Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast I have with me. Dr. Heath Lambert. He’s the Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church, Jacksonville, Florida. Prior to serving at First Baptist Church, Pastor Heath served as the Executive Director here at ACBC and is a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He’s the author of several books, including Finally Free: Fighting for Purity with the Power of Grace, A Theology of Biblical Counseling: The Doctrinal Foundations of Counseling Ministry, and The Great Love of God. He is married to Lauren and they have three children: Carson, Chloe, and Connor.
Heath, it’s always good to have you back on the Truth in Love podcast. So grateful for you starting this whole thing. In the coming year, in 2024. We will surpass 500 episodes. Would you have ever imagined something like that?
Heath Lambert: No, now we were going to give it a run back in the day and see if it worked, and I kind of thought maybe it would, maybe it won’t, but it’s worth a shot. So that’s funny.
Dale Johnson: Here we are. The ripple effect is pretty wild, and the Lord continues to bless, listeners growing consistently, and yeah, grateful for that vision that you had that we’re still picking the fruit off, man. Well, listen, it’s good to have you here. I want to say first of all everybody Merry Christmas. We’re so glad to be able to release a podcast on Christmas Day, and hopefully, you’re celebrating the birth of our Savior and looking forward to His coming again.
Heath, the reason we have you here is we want to talk about Christmas traditions. You actually started this years ago. We’ve continued to do this. This has been one of my favorite times of year to listen to those who’ve been a part of the biblical counseling movement and to just hear a little bit about what goes on in their house at Christmas. Now, before we get to that, I do think it’s important everywhere I go people say man, how is Heath? Is he doing okay? I’m going to give you a chance to say how Heath is doing so you can just tell everybody how things are going for you.
Heath Lambert: Well, I appreciate that. I’ve had too many surgeries not to elicit such questions. So I appreciate it. I’m very, very thankful that I just got done with a series of meetings with my neurosurgery and neurology team. I had actually right after the ACBC conference this year I started having a recurrence of symptoms. They weren’t as bad as what I’ve had in the past, but it was concerning to everybody, so I had a new round of tests and met with all the folks, and the good news is that my MRI is clean for the first time in five years, so I don’t have any compression on that troubling nerve in my brain and since that’s the case then I don’t need surgery. So that’s good. So I’m very, very thankful for that. The bad news on that is that I’m going to have some permanent nerve damage there; it’s just been too much between blood vessels and scar tissue and surgeries and actually probably even a viral issue that they think now happened a couple of years ago, that nerve has just been through too much and it’s going to cause me trouble for the rest of my life. So sometimes, you know means a little bit of trouble talking sometimes I get a little winky. So if I wink at you across the table you know I’m having a neurological problem. I’m not getting ready to spit at you here or growl. I can sometimes look a little funny. Sometimes it’s painful but they are very encouraged actually highly encouraged that now that there’s no compression on the nerve that they can treat those symptoms medicinally and so I’ve started a lot of those things. It’s going to take a few months for medicine to build up in my system and that kind of thing but they’re very encouraged they can eliminate most of the symptoms and so as long as I’m continuing to get those treatments I should be fine in terms of talking and chewing and all those kinds of things. So I’m very thankful that nobody’s plugging in the brain drill again and very thankful for medicine that can treat the problem. So thanks for asking.
Dale Johnson: That’s good stuff and really glad to hear that. Praise the Lord for the update and excited to now talk about Christmas. Can you believe it’s Christmas? That’s unbelievable to me. Here we are celebrating Christmas again, and it really does happen the older we get. Our parents were right about how fast years go by it’s amazing.
I want to take us into maybe your childhood, your past a little bit, some of the memories that were special around Christmas time. Talk about some of those if you can.
Heath Lambert: Yes, I love Christmas. Everybody loves Christmas. It’s not like that’s some big revolutionary thing to love Christmas, but I really love Christmas. Lauren my wife she calls me Buddy the Elf. I kind of get a little over the top at Christmas time. I don’t exactly know why all that is. The nature of my childhood, there weren’t a lot of really happy Christmases and you’re getting into trouble with me because you know if you know me at all how much I like to tell stories. I think in stories. Maybe I’ll tell you a few happy memories.
One happy Christmas, there weren’t a lot of them, but one happy Christmas from childhood was actually it started out really bad. My mom was horribly drunk and was being really violent, she was out of it, and she was not functioning. She was passing out. She was throwing up, and one thing led to another. My older brother got involved, and the next thing I knew, my dad had come to get us. We hadn’t seen him in years, Mom moved as far away from where he was. He didn’t even know where we were and he came to get us. I remember that he brought the police because my mom played dirty and he was afraid she was going to accuse him of kidnapping or something like that. So he comes with a police car and I remember the red and blue lights on the Christmas decorations. I can remember what that looked like from the police car on the Christmas lights. And so he took us and we went to where he was living at the time with his wife that we had never met and that was a great Christmas not because of everything that had happened but it was Christmas like a few days after that sort of rescue there. I remember I got Monopoly I wanted a Monopoly for so long. He got us bikes. He got a lot of stuff covered in two days and we got to go to our meemaws’ house at Christmas time. It was just sort of this remarkable time. I mean, mom was horrible. It was terrible, it was going to be a normal losery time, and then all of a sudden rescue and we had a delightful Christmas that year.
Another really happy Christmas memory was from college. So I’d been studying in Israel for a semester and if you’ve ever been to Israel, it’s actually very Middle Eastern in terms of culture. It doesn’t feel, you know, they’re our friend in the West and all of that, but it feels very much like an opposite sort of culture. Loved being there, loved my semester there, learned so much, but when it was time to be done, I was ready to be done and my buddy was studying at Oxford. And so I got a four day layover at Heathrow and I went and saw him at Oxford. We went and walked around London, and all of a sudden, these people were speaking English, and all of a sudden, there were Christmas carols in the shops. And there were these beautiful store windows with green ivy and red bows and I was just like, I love Christmas and I love the West. I love it.
One more as an adult with kids. Everybody wanted a dog and I was being a scrooge and I said, we’re not getting a dog. Dogs are a mess, dogs tie us down. I was leading ACBC at the time and I was like, “I’m on the road all the time. I’m going to leave you guys with this dog.” We are not getting a dog. Lauren, she did me a favor and she let me know in a very Christ-like way that I was thinking about it the wrong way because she wanted a dog too. And so then I just said, “Well, we’re still not getting a dog,” but I was lying and what I started doing was working behind the scenes to go get a dog and so I showed up—it wasn’t Christmas Day because the handoff with the breeder had to happen a few days before—but a few days before Christmas I walked in with what everybody agrees is still their favorite Christmas gift they have ever received and that was a Brittany Spaniel named Simeon. So Simeon had to cross the Rainbow Bridge here a few years ago, but he still is beloved in our home and in our memory.
Dale Johnson: I love it. Now you mention Christmas carols when you talk about walking down London. Are you a guy that is the Christmas music listener before Thanksgiving or are you like “We got to wait till after”
Heath Lambert: Oh, it is an ordinance that we wait until after.
Dale Johnson: Oh man, one thing that you and I disagree with, there’s too much good Christmas music to wait until after Thanksgiving.
Heath Lambert: I am a machine gun guard, in fact, it’s a thing in our house —if you think this is weird then you can email me at [email protected]. But we get up, we have breakfast on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Lauren’s usually gone shopping before any of the rest of us saw the light of day and the very first set of Christmas music that we listen to is the Anne Murray’s Christmas Album and the very first song we play is Anne Murray singing Joy to the World and it does all of our hearts good too and if you’re making fun of me if you listen to it, it will do your heart good too.
Dale Johnson: That’s really great. Now talk about, we start to get ready for Christmas a month in advance before the day even get to. What are some of the things that you guys do in the home to prepare or even to prepare your own hearts as you think about this Advent season?
Heath Lambert: Yeah, once we cross that threshold of Thanksgiving that we just disagreed on, once we cross that then all bets are off and we go nuts. So there’s a lot of things that happen in our house at Christmas time. I mean a lot, it is all Christmas all the time. I will mention two that are probably really definitive throughout the whole season. The first is on that Friday after Thanksgiving we wake up and we usually have something like eggnog french toast or something very Christmassy or something like that. Laurens usually gone shopping but me and the kids we decorate the house for Christmas. And I mean, we decorate the house for Christmas, we go nuts, and it has been this thing that Lauren leaves the house at the crack of dawn, and when she comes back at four or five in the afternoon, the house is decorated. So she’s had this Magic Christmas miracle. This is why she calls me Buddy the Elf. She’s like “Buddy the Elf came to the house.” So we decorate the house and if you just think we’re just secular people who put up trees and are celebrating Saturnalia or whatever. It actually has been a really meaningful time for me and the kids, not just a time to be together and work hard and make the house look good. Honestly, it was a thing every year where we said, hey listen, you have a birthday, I have a birthday and your brother has a birthday, your sister has a birthday, your mom has a birthday, and when you have a birthday, we spend the whole day celebrating it, but there’s one person who has a birthday and we spend a month celebrating His birthday, and we change the way the whole house looks. We are getting ready for Jesus’s birthday.
It was actually Christmas decorating that our oldest son Carson made his profession of faith, and when the light bulb went off, he was like, I have a dirty heart, and I want Jesus to clean it. That was the first time he expressed Faith, it was during Christmas decorating on the day after Christmas. So Christmas decorations is a big thing.
Then another thing is my wife is Italian and she bakes Italian cookies. I mean, enough cookies to feed an army. So, in the ministry assignments that I have had, you’re familiar with this. Every ministry assignment that I’ve had, the number of people that I’ve been in relationships to has been far larger than we could ever buy gifts for. So our solution to that has been Lauren’s Italian cookies. And so she starts baking cookies soon after Thanksgiving and there are just cookies coming out of our kitchen right up until Christmas Day. It’s not just festive. It’s also that we’re doing this to give to people we’re doing this to serve people. We love that this is a box of cookies that it’s going to this person that we love and so that’s helped us prepare our hearts as well.
Dale Johnson: I love that. It’s so cool. Now take us a little bit closer. Do you guys do anything distinct or different or special to you on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. What is that? What does that look like in your guys house?
Heath Lambert: We execute a goat (laughs). No, just kidding. I don’t know that we do anything too different than anybody else, but we are on a schedule. So every Christmas Eve at First Baptist we have a wonderful, beautiful, glorious Christmas Eve service where it’s about an hour we sing a lot of songs. I preach a little differently on Christmas Eve. So through the year I start with the text and I preach it and I sometimes use illustrations to help explain it. On Christmas Eve I’d do the opposite of that. Christmas Eve I find some interesting, meaningful, helpful story about Christmas, and I spend most of the time just telling that story, but then I end that story with a text of Scripture that we could all kind of apply to our hearts and carry into the celebration of Christmas and then it’s a candlelight service. So the last thing we do is we fill up this room with candlelight and sing Silent Night or O Little Town of Bethlehem or something like that and then there is a wonderful precious family that for years now we get together with after our Christmas Eve service and we share a meal. There’s been more and more people added to this meal every year. So that’s a pretty big group of us that get together. We’re having brisket this year. So I look forward to that, I love brisket, brisket is one of my favorite things in the whole world.
So we’re going to do that and then we go home then before bed we do one thing that is really spiritual and one thing that’s really not if you have the strength to bear it. We watch the old How the Grinch Stole Christmas and when our kids were little I don’t know what everybody’s going to think about this, but I told everybody that when the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day that was the Lord changing his heart, he’d been regenerated. So I imposed that on Dr. Seuss.
Then we read we read Matthews’s version of the Christmas story and go to bed. And then we wake up on Christmas morning and we read Luke’s version of the Christmas story and then we open gifts. And while we’re opening gifts Laurens making homemade cinnamon rolls that we eat and then we have Christmas dinner later in the day.
Dale Johnson: Favorite Christmas gift that you’ve given and favorite Christmas gift that you’ve received.
Heath Lambert: Oh, yeah, if my wife and kids listen to this, and they probably will, they’ll be ashamed if I don’t say that my favorite Christmas gift that I gave was Simeon that one year. So his name was Simeon. Simeon in Hebrew means the Lord heard, and so I said, guys, you’ve been praying for a dog, and guess what the Lord heard we’re going to call him Simeon. We got a video of the kids lifting up the box. We got a video of our daughter going “A real puppy. Are you serious?” So that was probably my favorite gift that I have given.
My favorite gift that I received. I feel like I’m not gonna have any friends when this is over cuz I’m talking about Anne-Marie and watching The Grinch and all this kind of thing. But so my favorite gift that I have received for Christmas was Reba McEntire. So, I am a huge country music fan. My country music parents are Reba McEntire and George Strait and I got Reba McEntire tickets for Christmas one year.
Dale Johnson: You know when I first met you people told me you did like country music. I could not believe that but here we are.
Heath Lambert: And I like the old kind, if you ask me about a new guy, I can’t. Now, I’ve heard some Chris Stapleton. I like him, but I like the stuff I listened to when I was growing up like the 80s and the early 90s. I like George Strait; I love Alabama. I like Reba McEntire. I like Garth Brooks. Can’t listen to Garth Brooks because he’s stingy in how he releases his music but God bless everybody but yes huge country music fan and Reba. I’ve been to a lot of Reba McEntire concerts will just leave it like that.
Dale Johnson: Listen, man. This has been super fun as we all celebrate the first coming of Christ and we look to the time when He comes again. It’s always fun to sit down and think about how families make it special and it’s good to hear how the Lambert’s do that as well. So, thanks, brother.
Heath Lambert: Thanks for having me.
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