Most of the time we have been taught that telling others about Yeshua is evangelism. That comes from a Greek word pronounced euangelizō which means to bring good news.
Pretend with me for a moment that you and I are hostages held captive by a terrorist. What would you or I want more than anything? To be rescued and set free! That would be good news.
What if we grew up in a prisoner of war camp and knew nothing else? What if we were enjoying living in that POW camp because we had no idea of what freedom is and didn’t want to leave? How might we look at a rescuer?
The definition of a hostage is someone taken prisoner by an enemy in order to force them to do what the enemy wants and to also force that on others.
Paul said it like this to Timothy when writing to him about freeing hostages.
“Then they may regain their senses and escape the devil’s snare, in which they had been held captive by him to do his will.” 2 Tim 2:26 TLV
Ever spent time in your life as a hostage? We all did until we were freed and we experienced a hostage rescue.
Thinking back we might ask ourselves “what led me to come to my senses and what did my hostage rescuer do to free me? Mine was successful and did the right things, and here I am today - a protector and rescuer of hostages.
Yeshua put it this way in Matthew 12:29:
How can someone go into a strong man's house and carry off his possessions without first tying up the strong man? Then he can ransack his house.
Trained hostage negotiators do these five things: they practice active listening, they express empathy, they establish rapport, they influence problem solving and they work towards behavior change. Only in our case we negotiate with the hostage and we do not speak with their captor.
All of these allow us to connect heart to heart and free someone who is captive.
And we use spiritual tear gas to do it - but this gas only effects the captor and not the captive. We tie up the enemy, Satan, so that we can spoil his house and run off with his possessions which will now be dedicated to the Hostage Breaker, Yeshua.
I have struggled with the concept of evangelism my whole walk with Messiah, having seen it as being a nice softie who makes an appeal.
Thanks to this revelation of evangelism as Hostage Rescue, I can now do this. Part of that is I need to learn to see those outside of a heart relationship with Yeshua as hostages of the enemy and not as people with a difference of opinion.
Straight To the Heart is the training for equipping us to rescue hostages and keep ourselves from being hurt in the process. This - like any hostage situation - is a two sided process. Part of it is directed towards the hostage, and the other part towards the hostage holder, the captor.
Rule Number One in this entire process towards the captor is easy to remember.
Rule Number One: Don’t let the captor be in charge. Yeshua put it this way: tie up the strong man.
Rule Number One in this entire process regarding the hostage is from ChrisVoss,
former head of FBI international hostage negotiations and is key to reaching the heart of the captive. In our case, the other side is the captive and not the captor and think of negotiation as what you used to call evangelism.
If while you’re making your argument, the only time the other side is silent is because they’re thinking about their own argument, they’ve got a voice in their head that’s talking to them. They’re not listening to you. When they’re making their argument to you, you’re thinking about your argument, that’s the voice in your head that’s talking to you.
If your first objective in the negotiation, instead of making your argument, is to hear the other side out, that’s the only way you can quiet the voice in the other guy’s mind. But most people don’t do that. They don’t walk into a negotiation wanting to hear what the other side has to say. They walk into a negotiation wanting to make an argument. They don’t pay attention to emotions and they don’t listen.
Again, we can call our negotiations evangelism, or sharing our faith, or making Yeshua known or something like that. Only recently have I begun calling it Hostage Rescue and if we’re thinking of an evangelism team, that would now be a Hostage Rescue Team, like seal team Yeshua
.
To me that is a whole lot more attractive than being a nice guy trying to convince someone they can have a better life. That may come after I learn to practice Rule Number One for Hostages.
More to come on that.
Blessings on your journey to Heartistry!
Steve