Episode #42 How’s Your Heart? with Guest Rachael Gilbert – What God Sees

Hi, friends. I am so excited because today we are having our first ever guest on Good God Talks. This guest is a dear friend of mine, Rachael Gilbert, and she is full of wisdom and encouragement. Rachael is a licensed counselor, degreed in Marriage and Family Therapy. She's an author, an EMDR-trained therapist, owner of BBC Health, and she hosts a very popular podcast called Real Talk with Rachael.

Her first book, Image Restored, released on March 7th so it's currently available and it's a fantastic resource coming from a biblical perspective and full of Rachael's personal experiences as God has walked her through restoring her own body image. Links for Image Restored and for all of the places where you can connect with Rachael are going to be available in the show notes. Rachael loves to help women experience healing and wellness that grounds us in God's love and builds us up in truth. So, I know this episode is going to be a timely message for you. And without further ado, I'm passing it over to Rachael Gilbert.

We are in a series on how God sees us, and the verse that came to mind for me is from 1 Samuel 16:7, and it says that "people look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart". I love doing word studies in the Bible and when I looked into this word 'heart', I found that in the NIV version, it is mentioned 762 times. And when I notice that God talks about something that much, I love to just pay attention and lean into it. I think one of the many reasons that God talks about the heart a lot is because anytime someone turned away from God, the first thing that that person did was they hardened their heart. We see a couple examples of this in the Bible.

Exodus 8:15 and 2 Chronicles 36:13 talk about it, and we still see this today in our own hearts and in relationships and in marriage, and I feel like this is why that God tells us in Proverbs 4:23, "above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it".

So, let's break down another word again. That word 'guard', just in the good old-fashioned dictionary, means protect from damage or harm. Okay, so God's saying above all else, protect your heart from damage or harm. And we do this by submitting our hearts to the Lord, one for his protection, but then, also, we have to do our part by doing routine heart checks just like we would with a medical doctor, right? We go into the doctor and they listen to our heart and they make sure everything's okay. We are called to do this ourselves, and here are just a couple of questions I love to use to do a heart check.

The first one, "how's my heart?". I know it's simple, but this is a powerful question that I actually often ask my kids that at first it took them off-guard. But here's the deal, if your heart doesn't feel right or it feels off, ask the Lord to put a pin on what is off in your heart. The second question I like to ask is, "how are my words?". Luke 6:45 reminds us that "the mouth speaks what the heart is full of". So if you weren't sure about the answer to the previous question about how's my heart? Listen to the words that you speak not only about your body, but about yourself. I remember my husband once said "stop speaking about my wife like that" when I had spoken some idle words about my body. And it was a good reminder that the words that are coming out of my mouth are an indicator of what's happening in my heart.

So once we figure out what's happening in our hearts, it's easier to see what our identity is rooted in. And without these routine heart checks, we can lose our perspective and start to receive our identity as what the world sees in us, rather than what God's word says about us. You my friend, you are a child of God. He sees you. He loves you, and he deeply cares about you, including and especially, your heart. So take time today to ask God-

God, how is my heart and how are my words?

Have a good talk.

And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!

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