I cringed in Physical Education Class when the teacher asked two people to pick teams. I was usually the last one chosen. Oh, the humiliation and shame I felt for not being as good as anyone else.
I cringed in Physical Education Class when the teacher asked two people to pick teams. I was usually the last one chosen. Oh, the humiliation and shame I felt for not being as good as anyone else.
Their rejection amplified my feelings of not being worthy to be loved by my parents, as a little girl. The messages and experiences in my life had deceived me into believing I was less than others, and therefore, less loveable. My deception of identity, low self-esteem, and feeling love-starved left me struggling to know I was truly loved for the first forty-three-years of my life.
Ultimate Need to Feel Loved
Your ultimate need to feel loved is the primary driving force in your life because it establishes a deep heart connection you are designed to live in. We were created from God’s love, to live in His love connected through Christ. Therefore, we have an inherent drive to keep searching for Christ’s exceptional love in a personal relationship with him.
Unfortunately, we are unaware of Christ’s exceptional love design at an early age. We don’t know, and we are not taught how to grow a deep relationship with Jesus every day. Many of us are told to pray and go to church after we are saved, which is good. However, these acts alone don’t show you how to foster and deepen your understanding of Christ’s exceptional love or your personal relationship with him.
Even though I loved Jesus since the age of seven-years-old, and I said he loved me, I struggled to feel his love in my life. I couldn’t feel his physical touch, which is what I desired the most. To cope with the absence of a loving touch in my childhood, I came to believe a person’s loving touch was Christ’s loving touch. The problem with this deceived belief is the fact that everyone’s definition and design of love was broken and not Christ’s pure love.
God’s Truth Reveals Christ’s Exceptional Love
Because I didn’t know about my ultimate needs, my broken love design, or Christ’s exceptional love design, I kept trying to make my broken love turn into pure love. I was living in the broken love I knew while hoping I would find a better love one day. My quest to find Christ’s exceptional love began with imperfect people first, instead of God’s truth.
As a young girl, I kept looking for his exceptional love in my emotionally broken parents. When you are raised in a home with broken and dysfunctional parents, you have no idea how the pure exceptional love of Jesus looks. You also don’t realize there are other love designs until you see other relationships.
As a teenager, I began to see how other couples loved through my friend’s parents. I also felt the surge of hormones, which ignited my desire to feel loved. Because of my understanding of love, I interpreted the new attention I was drawing from boys as a source of love.
My deceived belief, my desire to feel loved, and my unawareness of abuse led me into a relationship that ended in my date rape. The devaluing words of my father, after being date raped, shattered any remaining worthiness I kept hidden to be loved. My shattered soul plunged me into a mental abyss for several weeks that almost destroyed me.
In the darkness, I could hear Jesus saying, “I love you and I’m with you.” Despite the darkness and pain, I knew I had to choose to trust Jesus and to keep searching for his love or I would stay in the darkness. Deciding to believe Jesus over what I had experienced, felt, heard, and thought brought me out of my dark abyss. My decision to take the hand of Jesus and to trust him is one of the pivotal points in my mind, heart, faith, and life.
My Search and Growth Continued
Even though I made my decision to seek Jesus, I didn’t know how. I also had to deal with my pain, a difficult home life, and finish high school. Despite being raped, I still needed to be love. Over time I began to date again. However, my unawareness of God’s truth and not knowing the signs of domestic abuse made me the perfect prey for an abuser.
I thought choosing a Christian husband would ensure I would be loved. The devil used my naivety, twisted love beliefs, and unawareness of God’s word to imprison my mind. He led me to believe I had to stay in my abusive marriage to prove I loved God and to make sure God loved me.
I studied verses about love in the Bible and Christ’s life over the next twenty years. We all learn in a different way and at a different rate. The most important thing is to choose the right teacher, Jesus.
Jesus slowly showed me a new awareness of the brokenness in my life and how the devil had deceived me. He helped me see how the enemy twisted my identity, value, and worthiness to be loved. He also revealed my unawareness of my brokenness and Christ’s exceptional love design.
The hardest thing I had to realize in my quest to find pure exceptional love was the fact that my love for imperfect people or their love for me was imperfect. Human love could never take the place of the exceptional love Jesus dwelling in me the whole time. I only needed to learn how to let Christ’s exceptional love flow through me and receive it to KNOW I am loved.
The truth of God can set you free from feeling unloved when you live as a partner with Jesus in a progressive personal relationship. He will show you his healthy exceptional love design. His love design follows the two greatest commandments, and the fruits of the Spirit which are your life’s standards.
You Are Loved By Christ
Whether you grew up in a loving home or you didn’t, you may struggle to feel like you are worthy to be loved or that you are truly loved. Your doubts and questions are not the truth of God, nor are they from Jesus Christ. You, like me, have been deceived by the enemy if you are buying into any doubts that you are loved.
As a disciple of Jesus, he has shown you the GREATEST love, to die for you. The question is, will you stand on his proclamation of love for you, or will you allow the enemy to use your past and emotions to deny Christ’s love?
No matter what you think, feel, see, or hear, only you can choose to believe and to live in Jesus Christ’s love for you. Your ultimate need to be loved is calling you to return to the love of God through Christ’s exceptional love living in you. Choose to live in the confidence that you belong to Christ and he will empower you to overcome any rejection, abandonment, or painful love experiences you endured in the past.
Seek Christ with your whole heart. Partner with him to eliminate the lies about broken love you have believed. Jesus will show you his exceptional love because he’s always with you. He tells us he is our good Shepherd and we are his sheep. “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me—15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep.” John 10:14-15 NIV
To help you begin your journey living in Christ’s exceptional love you must renew your mind and heart with Scriptures. The following verses have empowered me to keep trusting that I would one day find and feel the exceptional love of God. Nothing can ever take Christ’s exceptional love away!
(Lord, I choose to trust you and to proclaim), “I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. 39 No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39 NLT
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A Quest for Exceptional Love: Transform Your Love and Relationships through Christ’s love design.
