Matters of the Heart #4: A Heart That Remembers

Matters of the heart decide what your life produces, because the heart is the factory God works through. In this fourth message of the series, the pastor teaches on a heart that remembers: a heart that trusts the Lord like a tree planted by the river, keeps itself tender, and refuses to forget what God has already done. It continues from Matters of the Heart #3 — Overcoming Heart Failure and Choosing God First.

Below you will find the full video, a structured summary of the sermon, the Scripture behind each point (linked to the New King James Version on Bible Gateway), a timestamped outline, and practical steps you can take this week.

Sermon at a Glance

This message was preached at NTC Ministries and posted on December 7, 2021. The pastor explains that he has taught matters of the heart before, more than once, and keeps returning to it because the world works from the outside in while God works from the inside out. Whatever blessing or goodness comes into your life, he says, comes through the heart.

The message moves from Jeremiah 17 through the history of the church’s reformations and into Mark 6 and 8, where the disciples saw three great miracles and still did not understand. He closes with testimonies and a call to remember the goodness of God.

Matters of the Heart: A Tree Planted by the Waters

The pastor opens in Jeremiah 17:7–10, a passage that sets something very good beside something that is not. “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, and whose hope is the Lord.” Such a person, the prophet says, will be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river and will not fear when heat comes.

He draws out the picture slowly. The heat, the drought and the adverse situations are all still present outside the tree. Yet its leaf stays green, it is not anxious in the year of drought, and it does not stop yielding fruit. The reason is not the weather. The tree draws its life from within, from roots that reach a supply the drought cannot touch.

That is the parable, he says. God wants believers to get their roots out into the supply of water and life from heaven, from the Spirit of God, so that the problems in the world today do not cause them to shrivel up, hide or worry. Trust and hope in the Lord are the roots, and the fruit follows.

This is why the series keeps coming back to matters of the heart. The heart, he teaches, is a factory for your life. Your circumstances are not the deciding factor; what is in your heart, and where its roots are planted, decides what your life will produce even in the middle of terrible things.

The Heart God Searches, and Why

Verses 9 and 10 are usually quoted alone, the pastor notes, but they belong with the tree. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” God answers that He searches the heart and tests the mind, to give every man according to his ways and the fruit of his doings. We do not fully know our own hearts, so God shows us.

He insists this is not God saying He will punish you because your heart is a mess. God searches the heart so that you can see the problem and change. He points to Jesus’ words in John 3:17: God did not send His Son to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. Jesus came for hearts.

The pastor describes people who come to a pastor wanting their problems fixed while refusing any responsibility. Just give me a better life and let me keep doing what I have been doing, they say. A new house or a large sum of money will not change anything, he says, because “their life is still going to produce what’s in their hearts.” The heart has to be changed.

Matters of the heart shape how the church helps people. When someone comes for food, the church gives food, but it also shares Jesus, because only a changed heart changes a life. Handing out help so that we look good, he says, is religion, and it is dead.

So the answer to a searched heart is repentance, and he wants the church to remember what that word means. “Repent means change.” When John the Baptist and then Jesus preached “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2, Matthew 4:17), nobody asked how to do it. It was simply a change of direction.

Repentance is not measured by how much someone cries at an altar. In 40 years of ministry he has known many people who cried a great deal and were still in the same mess a year later. Show people the goodness and greatness of God, he says, and they will drop everything to reach for it. Some bear thirtyfold, some sixty, some a hundred (Mark 4:20), and comparing ourselves among ourselves is not wise (2 Corinthians 10:12).

Reformation Starts in the Heart

The pastor believes the church has entered a third great reformation, and he traces the two before it. The first came when the church was formed after the resurrection. Israel had been meant to share the goodness of God, but the religious leaders shared only the law and made proselytes instead of disciples. Jesus told them they strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel, tithing mint, anise and cummin while neglecting the weightier matters. They forgot love, mercy and goodness, he says (Matthew 23:23–24).

Jesus then handed the baton to the church: go into all the world and preach the gospel (Mark 16:15). The Holy Spirit convicts of sin, of righteousness and of judgment (John 16:8). Our job, the pastor says, is to share how good God is and let people’s hearts be drawn to Him.

The church later drifted into superstition and corruption, and about 1,500 years on, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door. The pastor points to the gargoyles placed on church buildings to keep demons out as a picture of that era: everything external, nothing internal. When hearts were truly converted, even the world changed. Art turned from images of demons to images of angels in the Renaissance, because transformation from the inside out affects everything around it.

Now, he says, we are heading toward what Acts 3:20–21 calls the times of restoration of all things. Jesus remains in heaven until then, so there is spiritual work still to do. Before the church, he notes, there was no such thing as a hospital, but when the love of God was poured into hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5), people began to build places of care. Jesus came to do an inside job.

That requires believers with the courage to confront their own hearts and trust the hands of the Potter. The pastor connects this to Jesus’ promise that those who believe will do greater works (John 14:12) and to being led by the Spirit as sons of God (Romans 8:14). God wants a people who are spiritually empowered and who show forth the praises of Him who called them out of darkness into His marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9).

A New Heart, Kept Tender

The pastor tells of a parable by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which the world throws every evil thing into a huge bonfire. The devil watches, discouraged, until he brightens up: they have forgotten to throw in the human heart. Unless our hearts are fully given to Jesus, the enemy still has a hold. Jesus says, “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5), and the pastor adds that it starts with the heart.

Every person is born with a heart estranged from God. Through people who pray for us and show us the goodness of God, the Holy Spirit brings us to admit our need. Then God keeps the promise of Ezekiel 36:25–26: He sprinkles clean water, gives a new heart and a new spirit, and takes out the heart of stone to give a heart of flesh, one the Potter can work with.

The key, he says, is to keep giving that heart to Him. Martin Luther had a true heart conversion, yet whole countries later called themselves Lutheran without one. Constantine was truly converted, he says, but ordering his soldiers into baptism produced outward Christianity, and he links that drift to the dark ages and the sale of indulgences. You can say you are a Christian all you want; if it is only from the outside, you have been deceived.

He mentions former students who left the school unchanged and later wrote to say they had given their lives to Jesus. What was sown in them finally came up, and they had to confront their own hearts.

Proverbs 4:23 tells us to keep the heart with all diligence, because out of it flow the issues of life. Christians can become easily offended precisely because their hearts are tender, so they must keep bringing them back to God. Otherwise they withdraw and say they will never return to that church. His warning is direct: “A closed heart is always going to manufacture a paralyzed life.” You lose productivity, open relationships, joy and peace.

Three Miracles the Disciples Forgot

To show how a heart that remembers is formed, the pastor reads almost two chapters of Mark. After John the Baptist was beheaded by Herod, Jesus sent His disciples out with authority, and crowds came from everywhere. In Mark 6:33–44 Jesus taught a great multitude all day, then told His disciples, “You give them something to eat.” Five loaves and two fish fed about 5,000 men, and the pastor estimates at least 15,000 people with the women and children.

The apostles who were doing mighty works were also seating the crowd in ranks of hundreds and fifties. No matter your function in the church, he says, you are always serving. That same night, in Mark 6:45–52, they strained at the oars until about the fourth watch, and Jesus came walking on the sea. They were amazed beyond measure, for they had not understood about the loaves, because their heart was hardened.

Then in Mark 8:1–10 it happened again: a crowd that had stayed three days, seven loaves and a few small fish, about 4,000 fed, and seven large baskets left over. The table follows the pastor’s walk through the three miracles.

In Mark 8:11–21 the Pharisees demanded a sign, and Jesus warned of the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod, which the pastor describes as something that puffs bread up with air and never satisfies. The disciples, with one loaf in the boat, thought He was rebuking them for forgetting bread.

Jesus’ answer is the heart of the message: “Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember?” They had fed some 27,000 people with about a dozen loaves, the pastor says, and they were worried about one loaf. The hard heart was the problem, not the bread; what they lacked was a heart that remembers.

The Power of a Heart That Remembers

“The problem with Christians is they refuse to remember,” the pastor says. People get hurt and forget that they were forgiven and given eternal life. How can an offense take that away? Pointing at all the bad in the world only makes the heart harder. David, he notes, kept remembering God’s love and goodness and believed God would get him through, not a government, a teacher or a man in the pulpit.

Testimonies build a heart that remembers. We overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony (Revelation 12:11), and God confirms His word with signs following (Mark 16:20). The pastor recalls a prayer conference in the desert near Alexandria, Egypt, where a woman brought her grandmother, deaf from birth. He prayed, she heard, and she thanked Jesus in English. She returned with seven more deaf women, and he reports that each one he prayed for received instant hearing.

He warns that if you do not keep testifying, within a year you may doubt it happened. The real battle, he says, is between the memories of what God has done for you and the imaginations of doubt about the future. God makes a way where there is no way, and one loaf in His hands can feed a whole town.

He also reminds the church how the world looked before the gospel changed hearts. He quotes the Roman philosopher Seneca on drowning children born weak or deformed, and an ancient letter from the Egyptian desert in which a man named Hilarion writes tenderly to his wife yet tells her to throw out the child if it is a girl. That was the custom, he says, until Christianity came and hearts changed.

The church at Ephesus had good works but was told to return to its first love (Revelation 2:4–5). Cain offered God what he had done; Abel thanked God for what God had done, and that was accepted (Genesis 4:3–5). It is the goodness of God that leads to repentance (Romans 2:4), so the church’s task is to declare that goodness and let His glory flow.

Living Out a Heart That Remembers

Here are practical steps drawn from this message on matters of the heart:

• Put your roots by the river. Make trust and hope in the Lord your daily supply, so drought and bad news do not decide your fruit.
• Let God search you. When He shows you something in your heart, treat it as an invitation to change, not a sentence of condemnation.
• Repent by changing direction. Turn toward God and start following Him instead of measuring yourself against other people.
• Keep your heart tender. When someone hurts you, forgive, go to them, and bring your heart back to God instead of withdrawing.
• Write down what God has done. List answered prayers and miracles, and tell them to others so that doubt cannot erase them.
• Listen to testimonies. When someone shares God’s goodness, give them your attention instead of planning your reply, and let it build your faith.

Timestamped Outline

• 0:00 Matters of the heart: the heart is a factory
• 1:11 Jeremiah 17:7–8: a tree planted by the waters
• 3:19 Jeremiah 17:9–10: the deceitful heart
• 6:34 Not to condemn but to save
• 7:37 Give me a better life without changing
• 9:42 Repent means change
• 13:09 The third reformation
• 16:38 Martin Luther and the 95 theses
• 17:49 From gargoyles to the Renaissance
• 19:04 Acts 3: the restoration of all things
• 22:18 Trusting the hands of the Potter
• 24:39 Hawthorne’s parable of the bonfire
• 29:30 Ezekiel 36: a new heart
• 32:47 Constantine and outward Christianity
• 34:55 Proverbs 4:23 and the tender heart
• 37:54 A closed heart, a paralyzed life
• 40:56 Mark 6: feeding the five thousand
• 44:41 Jesus walks on the sea
• 46:36 Mark 8: feeding the four thousand
• 49:25 The leaven of the Pharisees
• 51:30 Do you not remember?
• 57:51 Deaf ears opened in Egypt
• 59:49 Memories versus imaginations of doubt
• 1:03:16 A letter from the desert and the goodness of God

Matters of the Heart Series

This message is part of an eight-part series at NTC Ministries. Start from the beginning or continue where this one leaves off:

• First message: Matters of the Heart #1: Guarding the Spiritual Heart and the Principle of the Seed
• Previous: Matters of the Heart #3 — Overcoming Heart Failure and Choosing God First
• You are here: Matters of the Heart #4: A Heart That Remembers
• Next: Matters of the Heart #5: Heart Treasures — Where Your Treasure Is, Your Heart Will Be

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the two hearts the pastor describes?

He says everyone has two hearts. One is the natural heart that pumps blood. The other is the real you, the innermost being living in the body he calls a suitcase. That inner heart is born estranged from God, the same separation Adam experienced when he sinned. When a person gives their life to Jesus as Lord and Savior, God gives that inner person a brand new heart, which must then be kept given to Him.

What should I do when someone at church hurts me?

The pastor says hurt will come wherever you are, so leaving a church does not solve it; it can be running from God. Jesus taught that if someone offends you, go to them, and if you offend them, go to them too. Say “I forgive you” and deal with your own heart. Otherwise the offense taints how you see that person, and only Jesus is the judge.

How should I listen when someone shares a testimony?

Do not sit there thinking about your own story or how you will answer. The pastor calls that not having ears to hear. Let the other person’s account of the goodness of God come into you first. Then, if you respond with what the Lord has done for you, they should listen the same way. Hearing and sharing testimonies is how a heart that remembers keeps its memory alive.

Scripture References

All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:

• Jeremiah 17:7–10 — the tree by the river and the deceitful heart
• Mark 8:11–21 — do you not remember?
• Mark 6:33–44 and Mark 6:45–52 — the loaves and the walk on the sea
• Mark 8:1–10 — feeding the four thousand
• Ezekiel 36:25–26 — a new heart and a new spirit
• Proverbs 4:23 — keep your heart with all diligence
• John 3:17 — not to condemn but to save
• Acts 3:20–21 — the times of restoration of all things
• Revelation 12:11 — the word of their testimony
• Romans 2:4 — the goodness of God leads to repentance

How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.

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