When you spend years teaching, counseling and mentoring folks, you learn a lot about the desires of people’s hearts. For many years Ron and I did just this, first as local pastors and later via traveling around the U.S. and overseas.

I loved getting out of my normal life “bubble,” meeting new people, encountering other nationalities and local cultures. We were privileged to work with people of all age groups; with Christians from South Korea, Mexico, Ukraine, and Zambia. The more souls we encountered, the more we understood the desires of people commonly came down to the same few things.

The common cry of human hearts

What are the desires of people everywhere?

In a word, righteousness — to be treated right by others. As well as the flip side of that coin, finding the moral courage to live right toward others.

People want to be loved well; to feel secure in the affections and faithfulness of their relations.

They need validation that God is good; that he can be trusted; that he is motivated to give life.

Many live with a hunger to know their government is ruling over them from a position of watchful care and not to harm them.

I identify with all these desires, and I imagine you do too. The universal needs of man flow from the place where we share life with God. God made us to desire justice and righteousness in relationship, for we are made in His image. God loves justice, and continually calls for righteousness. Therefore, we can never escape these desires, or make them go away. At the core of every issue, wound, estrangement, and failure of relationship, you will find one of these desires, unanswered somehow.

What can we do with unanswered desires?

We are ever faced with our powerlessness to change other people and make them treat us right, yet we are ever EMPOWERED by the Holy Spirit to be those who will treat others right and live by the desire to love well. A choice is continually before me: shall I be who I believe in being (loving, faithful, honest, and giving of myself) or let others and life itself change my character?

The more I hear from people in troubled marriages, the more I watch the world, the more I know this: the answer to all our cravings BEGINS with KNOWING God, in all his beauty and graciousness and goodness. Only He can satisfy us when people fail us; only He can give us the wisdom to respond rightly to injustice, only He can teach us what love looks like in this moment with this person. It all comes from hearing His voice of counsel within one’s spirit, and becoming those who trustfully yield to His good counsel.

Jesus often referred to Isaiah’s assignment (Is. 6:9-10): “Go and tell this people: “‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”  OTHERWISE THEY MIGHT SEE…. AND HEAR…. UNDERSTAND….. AND BE HEALED.

People, we must know our God as the first step to a great marriage, as the foundation to an abundant life, as the key to walking in the character and goodness we crave from others. His words are in you, waiting to comfort, guide and en-joy you. Listen for them. Respond to them. As Jesus said in Mark Chapter 4, those who have “hearing ears” will be given more to hear! Quit telling yourself it’s too hard, for the Lord said this life would be entered easiest by those who come as little children.

Bless you as you seek life in Him, Tonia