very words of God.

It records exactly the very acts of God.

And the Bible is a clear authoritative record of what God used to do.

With the implication being he's not doing this stuff anymore.

Right, Right.

And so what?

To skip way ahead, what we found in Somalia was the Old Testament in present active tense.

But that was somewhat encouraging that if the Old Testament was still in present active tense for me, by inference, perhaps the New Testament was still in present active tense.

And that's what the believers in persecution gave me.

Somalia gave me a deep understanding of crucifixion.

Believers in persecution gave me a clear understanding of resurrection coming out of crucifixion.

And our culture in America, they want the resurrection without the crucifixion.

It can't have it.

They can't have it.

I am crucified with Christ,.

But it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.

So going back here for a second, I want you to clarify something.

You said you saw the Old Testament being lived out and Somalia, something along that line.

Could you elaborate on that for a moment?

Let's look at the good side.

God never leaves himself without a witness.

There's not a place we've been on earth and we've been in the darkest places among this 3 billion people that don't have a single verse of scripture, not a scriptural song, not a missionary, not a church.

But God always is calling men and women to himself.

There's always an Abraham and a Sarah that's stepping out.

Ezekiel, a Daniel, David, all of this is coming up.

But in the midst of the Old Testament, Christianity or faith in Jesus and obedience to God is almost not measurable.

It's just so miraculous that God can call people out of that extreme darkness where no one has ever gone before them.

And yet Abraham's going to go to the promised land.

And that's what we see among unreached peoples is that they're in this Abrahamic type of Old Testament of fuse that last, you know, lifetimes.

Racial divides are in concrete every.

You know, if you want, you know, the Ten Commandments are written in such a place today.

Even with Islam.

If you want somebody's donkey, you go get it.

You want somebody's daughter, go take it.

You want somebody's wife, go take it.

The Ten Commandments are more a litany of what to do rather than what not to do.

And, and in that kind of darkness, parametered by the Roman Empire, Jesus comes in and he pushes a reset button and he says, guess what, Israel, it's not working.

Your armies, your temples, your, your wealth, your Judaic code of law, your Old Testament scrolls, it's not working.

And so Jesus sort of slaps down an old reset button in Matthew 10 and says, now we're going to try it differently.

I'm going to send you out as sheep among wolves.

Try to sell that to your church, try to sell that to a government, to a military.

All of this anger about Afghanistan.

Now, yeah, there's going to need to be a political response and there's going to always be a military response.

But what is, what's my response as a follower of Jesus to the Taliban that's killing my friends right now?

I got three texts this morning of a 14 year old girl taking from her father's arm, raped in front of him, and given as a sex slave because she's of a believing family to a Taliban soldier.

I got three or four texts like that from Afghanistan this morning.

And yet Jesus has the audacity to say, love your enemies.

And, and when they ask Jesus, how do you pray?

Well, pray this way, father, forgive me in the same way that I forgive those that sin against me.

How in the world do you do that?

And so we divide up Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, and we allow Christianity to be masked and not masked and vaccine and not vaccine.

When Jesus is trying to say to us, hey guys, ladies, guess what?

You're as free, praise God, you are as free today to share Jesus in Saudi Arabia as you are in South Carolina.

You are as free to share Jesus in North Korea as you are in North Carolina because it's not about political freedom, it's about obedience.

They cannot stop you from getting off the plane and sharing Christ.

They can punish you for it.

And then the love that you have for those persecutors will deepen and extend the kingdom of God.

But there's going to be a big price to be paid.

I'm not, I'm not blowing smoke, but the, the, the believers in house churches in China, they taught me so much about turning that crucifixion into the resurrection, looking for those opportunities.

And so I, I went all over the world after we went to Somalia trying to find help and couldn't find it until we spent years going among believers in persecution, whom I was taught to feel pity for, whom I was taught to rescue.

And yet they taught me, you know, sometimes God needs Joseph in jail.

If we get Joseph out of jail and Pharaoh has a dream, two months later, the Egyptians are up at creek without a paddle and so are the Jews in Egypt.

They're all going to die.

So how can the church pray God, if it's your will for our Joseph to be in this Iranian prison today.

Can you sell that?

Can you sell that?

I think it's hard selling.

Yeah, it is.

It's hard sell in our culture today especially.

I want to go back just for a moment because you skipped over something that I know you've probably talked about ad nauseam, but I know that some of our listeners aren't familiar with.

You said you went from right from Somalia to visit a lot of these people that had been in persecution, but you didn't elaborate on why and what happened in Somalia.

And I want to hear just from you hear a bit of this story because it is quite phenomenal in hearing it.

And I wouldn't even say it's phenomenal after reading your book, it's expected in talking about some of the Russians that said this isn't just as the sun comes up, it's persecution comes for those who are are followers of Jesus.

But elaborate if you would on how you were trying to plant a church in Somalia and all that happened there.

Well, I think someone else probably have said it better.

But desperation is one of the most creative places to be.

And I knew that Jesus had sent us a sheep among wolves.

I just didn't know what to do with them.

So we came back to the States after about six months.

I went to my seminaries, I went to lots of seminaries.

I went to secular.

I went to Washington D.C. to those committees on human and religious freedoms.

And I went to Freedom House.

I went to anybody I could talk to about how do you serve as a sheep among wolf.

I couldn't find any help.

Could not.

All I could find was, you know, in our culture we do really good A plus for raising up pastor teachers, D minus for raising up evangelists and church planners across the theological spectrum schools.

I think that's true.

And I couldn't find any help.

And finally a dear mentor of ours said, you know, Ripken, you're on your own.

We haven't done this before, so you've got to figure it out.

But we're feeding 50,000 people a day.

We're burying all these kids, we're reselling refugees, doing mobile medical clinics, watching believers being hunt down and killed.

They killed four of my best friends on one day.

And so In a condensed period of time, we got kicked out of Somalia.

Our 16 year old son died of an asthma attack on Easter Sunday morning, eight days after his birthday.

Ruth's mother died two months to the day that our son died of a long bout with cancer.

Somali believers have been reduced from 150 to 4.

And it was a hard place and, and yet God reminding us that he had told us the place to go to learn how to be sheep among wolves was to go to the sheep among wolves.

Soviet Union was falling apart, so we went, we went there, we went throughout China, now throughout, all throughout India, wherever we could find believers.

And it's, it's hard.

You can't just find them in a phone book and it's dangerous for them to be passed from house group to house group or you know, secret place to secret place just begging them to teach us what we did not know.

And so probably for tens of thousands of hours we sit at their feet just, just begging them.

How do you make Christ known when, how do we make Christ known when if you're just my friend in Somalia, you could be killed?

You see, I had people this weekend talk to me about how Bible distribution went in Somalia.

I said it was terrible because your listeners probably cannot comprehend that in Somalia.

If you gave a believer a Bible and you did not model for him how to securely handle that, you got him killed because he had a Bible.

I watched a Muslim guy about three blocks away.

The Somali Bible is a big green thing.

And I'm watching this Muslim guy that I later on found out could not read or write a word carrying that big green Bible.

And before I could get to him, Ali Tahad walked up behind him and put a bullet in his head and killed him.

And because some well meaning short term person gave that guy a Bible, he went into eternity without Jesus.

And he got killed because of the Bible.

He didn't get killed because of who Jesus was.

How do you make, how do you explain to your listeners, hey, this is what Jesus did, that he handled the scrolls in the temple and the synagogues and then out in the marketplace.

He didn't distribute those things.

He told those stories of the kingdom of God by memory.

And when they asked him a question about those stories, he told him another story.

And what believers in persecution just drummed into me is that God always keeps his word, the Bible in oral forms to rapidly transmit truth.

And God always Keeps his word, the Bible in literate forms to preserve the truth.

Wow.

Wow.

You just doubled the way you can use that from a literate open culture.

We can't imagine distributing Bibles leading to the wiping out of a whole house church.

And so this is what I'm experiencing.

I'm.

I'm watching 150 Somalis believers be reduced to four.

And every one Travis that were killed had a relationship with an outsider Western Christian that directly contributed to the timing of their death.

They were killed for who they worked for.

And a lot of Christian agencies love to go these places and hire Christians.

You do that in Afghanistan, give them a T shirt and the front of it says Jesus loves me, and the back has concentric circles and says shoot me.

They were killed for who they worshiped with.

They were outsiders.

They were killed for having a Bible often that they could not read a word of it.

Every one of them that were paid to evangelize the same way we would evangelize in Dallas, Texas, or, or, you know, and in Jacksonville, Florida.

None of those guys are alive today.

And so there has to be a.

What.

What believers in persecution did for me saying that Jim Slack, one of my mentors, did.

He said, ripken, whenever you have an evangelist evangelism issue you can't solve or church planning issue you can't solve, you're not telling yourself the right Bible story.

The persecuted church gives us the right Bible stories.

And included in that is persecution is normal.

Included that is in that the number one cause of persecution on the planet is people coming to Jesus.

Where there's a great harvest, there's always a great persecution.

Where there's a little harvest, well, Satan's not threatened, so he persecutes nobody.

And there's a huge difference between taking stands in a culture for social issues and proclaiming the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Believers in persecution are not whining over social issues.

They're proclaiming the crucifixion and the resurrection.

And so when out of those ashes of losing our Son in a lot of ways, losing our health and losing our ministry, going among believers in persecution, they gave us our Bible back in present active tense.

But more than that, they gave us the Holy Spirit back in present active tense to where Ruth and I can say with great joy and confidence today that everything that God has ever done in the Bible, God is still doing.

He hasn't rested, he hasn't taken a vacation.

He hasn't ceased to use some modern terminology, God's God.

And, and perhaps, perhaps we Go to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth, so we can see what God is doing.

Maybe that's why he says go to all these places is so that he can invest in us and come to say, see who I am and who I and what I'm about and, and, and is.

It's often been said he or she who speaks only one language understands none.

And I think there's some truth in that, that experiencing Jesus in a prolific number of cultures allows you to see.

You can go to India and see all the demon possession, you can go and go to Africa, go among low caste Hindus.

One medical personnel for every two million people.

You know what they'll do?

You pray for a hundred people to be healed and one person is healed, they'll focus on that one.

In my culture, you pray for a hundred people to be healed and one person is healed, they're going to focus on the 99 that weren't.

And yet we don't see that the medical care that we have is a miracle from the throne of God in the eyes of believers around the world.

And so I really don't want to be as heard to be preaching sermons.

I want to be heard to say, I'm so excited to find the living God of the Bible among the nations today and being able to walk with him and, and, and whether it's in those deepest valleys or the mountaintop, God is God.

And, and if, if my brother and sister is in that prison in Iran so that he or she can lead their persecutor to Jesus, can I say blessed be the name of the Lord.

My problem or challenges churches is we get, how do we, how do we know about Afghanistan?

Probably through cnn, Fox News.

But is there not a biblical God loving, fearing response to that kind of hatred and that kind of evil?

And, and your listeners might, this might give them pause.

But after almost four decades out and about, Travis, I have a heart.

It's in concrete in my heart that every place in my lifetime that we've sent our sons and daughters through our military to bleed and die by the tens of thousands all over the world.

I'm a Post World War II kid, but all of these places, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, all of these places where our sons and daughters have been sent to bleed, suffer and die are the exact places the church never went.

That's on us.

And the cost in blood for not going and fulfilling the Great Commission is a thousand times greater than the cost in blood if we were to die for who Jesus is.

Because Jesus knows how to use that suffering and how not to waste that blood and the insanity of God.

The book, the movie, our lives.

And trying to relate to godly people like yourself and friends like you is, Is not to waste their suffering.

In those sales in the Soviet Union, they say, you're going to die in this cell.

Your story is going to die in this cell.

No one's going to ever know that, that, that, that you ever were faithful to Christ here.

And I write about Dimitri and that Russian prison and insanity of God.

And I heard that he had died two and a half years ago.

So there's a way I can get in touch with folks like him through a website.

So I called him and I got his son.

He said, dad's not dead.

Dad's still alive, but he's hurting.

He's got arthritis and the bones they broke and he can't hardly get out of bed.

But he said, he said he gets out of bed each day and he, he wants to dance and he wants to sing because his persecutors and communism has died and his story is alive and has gone all over the world.

And, and I, and, and, and I had about a 15 minute conversation through his son with him and, and I was about to hang up and his son said, oh, no, no, Nick, you can't go.

You've got to know this.

He said, I'm now the, the chaplain of the prison that held my daddy for 17 years.

You got to stay in the story.

We don't leave Afghanistan at this place in the story.

We don't leave, we don't leave Somalia at Black Hawk Dam.

We've got to stay in God's story until he finishes the story.

And he doesn't finish it until Jesus comes.

And so that's, that's.

I guess if there's one thing that I would take from being overseas with my sweet wife and children and, and all co partners in this endeavor, is that being able to write yourself in God's story is a hoot.

It's just something very, very special.

And, and, and to know that you're in God's story and you're not going to take yourself out of it.

And people will say, well, aren't you glad to be back in America?

I am so sorry that my body's wore out.

I'm up to 33 surgeries and just had major, major back surgery and got all these rods and screws and everything.

And my biggest regret is, my gosh, brother, I can't go.

I can't start over.

I can't, you know, go again like we went before.

And, and yet we have generations now of young ladies and young men that we mentored in schools and colleges and seminaries.

Now they're in these hard places with their children.

And I think one thing that I've learned, I never expected to learn, that sending the sheep among wolves is a lot harder than being the sheep among wolves.

If the church ever, ever truly understands the responsibility and the joy of the sender, it will either transform them or they'll stop sending.

That's why most of them have stopped sending.

Because which is harder, dying on a cross or sending your only son to die on the cross?

Of course, both of those are in the nature of God.

But I would rather go to a Somalia a cobble a thousand times than to have to send or get to send my kids there one time.

Sending is the hardest thing.

That's why what you do is so important.

You're, you're equipping people to go across the street and across the oceans and, and if you do what you, if you do well, what you're doing, you're going to be part of sending these sheep.

You know, inner city Chicago, New York, just the hardest places on earth and, and sending our sons and daughters and our moms and dads, second career people to these hard places.

Hardest thing I've ever done.

I, I'm telling you, going is a joy.

Sending is heartbreaking and hard.

What a conversation.

And here's the good news.

We're not done.

This is only part one of my conversation with Nick and there's a second part coming and you are not going to want to miss it.

Because one of the reasons I wanted to bring this conversation back is because we desperately need voices like Nick's.

We need to hear from brothers and sisters who have followed Jesus in places where faith is costly.

Why?

Because they help us see things about our own faith that we simply cannot see from where we're standing.

That's part of what we're trying to do at Apollos Watered.

We want to help you think different, go deeper, serve greater by bringing together scripture, church history, hard fought lessons on the mission field and what we're learning from neuroscience.

And together those lenses help us to better understand the mission of God for all of life.

Not only the task that's being accomplished, but who we're becoming.

So here's what I want you to do.

Simple.

Go to ApolloSwatered.org and simply join our email list.

That's it.

Give us your email address and we'll keep you connected to what we're doing.

We're not going to flood your inbox.

I promise that.

We don't need any more junk mail, including letting you know when part two of this conversation with Nick Ripken drops.

And we're not interested in flooding it.

Seriously.

We want to send you things that are actually worth opening new conversations, articles, resources and tools designed to help you follow Jesus more deeply and serve him more faithfully wherever he has placed you.

And while you're waiting for part two, do me one more favor.

Share this episode with someone.

Maybe it's a pastor that needs encouragement.

Maybe it's a missionary.

Maybe it's a ministry leader.

Maybe it's simply someone who needs to be reminded that the Kingdom of God is so much bigger than the little slice of Christianity we see around us.

Then come back for part two, because Nick and I have a whole lot more to talk about.

But until next time, this is Travis Michael Fleming signing off for ministry.

Deep Dive.

Stay watered, everybody.