Why Start With Your Heart?

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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Transcript

0:15

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,

Why Heart Comes First

0:29

whether it's from the secular perspective of just being able to think your way to success or biblical teaching of taking your thoughts captive and making them submissive to Christ. And I'm not disagreeing that we need to take those thoughts captive and make them submissive to Christ. I just know for me personally, I didn't actually know how to do that until I learned to start with the heart. So if we haven't met yet, I'm Mukkove Johnson. I am a life coach for Christian women who run businesses along with managing families and ministries and all the things In my

Meet Mukkove Johnson

1:16

10 years in business, I've walked through trying to balance those things and most importantly, seeing how dealing with the thoughts was ineffective until I learned to start with the heart. So that is why I start with the heart. We experience things and we involuntarily have emotions that we experience along with whatever we're experiencing in life.

How Emotions Create Thoughts

1:49

And based on that experience and those emotions, we create thoughts And 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. Like, you notice that you're actually thinking that, where you may not actually notice what you're feeling, particularly if you grew up in a home that did not encourage you to pay attention to what you were feeling or even, you know, told you that you should not be paying attention to what you're feeling because you don't wanna be emotional, and you can't be emotion-driven. Which is true, 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 So 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

Childhood Pain And Planted Lies

3:15

alongside you, teaching you, and discipling you in that. And it's God designed for children to be egocentric, to see themselves as the center of their world. And that's something that matures out of us as we grow and submit to Christ. But it's normal for a child to think, like when their parents are getting divorced, that it's somehow their fault or when like bad things happen, somehow they caused it because they... You know, when you hear the things as an adult, you're like, "Well, that doesn't make any sense." But to a child, it does And 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 trust anybody again, or 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. And we may not remember that. It may not even been a consciously... You know, we might not have even been super aware of it at the time. But 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. Or look at your own father, and then God is the father. Like, you can't trust fathers. Look at this. Or, like, lots of other things So with the thoughts being able to be planted in the heart, the heart needs the care, the encouragement, the healing, the affirmation, whatever was missing that allowed that lie to take root So the emotions were around an experience that allowed the thoughts to be planted, so now you need a new experience for your heart. So if you experienced God as untrustworthy, now you need new experiences with Him where you see He is trustworthy And trustworthy doesn't mean that you always

Building New Trust With God

7:03

get what you want and that things always go the way that you think they should go But ultimately, God is trustworthy. He's a safe place for your heart, and He is taking all of the hard things that happen and somehow working them for your good when you stay submitted to His will and His plan. It doesn't mean that once you're submitted to His plan, only good things happen. We look at the life of Jesus and everyone else in the Bible, and that is not true. But it is true that ultimately He is taking and working those things for good, even if they, the things themselves were not good And the idea of taking thoughts captive without knowing how to deal with them. Like, I think of when there's an enemy situation or when there's a war, and one side takes prisoners, takes captives from the other side, they're trying to get information from them. Like,

Taking Thoughts Captive With Clues

8:15

there's a purpose for taking the captive, not just to say, "Oh, we've got captives, and they're, they're gonna stay, but we've got them, and we need to get information from them." So when we take our thoughts captive, taking the time to talk through or write out what are the emotions that goes with these thoughts? How old do I feel when I have these kind of thoughts? How many resources do I feel like I have? All help to identify that place in the heart and give that place for those emotions to be validated And validating your emotions, again, is not letting your emotions be in charge. It's not saying that they're good or bad or right or wrong. It's just acknowledging what is. Kind of like giving a weather report. You look out the window and I see sun or I see rain. It doesn't have to be good or bad, it just is. So seeing the emotions that are there, actually allowing yourself to feel them and see what other thoughts are attached there to be able to see Okay, it makes sense that I decided to think that way. Wasn't right, still need to repent of it and clean that up, but I can see based on my situation, based on my circumstances, my training or lack thereof or whatever it was, it makes sense that I decided to think that way. And now as a Christian maturing in Christ, I can ask God for His thoughts and start choosing to think those instead And when that temptation to think the other way comes up, being able to remind yourself, "Right, it made sense that I thought that way at one time, and I hear you. I see and feel, you know, the fear, the anxiety, the frustration, whatever it is. I feel you, I see you, and I'm making choices from my spirit reborn in Christ, from the new heart that Jesus gave me, rather than these thoughts that I've taken captive because I see they aren't in alignment with God's best for me. They aren't in alignment with truth." And if you're just taking the thought captive and trying to think something different without addressing the heart, then you get stuck in that loop of trying harder and trying harder and just really creating a war within yourself because your head is saying one thing and your heart is saying another. And there's that conflict because your heart is like, "I need to be heard here. I need you to understand my experience." And I just read this analogy. I should have written down her name. I didn't.

When Emotions Will Not Leave

11:38

Um, but a therapist that used the picture of like emotions don't just come and knock at your door and if you don't answer the door, they leave. If you don't answer the door, they let themselves in and come and sit in the living room and you keep tripping over them until you finally sit down and hear them out. Um So just trying to deal with the thoughts without the emotions that created them keeps you stuck, keeps you feeling like you're failing and like it's too hard and you can't go on. So that is why I start with the heart, because God cares about your heart he knows that out of the heart the mouth speaks. So those thoughts are going From your heart to your head into thoughts and then out your mouth And I also liken it to like if you're just dealing with the thoughts, it's like dealing with weeds by only pulling off some leaves or only pulling the part, the top part of the plant. If you do any gardening, you know if you pull part of a weed, it makes the weed happy and it grows even more As the root is down in the soil, in the heart. So

Pulling Weeds By The Root

13:06

to truly get rid of a weed, you need to go down and get out the root. Just taking off the top is like trying to think a positive thought over a place where your heart really doesn't believe that's true And eventually, if you can consistently think a different thought long enough, you will make progress and you will be able to create a new habit of how you think. But it's a much harder journey when you're still fighting with your heart on that. So like you can keep the weeds out of your garden if you just keep pulling the tops of the weeds or keep cutting the top. But your garden will stay weed free longer and you'll have a much greater impact if you go through and remove the roots. So emotionally is the same thing like getting into the soil where those roots are and letting the Lord graciously, tenderly loosen those and keep showing you, you know, this thought affects this area and it shows up over here and it shows up over there like this intricate root system that just spreads and grows and connects to things. Letting him loosen that at his pace so that when he's like, okay, it's time I'm going to pull that out of there now, he can get all of it or he can get as much of it as you're ready to let go of and he knows that. And then he fills that space with his truth and a new experience of him, of seeing his gentleness, seeing his faithfulness, seeing his way of thinking about the situation. So that's part of my

Healing At A Sustainable Pace

15:03

work of not being in a hurry and not being like, okay, we're going to like lay out your life like a garden and see everywhere that there's weeds and we're going to go in and pull them all in one session. I do not ever do that. We sit with Holy Spirit and say, what weeds are you working on right now? What is the thing that you're highlighting and that you've been loosening or that you know is ready to be dealt with to start the loosening process to be able to take that out? Because if we try and deal with too much at once, we're going to make a far bigger mess than we started with because it's overwhelming. Particularly when we're running a business, we have spouses, we have children, we have ministries. I'm in a season, I have children and grandchildren. And, you know, so there's in-laws and there's little kids and my own heart that's still like he's still working on things in me of that needs to come out there. You're feeling insecure. You're being passive. You're being indecisive. And those things go back to like when I'm feeling passive, I feel really small. I feel really young. And so he's bringing new experiences to see like it's okay to make a decision. It's okay if someone is upset with you. You can deal with that. You can manage. You can figure things out. Lost my train of thought for a second. Guess what I was saying is I understand when there's all the things, like that's, I don't think it's ever a good idea to like dig up everything because it's just too much to deal with But even more so when you have a business that you feel God is not saying to set aside or to quit, that you feel that calling of it needs to keep going, and you personally need to be able to keep going, and your family needs to be able to keep going. So His grace and His kindness allows us to deal with it a little at a time as we're living our life Instead of it being like this renovation project that we're gonna, you know, do over the weekend or do in a couple weeks or whatever. Like, He wants to walk us through it at a pace that fits the life He has given us and called us to So while the idea of being able to, like, do a complete renovation and, you know, be the confident, free woman we're supposed to be in Christ a year from now, like, that's not what He does. Like, we can make tremendous progress when we're partnering with Him, and we're intentional, and we're understanding how He's working. But He wants the relationship with us, and He's going to keep working in us until we die. We're not going to arrive, which is why I can show up and say, like, "I am still dealing with these things." I will probably do a podcast on that here in a little bit of, like, some of the personal things that are being triggered in me that like, oh, okay, I still... Like, there's still more to work on there. I need new experiences with the Lord to see how to show up in the freedom and confidence and boldness that He has made me to have, trusting His strength instead of my own So those are my thoughts for today on why I start with the heart. If you have questions, want clarification, I love your feedback. Love to have conversation with you, and we'll see you in the next episode.