>> NIK RIPKEN: Good morning. I know it might be a personal problem, but
I've been in a bad mood. My wife could tell you it's true. I've been in a bad mood for about two or three
weeks, and she begged me not to take it out on the students this morning but I don't think
I'm going to listen, I think I'm going to take it out on you anyway. The bad mood stems, I think, from my own ego
needs. We've been overseas for 30, 31 years now and
most of it's been from Somalia to Mauritania, Middle East places like Afghanistan, Pakistan,
and I don't know what I expected God to do with us but the world that we have served
for 31 years is now worse off than it was when we went there! And I felt I was more important to the Old
Testament world becoming a New Testament world than apparently than we have been. So I know that I'm a bit angry at the world,
I might be a bit angry at God, but I think in the midst of that, if I am honest as I
can be with you, maybe we'll take away something that's very valuable with you. You see, I was raised in what could be defined
the New Testament. My wife and I have gone to the heart of evil. We have been in — those believers who are
practicing their faith, the nearest we can figure out is that 70 percent of them live
in environments defined by persecution. So believers who are practicing their faith,
normal Christianity, is persecuted for their faith. But my problem is I've become too much of
a spokesman on the, for the Old Testament. I mean when I — we’ve experienced what
we've experienced in Afghanistan and Somalia, it, it sounds good to me that an eye for an
eye, that makes good sense. It makes good sense to me, being from rural
Kentucky, it's that Old Testament darkness that's still in my heart, that if somebody
comes and messes with your sisters and without their permission and willingness has carnal
knowledge of them, you and your brothers get together and you, you take them out. That sounds pretty good to me. I paid him to say that, so. But I paid you to be louder. It sounds good to me. That when they drive their airplanes into
our buildings and kill our people, when they take innocence that my wife and I love and
the Taliban take them and we haven't seen her for seven years, it sounds, it sounds
right to me that if they threaten my country, they threaten my culture, they threaten my
kids and my way in life, it sounds — the Old Testament makes good sense to me, let's
go and let's kill them. Every man, every woman, every child says the
Old Testament, and even don't leave the donkeys alive. And part of me as a country boy says oh no
not the donkeys, why the donkeys? What have the donkeys done? And that Old Testament has such root in my
heart right now. And part of my problem is we've been overseas
for 31 years and being with the Taliban, being with Muslims, being with those who are without
Christ, we see the world through lost eyes. But now I've been in America for a year and
my culture is telling me to do something different to lost people than I've been doing with my
wife and kids for 30-some years. And I'm, I'm mad about it, I'm conflicted
about it, I wish you could have gone to Somalia with us for almost seven or eight years. Can you imagine — it just baffles me when
I look in here this morning, and see what's sitting here — to go to Somalia where there's
10 million people and only 150 believers when we got there. When we left there, forced out of there, about
seven a half years later, those 150 believers had been reduced to only four. Four! We watched an entire generation of believers
hunted down as if they were an animal in the woods of Kentucky. On August the 4, 1994, the precursor to Al-Qaeda,
they were called Al Ittihad in Somalia now they're called Al-Shabaab and now they've
morphed together with Al-Qaeda, planned it out, did it intentionally, they stalked four
of my best friends who were believers from Somali-background on their way to try to make
a living for their family, put a gun to the back of their head, blew their brains out,
drug their mutilated bodies and hid them ‘til, until today we don't know where the believers
have been buried. From 1991 until February of 2013, every funeral
we had for a Somali believer was, was attempted without having the body there, without having
a corpse there, without being able to pray over that person who had given their lives
for Jesus. From 1991 to 2013, every believer who was
killed, we still don't know where they have laid their bodies. And they killed four of my best friends in
one day. And I had four guards that were Somalis with
me, and I asked them as I walked through the rubble of Mogadishu, I said give me some space. I don't know how you all do your time alone
with Jesus — my wife has a quiet time, you probably could already tell I have a loud
time with God. Probably both of those are Scriptural. And so I'm gonna yell at God a little bit,
didn't want my Muslim guards to hear so much and I'm walking through the rubble, they've
just killed four of my best friends in 45 minutes, we don't yet know that we don't have
a body to say grace over, and I'm saying to God, "Do You have a clue what's going on? Do — have, have You taken a vacation? Don't You know that in this country they are
killing everyone that loves You, that honors You, that has given their life to You? And these Muslims, these radicals, these Somalis
are killing everybody that loves You! And I'm supposed to be a New Testament sharer
of the Gospel but I put on this Old Testament prophet demonstration and,” I say to God,
“It's time. It's time. These people are killing everything that You
love and it's time for You to take them out. It's time for You to wipe them off of the
face of the earth. They're just taking up space, they're evil
incarnate and God, it's time to kill them because,” I say to God, “they're not worthy
of the blood of Jesus Christ.” And the Holy Spirit said to me immediately,
“Neither are you.” And I said to God, “How dare you? How dare You? How dare you put me in the same category of
these Somali killers!” and the Holy Spirit said, “No Ripken, you're worse! You had all this access to Jesus for 18 years
of your life and you cursed me, you lived a life that was so immoral, you did things
that were, were just horrible in the Kingdom of God, and you had total access to Jesus
and you walked away until I hunted you down in a factory at night when you were 18 years
of age. And how dare you, Ripken, ask me to kill,
to destroy, to annihilate a people group who for 2,000 years, no one came to tell them
about Jesus? No one gave them a choice between evil and
good. No one told them that there was a better story.” But I'm here now and I'm not with the people
that we love, both Muslim and workers who have been sent out. Young couples that met on the mission field
that we married who are now there with their children. And we can't give you their names or tell
you where they've living, so we have to tell our new Satan story because we can't publicly
tell Jesus' story in this kind of environment, in this kind of world. And there I'm watching now, we lived, we lived
maybe 50 miles from where ISIS is taking their knives and cutting the heads off of innocent
reporters and people who are just there to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and mounting
their heads on the one whose been killed’s body as if it was a trophy for Allah. We are working in these places where ISIS
is taking and groups like Boko Haram are taking women by the hundreds and the thousands and
making them sex slaves and impregnating them so that they will bear Muslim children and
therefore the Yazidis or the Arab Christians will cease to exist in one generation. Before Saddam Hussein was killed, probably
three million plus Arab Christians, as far as I can remember, in Iraq, that has been
reduced to almost nothing because evil has chased them out. And you hear about ISIS and governments say,
“This is what we're going to do, we're going to wipe them out every man, woman, and child
that is doing this kind of evil, we've got to let them cease to exist on the sands of
the Arab and the Muslim world.” And we actually — the church is actually
believing that there is a political, an economic, there is a military solution to what's going
on in the world! And I'm angry because of the Old Testament
that is in my heart. And I hear the Bible say “an eye for an
eye and a tooth for a tooth” and I think that's pretty good, that sounds pretty good
to me. And then here comes Jesus. And here comes Jesus. And in the midst of a country defined by a
dictator, in the midst of a culture that was willing to kill hundreds if not thousands
of babies just because, God had the audacity to send His Son to love those people? Here comes Jesus in the midst of a Roman empire,
dictators, murderers, women treated second-class citizens at best. Here comes Jesus in an environment that the
world today would know very, very well and the church is joining with the government
and we're believing there's a political, there's a military solution to ISIS, to Iraq, to Syrian
refugees, to Al-Shabaab and the killers in Somalia, and here comes Jesus. “You've heard it be said, ‘an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I tell you, do not resist an evil person.” What? What!? That's not gonna, that's not gonna sail in
Kentucky. Whoa, if anyone slaps you on the right cheek,
what do you do? Knock his teeth out. "If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn
to them the other cheek also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt,
give him your coat also. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go two. Give to the one who asks and do not turn away
from the one who wants to borrow from you." And here comes Jesus. And you've got the evil of the world, and
what's going to be pitted against the evil that is so clear in the world are the military,
political, economic forces of the Western and the Arab world, but here comes Jesus. "You've heard it be said, love your neighbor
and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray
for them who persecute you." Another translation says “for those who
despitefully use you and spit upon you.” How you doin with that one? Where does that sit in your heart today? Where do you interact with the words, “love
your enemies that you may be the children of God?” “You greet only your own people. If you greet, if you love, if you do hospitality
with only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even the pagans do this?” And then he says to my Old Testament heart,
“be perfect as God is perfect.” You see, I'm — I’ve got anger in my heart
today. It might be sin in my heart today because
I'm asking you who in your church, who in your world, who in your life, in the accountability
group that you're in, who is standing up in your culture today? Who is standing up in the name of Jesus to
say that there is no political solution for this world and its hatred? There is no economic, military solution! Who is standing up today and is broadcast
across our nation and say what — here is a godly, Christlike, Jesus-centered, follower-of-Jesus
response to ISIS? Here is what Jesus is saying about Syrian
refugees. Here is what Jesus is saying about having
the grace enough to understand that God loves, died for on a cross, for both Jews, for both
Arabs, for both Muslims, and for every American, especially today for those who have yet to
hear and to understand. Who is speaking that into our lives? We're hearing, “Let's go to church ‘cause
God wants you to be happy.” And we're hearing from our culture, “Let's
send our young men and women and let's go kill in the name of what is right.” There is a government role to play. Hear me well. There is a military role to play. Hear me well. But who is going to all of these hellholes
on the planet and speaking Jesus' solution into their lives? What choice have they had? If you were raised where they were raised,
and you were fed a steady diet of hate and shame and child abuse and “an eye for an
eye” and “kill them every man, woman, and child,” and if you grew up and you were
raised, generation after generation after generation, in that environment, you might
be wearing the uniform of ISIS today. In your school there's a young lady that my
wife and I love a lot. Her father's been my supervisor for years,
I'll take a bullet for him. Well, maybe I'll take a rubber bullet for
him. Maybe a stopper gun, maybe that'd be more
honest. But I fell in love with him as a man of God
that when 9/11 happened and he saw that unfold on the TV, he fell on his face before God
and he cried out to God for forgiveness and says God will you forgive me, will you forgive
us because we've — we never got to these people's country with the Gospel. We never got to their city, we never got to
their village, we never broke bread with them in their home. God, can you forgive us that we never gave
those who are perpetuating evil a different story, a better story, a story about Jesus
and His love. And I can follow to the ends of the earth
a person who will fall on his face before God crying out for the souls of those who
are slapping us, beating us, and killing us. We buried a son in Nairobi, Kenya. He died about a week after his 16 birthday
of an asthma attack. And ironically, he died on Easter Sunday morning. That makes Easter very different for my family. You can imagine, I don't have to tell you
how hard it was to walk through that with our other two sons, and how much that my wife
and I had to walk together through that. I've never seen the body of Christ show up
in a more magnificent way. Our son died in March, we left Kenya and were
kicked out of Somalia by June. From March to June, we never cooked a meal,
the body of Christ did that for us. Students much like you, though most of them
in high school, every day they flooded our house and there'd be 15, 20 pairs of shoes
in the hallway coming our house and our two living kids on earth their bedrooms would
be filled with their friends who walked through that. It took us over a week to bury our son because
of all kinds of nonsense going on in that environment. And people were just coming to our house,
and people were flooding us with love. You know what our black, our African, our
English-speaking Kenyan church did? For the seven nights it took us to bury our
son, every night they came to our house in Nairobi — bad roads, no streetlights, dangerous
to be out, and every night — can you, can you picture this? — every night, guys and
ladies, they came to our house and they prayed for us as we took our baths and went to bed
and then they sat and stood in the living room of our house and sing us to sleep. For a week. And I remember holding my wife and weeping
and having the peace of God just fill my heart as my church, as our church, sang us to sleep
in our home every night. Waking — waiting for our families to wake
up in the states so that we could call them, I went to the office, got on the radio and
called my Chief of Staff in Mogadishu, a Muslim friend. And I wanted to tell Hussein that I can't
come in now, here's what's happened to our son, he knew our boys, he loved them. And he is such an extravert and he's always
talking and he's always waving his arms and he's always interrupting others, he's just
such a — he has such a lively soul in him. And until we met, he had never heard the name
of Jesus and as I told him about our son's death he didn't, he didn't even say sorry,
he didn't say anything, he, he — just silence, and I thought well, there's a problem with
the communication on the short-wave radio and so I just laid it down and went to do
whatever else I had to do. And this was on that Easter Sunday morning,
people bringing food on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, food to our house, prayers to our
house, gifts to our house, money to our house, mostly love and songs and hugs and kisses
and tears and laughter and joy in the moment in our house. And so, when there was a knock on the door
I thought more people, more neighbors, more food, more kids from the local schools and
I opened it up and there standing dirty, ragged, almost starved, he's just filthy, smells like
a goat, is my Chief of Staff from Mogadishu, Somalia. And I just said to him, “Hussein, where
in the world did you come from?” With all the pride that he could muster, he
stood just in front of me, inches away from me, and he said to me, “I have walked all
the way from Mogadishu to Nairobi, Kenya, and I have come to bury our son Timothy.” Wow. He had walked through minefields, he had ridden
camels and ridden in the back of goat trucks, thus the smell. He had crawled around where clans were fighting
and this Muslim man walked, rode camels, goat trucks, came five days without food, without
water. When he — when I said to him our son has
died, he laid the radio — whatever that thing is — down and he walked out of the
door of his office, of our office in Mogadishu and he started walking to Kenya five days. Five days. And he said, “I've come so that we can bury
our son Timothy.” He doesn't know how uncultural it was that
at our son's funeral he sits between me and my wife. I don't even get to sit with my wife at my
son's funeral – Muslim’s sitting between us. Oh, God was having a good day. And he watches our oldest son get up and sing,
in honor of his son who has died, in the school choir. And he listens to my wife's brother's message
and he hears the Gospel so clearly about what it means to actually, physically die and be
in Christ and he listened to the choir sing and he watched 20 some people come to Christ,
almost 30 people at our son's funeral and he's just doing this all the time, he's just
sitting between us and looking and looking and the Spirit of God was falling in that
moment and this calloused Muslim sunburnt Somali man of the desert inappropriately reaches
over and I see him take my wife's hand and he reaches over and he takes my hand and he
puts our hands together and he wraps his calloused hands around ours and he cried with us. He wept with us. He grieved with us. And he experienced the resurrection with us. A few weeks later, I went back to Mogadishu
for the last time, to say goodbye to our 10 or 15 staff members and to this man. I was able to get him back into Somali through
the United Nations so he didn't have to walk five days back and the hardest thing was he
was in the country illegally, we had to figure out how to do that, I think my wife altered
his passport or something like that, well I better not say that, I'm in a lot of trouble. I'm not even gonna look where she's sitting
now, is she okay? Is she grinning? All right, all right, well okay I might need
to go home with some of you guys all right. And I get him out of the country and two or
three weeks later I go there to say goodbye to the staff and part of the culture was to
thank the staff for sending Hussein as a representative of our staff to our son's funeral. And I did that culturally appropriately and
I wasn't surprised when Hussein stood up and told them all the details about his five days
of travel, how thirsty, how hungry, how he had to crawl, how he walked through around
minefields, on the camel and the goats, and he did all of this, and then I thought, “Wow. This is just really good. The narrative is like they were there.” And then I thought, “Oh no. You need to shut up, because he began to talk
about our son's funeral, and he looked at our Muslim staff and he says, Why is it, why
is it that when we die we don't know where we're going? Why is it that when Somalis, when Muslims
die we have to wait in paradise to see have we been 51 percent good? Why is it while they were crying over their
son and broken by his death, they were laughing, they were celebrating, because Momma and Poppa,
he called us, the Ripkens knew — they were broken, their son had died — but he is with
Jesus and he is in the paradise? Why do Christians get to know where they go
when they die and Muslims don't?” And I thought, “Oh my! They're going to kill you!” And he went on to say, and he looked at me,
“Why have you Christians kept Jesus to yourself?” And I thought, “Well, the staff is going
to hang him,” and the entire staff looked at me and they asked me, “Why have you done
this? Why, if there's this truth about eternal life
and this truth about being in Christ and this truth about loving your enemies and turning
the other cheek, if you had this, why have you kept Jesus to yourself? Our brothers and sisters are persecuted all
over the world. Why?” They've done two things. One, they've picked up Jesus and two, they
refuse to keep Him to yourself. Everywhere our military is going, our predator
drones are flying, if the way I read the world right, everywhere our military sons and daughters
are having to die are exactly in the places where the church has refused to go with the
love of Jesus. I gotta get over my anger, because I went
too late, and I said too little. And I've got to pray that you will take Jesus
to the places we have refused to go. And while culture says, “Go and kill,”
you'll be willing to go and die for the kingdom of God. Please, hear the words of the Lord. “It has been said, ‘eye for an eye and
a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say unto you love your enemies.” Seemingly impossible, God bless you. >> MELODY HARPER: If you'll be seated for
just a minute, we're almost done. But we're not quite finished yet because we
can't just leave it there. Nik, thank you. And thank you to Jesus because it's through
Jesus that we have a different message. In Nik's book he writes that we can choose
to identify with either the persecutors or with those who are in chains, and the thing
that determines who you identify with is whether or not you share Jesus or you keep Him to
yourself. I want to challenge you today not to keep
Him to yourself. Don't keep Him to yourself here in Lynchburg
as you walk out these doors. But Acts 1:8 says, "You will by my witnesses
in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth, " and as we've heard
this morning, there are still millions, some in our local community and many to the ends
of the earth that have not yet heard. As we focus on what God's doing around the
world this week, we're not just talking about it and educating you in this sense so that
you're aware. We want to challenge you to get involved,
and there are opportunities for you to do that while you're a student here at Liberty. The Center for Global Engagement sponsors
global teams every year, and these are an opportunity for you to gather together with
other students from Liberty to be on a team with faculty and staff from the university,
to be mentored in the process as you prepare to go and serve, to be mentored by some of
our global mentors with our different partner organizations, to go and be part of what God
is doing in the world, to see firsthand and to share firsthand the love of Jesus with
those that have never heard. This year, Liberty is sending out 27 different
teams around the world. Some are going out during Christmas break,
some are going out during spring break, some are going out right after graduation at the
end of the semester. This morning I want to highlight a couple
of those opportunities, during Christmas break we're sending a team to East Asia to work
with university students. You guys, this is a couple weeks of the social
life of being at university without the homework, OK? You're gonna go, you're gonna build relationships
with students, you're gonna connect with them, you're gonna drink tea, you're gonna play
basketball, you're gonna play music, whatever it is that you do on campus, but to go and
connect with students that have never had a chance to have the opportunity to hear. That's in East Asia. We're also sending a team to the Middle East
during this time. Again, to connect with university students. Students like you who are studying, who are
seeking to learn about the world, but who likely have never heard the truth and the
love of Jesus. Would you be the first one to share that with
them this Christmas? We're also sending out 25 other teams throughout
the year. There's maybe a map that's gonna show up on
the screen with those locations. India, the Balkans, various locations in Africa,
North Africa, Thailand, Bolivia, Romania, Haiti, all over the world. Some are providing clean water, some are teaching
English, some are rock climbing, some are doing children's and youth camps, some are
working with refugees, some are doing art and music therapy, some are doing sports,
photography, education – lots of different opportunities. Lots of types of ministry and many places
to go. At least one that you can connect with to
be part of. I want you — I want to challenge you to
take the first step right now, a lot of times we hear a great message, we're challenged
by a speaker, God speaks to our hearts and we walk out and we go to class and we go on
with our lives, just as they were before. But you can take the first step without leaving
this room today. If you get out your cellphones, you can text
the words SENDME, S-E-N-D-M-E to 24502 to start that process today. That's not committing you to go on a team,
that's just taking the first step to say, “I want to get more information because
I cannot let what I have heard this morning end at 11:01. God's challenging me to do something more.” So you can text that number right now. On your way out, there's going to be Center
for Global Engagement tables set up around the concourse, you can stop and get information
there. They're going to be set up in DeMoss Hall
this week. There's going to be an expoquito on the lawn
in front of the Jerry Falwell Library this afternoon until 3:00; you can stop by there
to get more information. Don't let this just be a challenging message
that ends with Convo. What is God calling you to do, and how is
God calling you to respond? And how can you get up out of your comfort
zone of this chair in this bubble, to allow God to work through you to make a difference
in the nations? We have a global God and He is working all
over the world, and He is inviting you to join that. Pray with me. Jesus, we don't have the answers and it is
overwhelming to look at what is going on in the world, and to know how to respond. But You are the Sovereign God. And Your heart is for people of all nations,
every nation, tribe, and tongue. And we have been blessed with the opportunity
to hear of You, to know You, to have the choice to follow You. And with a choice and the freedom to share
You. May we identify with those who are in chains
for the sake of Your Gospel by choosing to speak and choosing to share and choosing to
show Your love to the nations. Call us out of our complacency and our comfort
and I ask that You would burn in our hearts until we take that step to follow You, and
to be part of what You are doing in the world, because You and You alone deserve the glory. We can't do this in our own strength, but
You don't call us to. So in the power of Jesus' Name, I ask that
You would give us the boldness and the courage and the freedom to witness for You, wherever
we are, here in Lynchburg and to the ends of the earth. And it is in the power of Jesus' Name that
we ask that, amen. Have a great day Liberty.
