Author: Heath Lambert

A Personal Update from Pastor Heath

Written by Heath Lambert on August 23, 2022. Posted in First Thoughts.

Dear First Baptist Family, Today is the first day I’ve felt able to reach out to you (and been allowed to!), so I wanted to share with you some of what has happened. Most of you know that on August 4, I went to the hospital for surgery to relieve the pressure on the trigeminal nerve in my brain that now, for five years, has been causing pain, spasms, and difficulty chewing, speaking, and swallowing. After surgery, it was immediately clear that the operation came with some significant costs as I lost all the hearing in my right ear. This was very discouraging. As the days progressed and I began to be able to get out of bed, it was also clear that I was dealing with an unusual amount of dizziness and disorientation. Having been through these surgeries before, I expected some unsteadiness,...

Is it Okay to be Sad in Your Suffering?

Written by Heath Lambert on August 22, 2022. Posted in Marked By Grace.

This is the third podcast that is dropping in August, that I am recording in July in anticipation of my third brain surgery on August 4th to relieve pressure on one of the nerves in my brain that’s caused by some blood vessels that are compressing that nerve. I don’t know exactly, as you listen to this, what phase of the recovery I am in. Having been through this twice before, I know that by the third week, I’ve been doing a lot better in the other two cases. I’m starting to get around a lot more easily; I’m starting to be able to do more; I’m looking ahead in that third week to being able to be cleared by the surgery team to be able to do some other things than the kind of slower, more cautious things I’ve been able to do up to this point. So again,...

How Do I Deal with the Pain of Physical Suffering?

Written by Heath Lambert on August 15, 2022. Posted in Marked By Grace.

This week, on the podcast, I want to talk to you about the toil and the agony of physical suffering. As you might know, this is scheduled to be my second week of recovery from my third brain surgery. I am recording these podcasts near the end of July in anticipation of that surgery. I don’t know exactly what kind of situation I’ll be in as you listen to these podcasts. But since I’ve done this a couple of times before, I know that I am in a season of my life that is not fun. That is very hard. I have this physical problem in my brain with blood vessels compressing my trigeminal nerve, and it causes spasms and discomfort and pain and all sorts of things. The only way to relieve that pressure, the only way to fix it, is to remove those blood vessels from the nerve. And that...

Where is the Goodness of God in Suffering?

Written by Heath Lambert on August 8, 2022. Posted in Marked By Grace.

By the time you hear this podcast, it will be dropping on August 8th, the second week of August. And that will be just a few days after what is scheduled to be my third brain surgery that is taking place on August 4th. I am recording this podcast and the rest of the podcasts in August, near the end of July, before my surgery. As you’re listening to me say these words, I don’t know what kind of shape I will physically be in. I might still be in the hospital. I might have been released from the hospital. Having done two of these surgeries before, I have some sense of what to expect. Neither of my recoveries was exactly the same. After the first surgery, after about three and a half weeks, I started to feel like a human being again. And then I got a nasty case of COVID. And it...

Can Christians Smoke Marijuana?

Written by Heath Lambert on August 1, 2022. Posted in Marked By Grace.

Over the last decade, there has been a surprising number of changes in the laws regarding marijuana. We’re seeing a growing trend in the United States of America to make marijuana legal in some sense; not every law is the same. Not every intention for every law is the same. But there’s no denying that the last decade has seen a growing liberalization with regard to the legality of smoking marijuana. What that does is if you live in a place where it is legal to smoke marijuana, it raises a question for a Christian. And the question is, if it’s legal to smoke marijuana where I live, then am I allowed to smoke it? So that’s the question this week on the podcast, can a Christian smoke marijuana if it’s legal where you live? And the answer is no. Christians cannot...

What Should I Do if I Doubt My Salvation?

Written by Heath Lambert on July 25, 2022. Posted in Marked By Grace.

This week on the podcast, I want to talk about doubting your salvation. But I want to talk about doubting your salvation in a little bit of a different way than we typically do. Typically, when I talk with Christians and church members throughout my ministry, when you’re talking to somebody who doubts their salvation, you’re talking to someone who is in a lot of pain, you are talking to somebody who is struggling, who feels overwhelmed because what they want is to be saved, they are concerned that they are not because of their doubts. They don’t want to be without salvation, and so it’s a painful, difficult process. There is a time and a place to be open and honest about how painful and dark of a place that could be. But what I want to do this week is I want to talk...

How Should Christians Think About Plastic Surgery?

Written by Heath Lambert on July 18, 2022. Posted in Marked By Grace.

We’re talking about Christians and plastic surgery on the podcast this week. About a week or so ago, my wife and I were walking through a crowd of people, and for whatever reason, I just started recognizing that I had walked by four or five women who clearly weren’t a part of the same group. It wasn’t like they were in a group of people that were walking. But I walked by a group of women, four or five of them, who all looked very plasticky. They looked the same. You could tell all of them were looking at the same sort of pictures of what they wanted to look like. You could tell they had had plastic surgery, and you need to know I am clueless about these things. My wife and my daughter make fun of me. They’ll be talking about somebody on television or talking about...

A Personal Health Update

Written by Heath Lambert on July 17, 2022. Posted in First Thoughts.

Dear First Baptist Family, This morning I shared with our church the bad news that I now require another surgery in an attempt to correct the nerve problems in my brain. For anyone who was not there, I wanted to share this information with you. Many of you know that since my second surgery last year, I have endured ongoing symptoms of pain, discomfort, and spasms. I have been able to manage some of these symptoms with medication that have stifled the pain and minimized the involuntary movement, but it has become increasingly clear that my problem has remained. A few months ago, I was recommended to a different neurosurgery team at a different hospital to see if there was anything more that could be done to address this problem. Just over a week ago, I met with my new doctor to review the...

Refusing to Celebrate in a Post-Roe World

Written by Heath Lambert on July 14, 2022. Posted in First Thoughts.

A Moral Earthquake The Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v Jackson was a massive earthquake that rocked the entire world. Only time will tell how massive is the number it registered on the cultural Richter scale. What we know right now is that there was a massive fault line separating professing believers. You might not have seen it before, but the Dobbs earthquake has turned that fault line into a massive chasm. That chasm separates two kinds of people in the Christian community. A Chasm Between Two Kinds of Professing Believers On one side of the chasm are the Christians who are celebrating the end of the era of Roe. On the other side of the chasm are those who are not. I have taken one opportunity to celebrate this moment in a blog and another opportunity in front of the congregation at...

How Should Christians Think About Transgender Names and Pronouns?

Written by Heath Lambert on July 11, 2022. Posted in Marked By Grace.

Seems like one of the biggest things in the news these days has to do with not just the LGBTQ+ revolution but specifically with the “T” in LGBTQ+. There’s just a lot of news that comes out about that there’s a lot of stuff lately about teens and adults who want to detransition. They have done this so-called transition to another gender, and now they regret it. There are rules coming out about sports competitions and who can compete, and when you have to transition in order to be able to compete as the gender you identify with. There’s just a lot of stuff in the news, and it seems like the question that I get asked all the time from faithful Christians is, what do I call a transgender person when a transgender person says, this is my name? Do I call them by their female...