Give Me Thine Heart

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the sermon's captions — published in summary form; watch the full sermon at the source.

Preached Sunday evening, December 14, 2025, in a full evening service carried by the Apostolic Messages channel; the church is not named in the upload, and its pastor, Brother Epley, was absent recovering from surgery. Copeland said the message had come to him that Monday and that he knew at once he would feel it here. His text is Proverbs 23:26 — "My son, give me thine heart" — which he calls the prayer of God read all through Scripture: God's standing desire for a people who will simply give him their heart.

Before the theme, a word about receiving: preaching, teaching, or Bible study profits only a mind and heart set to receive it, since the carnal mind is enmity against God and not subject to his law. From there the sermon is an indictment of half-heartedness. There is not much worse than the pillow-at-night knowledge that you gave a thing the bare minimum and merely got through it; the Bible's principle, in Solomon's words, is that whatsoever your hand finds to do is to be done with all your might. The spirit of the age — casual, lazy, indifferent — always works its way toward the church, and a word preached profits nothing where it is not mixed with faith by a hearer who responds. Jeremiah 48:10 supplies the warning: "Cursed be he that doeth the work of the LORD deceitfully," where deceitfully means slothful, slack, idle-handed — cursed, in effect, is the one who does the Lord's work without putting his heart into it. Prayer, singing, preaching, worship — none of it can be ticked off a box.

Two stories carry the conviction. As a teenager in Honduras with his father, Copeland lost his passport and searched for it in panic — suitcases, restaurants, everywhere — until joy and relief washed over him when it was found; the Holy Ghost's question has stayed with him: when was the last time you sought for me like that? And in the Philippines he watched a man of twenty-eight, born with little more than nubs for arms and no legs, who travelled thirty hours by boats to reach the meeting and dragged himself across the floor to the altar on his elbows while whole-bodied people stood waiting to be moved — and was convicted that God forbid the man with less should out-worship those God has given two good hands, two good feet, and a sound mind.

The doctrinal centre is the Shema. Jesus called it the first of all the commandments, and it does not stop at "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is one LORD" — it runs on: thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might. It is not enough to know there is one God, to hold baptism and the Holy Ghost on paper; the knowledge does no good where the heart has gone out of it. Jacob and Esau make the same point from the other side: God loved one twin and rejected the other not for talent or wickedness — Esau's problem was worse than immorality; he simply did not care, and traded a promise from God for a bowl of soup. God moves, Copeland argues, based on our move: Paul's work-and-eat principle holds spiritually too, the miracle at Bethesda waited on movement, David answered "Seek ye my face" with "Thy face, LORD, will I seek," and it is impossible to backslide with your heart in it. He closes where he began — Proverbs 23:26 — asking who in the house has given God many things but not, for a long while, their heart, and praying that God would convict the church every time it prays or worships with its heart elsewhere.