Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. Psalm 63:3
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that God’s love is better than anything? That it is better than even being alive?
I’ve been reading a book called The Insanity of God by Nik Ripken. It’s a really convicting book. The title might sound a little off putting, but you would understand if you read it:)
It’s about the persecuted church around the world. In one of my first blogs I talked about the book Tortured for Christ, and this is just like it.
In the last few weeks there have been loads of cool things that have happened recently! But I feel like this story is one you need to hear first.
His name is Dmitri.
It all started in a Russian village miles and miles away from the nearest church. Because of this, his family could only go to church a few times a year.
They were very poor.
But Dmitri wanted his children to know about the bible!
So he got his family together that night and read to them some of the bible stories he remembered.
The more they learned the more they wanted to worship. So they started singing after reading the bible.
And the more they sang, the more they wanted to pray.
“Nothing could be hidden for long in small villages. Houses were close together and windows were often open. Neighbors began noticing what was going on with Dmitri’s family. Some of them asked if they could come and listen to the Bible stories and sing the familiar songs.”
Soon there were 25 people coming to show up to learn and worship. The Russian police came to his house and accused him of starting an illegal church.
This was shocking to Dimitri. He wasn’t trained in any way to be a pastor. They were just reading, singing, and asking for an offering to help some of the neighbors who couldn’t make ends meet.
Then the group grew to 50 people. Dmitri and his wife were fired from their jobs and their sons were expelled from school.
The group grew to 75…and then an officer came and beat Dmitri and threatened to send him to jail if they didn’t shut down their “church” immediately. He was very hurt.
“As the officer pushed his way back toward the door, a small grandmother took her life in her hands, stepped out of the anonymity of that worshiping community, and waved a finger in the officer’s face. Sounding like an Old Testament prophet, she declared, “You have laid hands on a man of God and you will NOT survive!”
That happened on a Tuesday evening—and on Thursday night the officer dropped dead of a heart attack. The fear of God swept through the community. At the next house-church service, more than one hundred and fifty people showed up. The authorities couldn’t let this continue, so Dmitri went to jail for seventeen years.”
“Indeed, it was a painful story. Dmitri spoke quietly of long, heart-wrenching separation. He spoke of sweat, blood, and tears. He talked about sons growing up without their father in the house. He described a poor, struggling family enduring great hardship.
This was not the kind of inspirational testimony that we love to celebrate; this was raw, biblical faith. This was the story of one man who refused to let go of Jesus and refused to stop telling the Good News to his family and neighbors.”
But there is more to this story.
“For seventeen years in prison, every morning at daybreak, Dmitri would stand at attention by his bed. As was his custom, he would face the east, raise his arms in praise to God, and then he would sing a HeartSong™ to Jesus.
The reaction of the other prisoners was predictable. Dmitri recounted the laughter, the cursing, the jeers. The other prisoners banged metals cups against the iron bars in angry protest. They threw food and sometimes human waste to try to shut him up and extinguish the only true light shining in that dark place every morning at dawn.
There was another discipline too, another custom that Dmitri told me about. Whenever he found a scrap of paper in the prison, he would sneak it back to his cell. There he would pull out a stub of a pencil or a tiny piece of charcoal that he had saved, and he would write on that scrap of paper, as tiny as he could, all the Bible verses and scriptural stories or songs that he could remember.
When the scrap was completely filled, he would walk to the corner of his little jail cell where there was a concrete pillar that constantly dripped water—except in the wintertime when the moisture became a solid coat of ice on the inside surface of his cell. Dmitri would take the paper fragment, reach as high as he possibly could, and stick it on that damp pillar as a praise offering to God.”
This went on for 17 years. 17 years!
The officers tried to make him stop by threatening his family, beating him, and even telling him that his whole family was dead.
One morning, He found a whole sheet of paper and wrote out all the verses he could think of and the words to every worship song he knew, and put it in full view of the guards.
This was the last straw for the guards. They were going to execute him the next day.
“Dmitri was dragged from his cell. As he was dragged down the corridor in the center of the prison, the strangest thing happened. Before they reached the door leading to the courtyard—before stepping out into the place of execution—fifteen hundred hardened criminals stood at attention by their beds. They faced the east and they began to sing. Dmitri told me that it sounded to him like the greatest choir in all of human history. Fifteen hundred criminals raised their arms and began to sing the HeartSong that they had heard Dmitri sing to Jesus every morning for all of those years.
Dmitri’s jailers instantly released their hold on his arms and stepped away from him in terror. One of them demanded to know, “Who are you?”
Dmitri straightened his back and stood as tall and as proud as he could. He responded: “I am a son of the Living God, and Jesus is His name!”
The guards returned him to his cell. Sometime later, Dmitri was released and he returned to his family.”
There’s not really much more I can say. If that story doesn’t move you, then nothing I say will either.
But I will leave you with this.
All quotes are taken from Nik Ripken’s The Insanity of God
