Trying harder to be a better person doesn’t work.

The CREATED IDENTITY book and workbook were written for those of us who long for change. We realize we cannot fix ourselves because we have tried and failed. We can’t keep living with the disappointment and frustration of the status quo. We don’t want to hurt the people we love. We are tired of pretending we’re okay.

We don’t need behavior modification. We need identity reconstruction.

We don’t understand that our sin is not a symptom of our badness. It’s a by-product of our identity crisis. We have forgotten who we are and how to act like God’s beloved. Without His intervention, we will never become the person He created us to be. We have overlooked the key to lasting and supernatural transformation. Surprisingly, it’s not trying harder to be good. It’s giving up and letting God get to work.

Whenever we determine to clean up our act, we are smug when we succeed and ashamed when we fail. We no longer revel in the holy mystery of grace. We shift from a heart position of thankfulness to one of continual self-importance or self-doubt. In an effort to please God, we make becoming a “good” person our spiritual focus. We forget that heart-level change is a God-inspired, God-accomplished feat.

Authentic change has very little to do with willpower and a lot to do with admitting defeat. We aren’t strong enough. We can’t do it on our own. When life brings us to the end of ourselves, God waits there—not to reform our behavior but to excavate our true identity.

We must surrender to God’s campaign for change, which is focused less on our behavior and more on the beliefs driving it. Spiritual transformation is a stripping-away process that God undertakes to remove everything that contaminates or dilutes the real us.

The book Created Identity: Stop Improving and Start Becoming shows us how to relinquish the things that are standing in the way of our healing:

  • Our  façade
  • Our pursuit of counterfeits
  • Our false identity
  • Our personal strongholds
  • Our small dreams

The Created Identity Workbook provides thought-provoking questions and exercises designed to invite God into the dysfunctions that falsely define us. Step-by-step, with God’s help, we will finally identify and address the things that have prevented us from healing and growing. 

Check out or purchase Created Identity: Stop Improving and Start Becoming

Check out or purchase Created Identity Workbook

Click here to visit my blog page! https://changedbygodblog.wordpress.com/blog/

About the Author

Audrey Steele was born in a rural farm community in Missouri and raised in a loving Christian home.  Her religious community was legalistic, and so she worked very hard after her conversion at a young age to be a good Christian and earn the right to be called God’s child. Eventually, life’s difficulties taught her that she was incapable of doing so, and that spiritual growth was God’s work in her, not her work.

While striving worked well in college and in the workplace, it yielded few results on the spiritual plane. She was unable to cope with the pain she experienced from personal traumas and difficulties. She grew tired of the Christian game and façade. Being a good person was no longer enough. She needed to learn to be the real Audrey. The person God created her to be, free from the lies that twisted her identity.

God took her on a journey of growth and recovery. It wasn’t easy. She had to be far more honest than she ever had been, and humble enough to let God strip away all of the familiar, comfortable and twisted ways of thinking and acting that she’d come to trust. She stopped chasing fake joy, confronted false beliefs, faced the reality of her stubborn character defects, and discovered the joy of resting in God’s acceptance and stepping into her created identity.

Audrey had no formal qualifications for writing this book.  It wasn’t a pet project, a hobby, or an attempt to start a new career. It was her God-sized dream, an expression of her personal spiritual journey and her desire to share it with others.

God put in on her heart to write this book in 2013, two years after a difficult divorce and six months before her thirteen-year-old daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. Although Audrey planned to put away her writing during the intense two-year chemotherapy regimen, she was unable to ignore the intensity of God’s call to continue working.  And so, the first half of Changed By God was written during this difficult time, in quiet moments when God’s voice rose above the din of suffering. Though the Enemy pressed in to question and dismantle all the truths she had claimed, God was faithful to hold her together.

During the final six months of her daughter’s treatment, Audrey was diagnosed with breast cancer.  As she underwent mastectomy and chemotherapy, she finished the second half of the book.  The words she wrote kept her focused on truth as this trial stretched her beyond her capacity to endure.

If you ask Audrey, she will tell you that her book is proof that God does His strongest work through us when we are the weakest. She understands, through experience, that God-empowered change is not just a religious option.  It’s the only way to move through life’s challenges with our faith intact. She knows, intimately, the chaos and the glory of the process. Because she’s been broken and rebuilt by the gentle hands of the Healer, she hopes others will read her words and finally find rest from their own endless, wearying attempts to change.

Today, both Audrey and her daughter are in remission.  Audrey enjoys life in Colorado as a high school teacher and spends her free time hiking and camping.  Her priority and joy is her family: her loving husband, David, her children Ashley (23), Aspen (22), and Isaac (20), her step-daughter Olivia (16), her parents Jim and Karen, and her sister, Jen.

Contact the Author

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