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Why do I start with the heart when I am working with Christian women who run businesses when so much of the teaching says it's all in your mind, or control your thoughts?
From the secular perspective it seems you can think your way to success. Then Christians teach you to take your thoughts captive and make them submissive to Christ. And I'm not disagreeing that we need to take those thoughts captive and make them submissive to Christ.
I know personally, I didn't actually know how to do that until I learned to start with the heart.
In my 10 years in business, I've learned how thoughts started in the heart and that has allowed me to keep going when I wanted to quit and God said it wasn’t time to let it go. Since I’ve been in business I’ve had major health challenges, 3 children get married and start families while also raising our surprise who is now 9. There have been church hurts and business betrayals, and more.
We experience things and involuntarily have emotions along with whatever we're experiencing in life. Based on that experience and those emotions, we create thoughts. Since the emotions are involuntary, I think we skip over them, and our culture has taught us to skip over them and just focus on the thoughts because those are more concrete and tangible.
We don't want our emotions to drive, but they do have a very important role in making decisions and even living a spirit-led life. Because the emotions are automatic, just like blinking your eye when somebody throws something at your face they're not good or bad. The thoughts that we attach to them can be. And when we're children particularly, we don't have the filters or the ability to reason, discern things, especially if someone is not walking alongside you, teaching you, and discipling you in that.
God designed for children to be egocentric, to see themselves as the center of their world. That's something that matures out of us as we grow and submit to Christ. But it's normal for a child to think, their parent’s divorce is their fault. As an adult, you can see that doesn't make any sense. To a child, it does.
The enemy knows that about our human development, about how children operate. So he is there offering those thoughts, offering solutions where we can decide, "I'm not going to ever ask for anything again because this felt so awful when I asked for this thing and was yelled at and sent away. So I'm never gonna ask for anything again." That's not the child coming up with that. That's the enemy saying, "Here's a way out. This feels uncomfortable and feels terrible. You can take this thought that you're never gonna ask for anything again, and that's gonna keep you from feeling this way in the future." And as a child, we're like, "That sounds great. I'll take that." And so that thought gets rooted in that emotion, in that pain or confusion or frustration or whatever it was, where we decide we're gonna think that way.
That's how those thoughts get in there. So without going back to the heart of what was the emotion that allowed that lie to take root in the first place, it's very, very difficult to get that lie, that decision to think that we could take care of ourselves and protect ourselves instead of trusting the Lord. It's very hard to get that uprooted if there's that emotional place in the heart that's like, "But He didn't keep me safe here, so I can't trust Him. I got hurt, so God must not be good." Because those are lies that the enemy will feed in there, that this wouldn't have happened if God really loved you. This wouldn't happen if He was really safe and really a good father.
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