Loved

By Gayle Ramsey

Worth and identity are searched for every day, but so often sought for in all the wrong ways and places. "Loved" gives its readers practical steps to live life free from the rat race of searching for or proving their value and identity. Understanding and knowing God's love is where true worth is found, and in Him true life begins!

"Loved" is about finding your true worth and identity in Christ Jesus, and in His great love for you. In this thirteen-chapter book, you will learn to grow in Christ. Each chapter is rich with strategies for overcoming obstacles that get in the way of living the full life that God created you to live. The study guide at the end of the book has questions to go along with each chapter of the book. The study guide is great for individual use or in a study group setting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667821054

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Copyright © 2021 by Gayle Ramsey

Loved

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

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without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written

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Print ISBN: 978-1-66782-104-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66782-105-4

Printed in the United States of America

Preface

"Not that I have already obtained all this,

or have already arrived at my goal, but I

press on to take hold of that for which Christ

Jesus took hold of me."

Philippians 3:12

Most of my life I have been held back by fear, insecurity, and low self-worth. I tried to handle it in my own way, fighting to keep up with what I thought the world viewed as worthwhile, but eventually it all caught up with me. I found myself feeling trapped, alive but not living, watching life pass me by - barely being able to function, and unable to live the passionate purpose-filled life that I longed for. I knew that I needed to change. So, at first, I began writing this book so that I could learn, change, and break free from the things holding me back in my life. But a couple of years into the journey I realized that I was not the only one struggling with these issues, and that if God took the time to teach me how to live to the fullest, then I should share the wonderful truths that brought me freedom. If you receive anything from this book, any freedom or strategies for living, it is simply a gift from God. I am thankful for the lessons and truths that our loving Creator has taught me in His word and through the life experiences that He has allowed me to have, and I am humbled and honored that He has given me the privilege to share them with you, but anything good that you receive from this book, is truly from him, not me. I am nothing without Him, nor will I arrive at any state of perfection on this side of heaven, so keep in mind as you read that we are all alike, sinners saved by grace, and souls so dearly loved by God.

Years of feeling worthless and times of feeling a false confidence brought me to a place of desperate search. I had been allowing the world to dictate my worth and I was playing the game that the world plays. But there is no winning that game, there is always something bigger, something better, and no matter how hard you try there will always be the latest and greatest that someone has come up with for others to achieve - to make it up one more rung on the endless ladder of the world’s approval. I never finished a college degree; I didn’t go out and become a great businesswoman; there were things that I had started but then didn’t finish because I realized that I was chasing my own dreams and not following God’s plan for my life. I am a wife of an amazing man, the mom of an incredible daughter, and I deeply love our Creator, and long to live for and serve Him passionately all the days of my life. But so many times I have wanted to serve myself and do things that give me a name or some glory of my own. Being a stay at home mom most definitely didn’t do anything for my confidence, I mean if you tell someone that you are a stay-at-home mom they may look at you and pause, and in that pause you know exactly what they are envisioning about you - that you are perhaps lazy, that you lay on your couch in your baggy sweats watching Dr. Phil while your kids run around and destroy the house - laundry piled up, dishes in the sink, and so on. A lot of people these days don’t exactly consider being a stay-at-home mom to be the best life choice. (And if the image described above is correct, I would agree) So I had to decide, was I going to spend my time pleasing people around me, or was I going to please God, and live the life that He has planned for me no matter where He may take me. We have to learn to run our own race, but in order to do that we need to know what that race is and be able to know that we have individual purpose and value. If you and I could grasp where our value comes from, and understand our identity, then it would revolutionize everything we do, and change how we look at every aspect of our lives. We would stop making choices based off of what we can get out of things and start making them based off of who we are and what our purpose is. Because of our confusion and searching, many of us have been living like a prisoner, scared and caged for most of our lives, held there by so many fears. Too afraid to be whom we were made to be. I pray that this book will open your eyes to the truths that have personally changed me forever, and that it will allow you to start living your lives rather than just existing. I want to share with you the secrets that not only gave me the key to unlock my cage, but also the courage to come out of it. In the chapters of this book, we will look at things that we feel take away from our worth or falsely add to it, learn who we are, and discover tools that have been given to us to overcome the obstacles that try to prevent us from living life to the fullest; and learn how to live purpose filled lives, full of passion and meaning.

Most importantly we all need to know one thing, that we are loved. The events, circumstances, and searching in our lives answer this question and not always in a truthful way - convincing us that we are not loved. But no matter how much trouble or sadness you encounter, if you believe that you are loved, you will believe that you also have value. If we opened up our brains and put all of the confusion and searching into one equation it would look like this: LOVE= VALUE. Now love looks different to everyone, such as power, money, sex appeal etc. So, we will look at why we may crave the things that we do in life.

I want you to come away from journeying through these pages with the truth planted and rooted firmly in your heart, knowing who you are and where your true value comes from. So, take a minute to put aside all the labels and names that others have stamped you with and that you have made for yourself, and let’s start over, and see what we can come up with about who you really are, and get ready to start living your life the way you were created to live it!

Chapter 1

Trapped

Dear reader, if you are reading this book chances are you have already found out that life is messy. So messy that we find ourselves slipping, tripping, falling and even getting pushed down – sometimes making us feel that we can never get up again. My hope and prayer is that I can share the encouragement, courage, wisdom, and tools with you that God has been teaching me over the years so that you too can live a full life despite the mess. Without His tender and strong guidance my life would be nothing more than a huge heap of rotten failure, but thanks to His truth, wisdom and redeeming power He has done amazing things in my heart, and life. He has settled my searching heart in the vastness of His perfect love, and He has the power to also fill you in every way, making your life full so that you can live every day with purpose and passion.

Do you find yourself in a constant search for value? Some of us may not be aware of our search, but we may at least be aware of our own inadequacies. We were designed with the need to receive perfect love in order to understand our worth, and without it our hearts will feel incomplete, lacking, and hollow. The best human effort will always fall short of giving the level of love that our hearts require to know its true value. So, our search begins, we look for value in the eyes of other humans, flawed just like us. The world and culture will tell us that our value comes from many things, external things that we can buy, do, achieve, or become, and that who we are is pretty much what we do, what we own, what we like, or are good at, and that our value is only as deep as others love permits. With this sort of mindset, we will be very unstable people, looking to others’ actions to dictate our response and seeking a name for ourselves that will gain us the value that we crave. Our search for worth, and identity can steer us straight into traps. In this first chapter we will be briefly looking at some common traps that we all can get caught in, and in the chapters following we will be talking about why we get caught, the different obstacles that can send us into the traps, and how we can find freedom from them.

We have an enemy; he lays strategic traps along our path to ensnare us and pull us away from that full life that God intended for us when He created us. Because of our uniqueness we will have different weaknesses and strengths; what may be a struggle for one of us may not be for another, but this makes us no better, just different. No matter how different we are or what sort of trap we fall into, more often than not our vulnerability to the traps comes from our need to find value. We are all on a journey from the time our lives begin to the day we die. I like to call it the path or road of life, and our enemy would love nothing more than for us to get lost along the path, keeping us from getting to the places that we are supposed to reach, making us ineffective on our journey. At times, our need for value and significance can make the exit ramps and short cuts along the road look very appealing.

Our enemy hates us, he hates who we are and what we were created for, so he will work overtime to keep us from ever discovering the Creator’s design for our lives. One of the main reasons we were created was to worship and bring glory to God. Satan wants to take God’s glory for himself, Matthew 4:9, and he wants to do everything in his power to keep us from understanding our identity, and where our value comes from - ultimately keeping us from bringing glory to God and drawing others into closeness with God. But his power has been broken and through Christ Jesus we have the power to overcome any and all of the obstacles that the enemy throws our way.

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy;

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."

John 10:10

Without knowing who we are and where our value comes from, we will get lost, and caught up in all kinds of messes, all purposed to keep us from the full life that God has created us to live. One trap usually leads to another and another, and it will keep on going until we have become entangled by our fear, failures, and sin, losing faith and hope, and giving up on life.

When I was ten years old, I met a boy at our church. His eyes were warm and dark, and his hair was the same. His skin would get a lovely tan in the summer and his gaze, when it fell on me was enough to melt through the barricade I had around my heart. I was determined that I had no interest in a boyfriend except for friendship, but over the years just friends turned to crush, crush turned into like, and like turned into love. By fifteen I was head-over-heels for him. I could not get enough of him, never in my life had I felt so desired and liked. And while our relationship was very innocent in the beginning, at eighteen it began to shift. Our love was growing and with it our desire for each other. What I didn’t see, even though I was a Christian, was that I had replaced God for a boy. I had holes in my heart, as we all do, that only God would be able to fill, wounds that only God would be able to heal, and a desperate need for the perfect and unrelenting love that only God has to give. Filling the holes of your heart with what the world has to offer or with things that you are not yet ready for will lead you into many traps.

I could not give myself to this boy quick enough, looking for any moment we could be alone was the first thing on my mind. In the magic of his touch, I felt my inadequacies disappear and I would feel my heart surge with value, enraptured by the safety of his love. I held back very little, like eating the dessert before the main course, it made the impact of real life and the struggles that came with it that much harder to swallow. Like the price that the wicked queen in Snow White had to pay every time she used dark magic for a quick fix of beauty, so it is with us when we try to gain value in our own way, through the magic of a man’s touch, or through any avenue other than how we were created to receive our worth. There is always a price that we will have to pay. God has given us love, romance, affection, touch, and so much more that He wants us to be renewed, refreshed and enthralled by, but He did not design our hearts to receive value from each other. While it is our God-given obligation especially as parents and spouses to call out the value in our children and spouse, they already possess it. We are not giving it to them, only helping them realize it. So, instead of allowing my boyfriend at the time, to be an inspiration of the worth that I already had been given, I was allowing everything I was to rest on his shoulders. And although his shoulders have always been broad and strong, they were not made to carry the weight of all my insecurities, fears, failures, identity and worth.

Life hit us right between the eyes; married at nineteen, he left for war in Afghanistan five months later. While we very much enjoyed starting married life, we didn’t experience the bliss of being newlyweds as some describe it. For us we both were rudely awakened by the stark reality that we were still the same people, and that getting married did not magically take away our fears, or insecurities. In fact, we became more aware of them. My husband began to withdraw, dealing with this same realization the only way he knew how. I began to panic; his withdrawal was my worst nightmare, because it is impossible for someone who is withdrawn to pursue with the same intensity as they did when their heart was open. Who I thought I was began to crumble on the inside, so I tried to be the best of the best - from cooking to housekeeping to everything. I tried to win the pursuit of my husband’s affections. It wasn’t long before he left for the war in Afghanistan. We wrote letters to each other. In them, he told me that he had become aware of how he had checked out for the first few months of marriage, and he wanted to do better when he returned. I was thrilled, and again felt my heart fill with a sense of value, knowing that I had the love of my husband. Months passed and by the grace of God he came home safely - he even made it home before Christmas! We experienced two weeks of incredible bliss, but it didn’t take long for the horrors of war and our same insecurities to break into our perfect world. I was still looking to him for my worth and as you can probably guess, with the weight of normal life, problems from the past, and now the war on him, he did not have any room left to carry my value, identity, or brokenness. You see even a man that has had a smooth life, not seen war, and didn’t have much emotional baggage would not be able to carry that weight. Only God can do that.

I have loved you with an everlasting love. Jeremiah 31:3.

God’s love is unchanging - He will always pursue us, every day. He is the only one who is able to love us perfectly and can consistently show us the worth that He has placed in each and every one of us. Without His perfect love securing our hearts we will fall into many traps, as I did, looking to my relationship to give me value. I wasted many years of my young life, all in knots, thinking that I would be forever stuck as a worthless nobody when I was already somebody to God. I had been believing the lies of the enemy and that made me an easy target. The lies that we start to hear and believe can stem from our experiences such as: influential people in our lives saying hurtful words or the things said to us by the actions or inactions of others. Our misunderstanding of who we are will allow us to take these lies as truths. The enemy uses the things said or done to us that make us feel like a failure or useless, unloved or alone, strategically feeding them to us, making us susceptible to the traps he has set. He wants to keep us from the full life that Jesus wants us to have. All traps will start with lies, and every trap will lead to sin.

So, let’s take a look at a few traps that we need to be vigilant for. There are many more traps in life that we will not get a chance to look at in this book, but we will cover some very important ones:

*Doubt

This is the first trap that the Bible tells us about, when the enemy talks to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?" Genesis 3:1.

The enemy, began planting doubt in her heart by confusing her, twisting what God had said, calling God a liar, and questioning God’s motives. God had told them that they could eat from every tree in the garden except that one. Genesis 2:16 – 17. You can see that what the enemy said to Eve was a distortion of the truth, bent to make God’s character seem questionable. And he will still use these tactics today. Using our own sins, struggles and weaknesses against us. He will try to plant doubt in our hearts, making us question the truths that we know. He may pose questions to us that make us doubt God’s good character, that make us begin to believe that God is not loving, or good, and that even though we are created in God’s image, that we an image bearer are the ones who deserve glory. Like Eve, we may begin to suspect that God is keeping from us something that we deserve. Doubt in God’s character will lead to doubt in His laws, and in His love. If the enemy can make you doubt that you are loved, especially by God, then you will doubt who you are, and that you have value. In turn, you may make low value choices for your life. So be vigilant, if we get caught in doubt then it will not be long before we are tangled in other traps.

"Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them,

because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers."

1 Timothy 4:16.

*Envy

When we are caught up in envy, we don’t appreciate who God has created us to be and we are not comfortable in our own identity. Envy produces a constant lust for more in our hearts that can never be satisfied. It can quickly cause our hearts to harden and propel us to live for ourselves and make choices to gratify ourselves - blinding us to consequences, and to how our choices might affect our future. We are often unaware of the crippling effect that envy will have on our own future, or the future of others that our lives are connected to. Ultimately envy will keep us from being all that we were created to be. When we see the value in others and want what they have, but don’t see it in our own lives, envy is at work within us.

A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.

Proverbs 14:30.

With all of the turmoil that envy stirs up inside of us, there can be no momentum in our lives. Having jealousy in your heart will lead you to make poor choices because of the confusion that comes into your heart like a dense fog clouding what lies ahead of you. It soon becomes harder to see the future, and to know what choices to make, how to act or WHO YOU ARE. In this trap we often trade a high calling for a mediocre existence. Settling for just cruising through life, trading passion for passivity