Author: Heath Lambert

Health Update

Written by Heath Lambert on July 8, 2023. Posted in First Thoughts.

Dear First Baptist Family, I need to share some frustrating news. I am writing to you from the hospital, waiting for an operating room to open up, and I will have surgery as soon as one does. The good news is that my brain is in good shape. I’m experiencing no spasms, no nerve pain, and no neurological symptoms of any kind. This continues to be good news about the ultimate success of my last brain surgery. The problem I am confronting is that after so many surgeries, the flesh around my scalp is not healing properly, and now my wound has ruptured, and that rupture must be repaired. The surgery team is going to do that with an operation that will add grafts to the damaged layers and resew the wound. This operation will not be fun, but it is also not brain surgery. The recovery will be much...

Do We Have Guardian Angels?

Written by Heath Lambert on July 3, 2023. Posted in Marked By Grace.

This week on the podcast, I want to answer one of my favorite questions that I have been asked. The question is, do we have guardian angels? Something we hear about a lot. We talked about it a lot. People make reference to angels watching over us and having guardian angels. But the question is, do we? Is that something that we can see from Scripture? I think the answer is yes. I think we can say that Christians who have turned from their sin and are trusting in Jesus Christ, I think we do have guardian angels. Let me tell you why I think we can say that that is true from the Bible. In Revelation 1, the apostle John gets this vision of the ascended, glorious Christ. As he describes, this ascended Christ, one of the things he describes about him is in Revelation 1:16, which says, “In his right...

When Your Pastor Isn’t As Good As Your Podcast

Written by Heath Lambert on June 26, 2023. Posted in Marked By Grace.

Years ago, when I was still very new in pastoral ministry, I was a young preacher. This was in a day before podcasts (if you can imagine such a world), and a good friend of mine was visiting me on a Sunday at my church and listened to me preach, and he gave me some indelicate feedback. We were eating lunch after church. He just heard the sermon, and I will tell you, this friend of mine went to Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, under the preaching ministry of Mark Dever. This dear friend of mine, whom I love, we were sitting at lunch, and he just was exasperated. He said, Heath, I don’t even know why you preach. He said Mark Dever is the best preacher I’ve ever heard, and I feel like we should just film his sermons and play them at places like your church. Now, a lesser...

When Should I Baptize My Young Child?

Written by Heath Lambert on June 19, 2023. Posted in Marked By Grace.

If you are a Christian parent, you are going to feel a unique burden as you bring up your children. That burden is you are going to want your child to be baptized, you’re going to want to see them follow the Lord in the ordinance of baptism. Figuring out when to baptize your kid can be tricky. It’s tricky for a parent to figure out, is it the right time to baptize my young child? I want to provide some guidance on how you could think this through. As I give you the answer, the first thing I need to be honest about is different Christians would answer this in remarkably different ways. If I were a Presbyterian, the answer I would give to this question is very different than the one I’m about to give. I am a Baptist, I am the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville,...

The State of the SBC in 2023

Written by Heath Lambert on June 15, 2023. Posted in First Thoughts.

No Frills In my family, when we want the honest, straightforward assessment of a situation without any sugar coating, we often ask for a “no-frills assessment.” Well, after the conclusion of the meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in 2023, I want to share a no-frills assessment of where I believe Southern Baptists are in the aftermath. Southern Baptists are People of Great Conviction The issue garnering the most attention in advance of the convention meeting was the one of female pastors. As messengers gathered in New Orleans, they were asked to decide whether Saddleback Community Church, led by Rick Warren, could remain part of the Southern Baptist Convention after the church installed female pastors in clear violation of The Baptist Faith and Message (BFM). No one knew for...

Why SBC?

Written by Heath Lambert on June 12, 2023. Posted in Marked By Grace.

As you listen to this episode of Marked by Grace, it is dropping on the week of the Southern Baptist Convention. It is dropping on Monday, June 12th, and if all has gone according to plan, I am in New Orleans with the other messengers of the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, and we are going to be ready to participate in the Southern Baptist Convention. If you’ve been paying attention to SBC life at all these days, you know there are some mighty and tumultuous events going down in the SBC. I’m not going to talk about those on the podcast. I’ve already been talking about those on our First Baptist blog at First Thoughts, fbcjax.com/blog. You can go find out about that there. So I’m not going to weigh in on all that now. I’m just going to say it’s...

Should Christians Boycott Target?

Written by Heath Lambert on June 5, 2023. Posted in Marked By Grace.

All right, well, this episode of Marked by Grace is dropping on Monday, June 5th. That means this is the first full week of June. This is the month that many in our secular society refer to as Pride Month. It is the month when our culture is telling us that we are supposed to celebrate all of the continuum of LGBTQ+. And there’s a lot of virtue signaling; there are a lot of people, there are a lot of corporations that are going to want to signal to everybody that they are with the cause. That they are in keeping with the culture. One of those corporations that is doing that rather famously right now is Target. I am a married man and have three kids. And that means there have been seasons in my life where I have thought Target was an extension of my living room. I spend a lot of time...

Sexual Abuse and The Future of The Southern Baptist Convention

Written by Heath Lambert on June 5, 2023. Posted in First Thoughts.

The exposure of the sin of sexual abuse in our churches created the greatest crisis in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Here are four facts about where our convention truly stands as we head into New Orleans. 1. Southern Baptists Want Sexual Abuse Reform The exposure of sexual abuse jolted the SBC to the core. One case of sexual abuse would have been overwhelmingly too many. Hundreds of victims are as horrifying as they are heartbreaking. This terrible problem, however, is not where the trouble ends. Sadly, two opposite kinds of people refuse to tell the truth about this crisis. Some have a vested interest in the status quo, have downplayed the problem, and have resisted any good faith efforts at reform. Others have amplified the problem to the point of caricature. They...

The Baptist Faith and Message and The Future of The Southern Baptist Convention

Written by Heath Lambert on June 1, 2023. Posted in First Thoughts.

Conviction has always been the foundation of our convention. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has declared those convictions in The Baptist Faith and Message (BFM), which we worked so hard to create and take so seriously. It’s been a long time since Southern Baptists have had a debate about the BFM, but we’re having a big one now. When this debate is over, we will either be a stronger convention or a weaker one. I’m encouraged that the SBC is going to get in the right spot on this issue, but we have to work to make that true. The debate started a year ago when the credentials committee recommended further study into the word pastor before removing churches who employed female pastors. As the convention debated that recommendation, the suggestion came that it was unfair to remove churches...

Teaching the Gospel to Young Kids

Written by Heath Lambert on May 29, 2023. Posted in Marked By Grace.

If you are a Christian and you are a parent, then the most important thing to you in the world is that your kids know the gospel. It is going to be a crucial part of your parenting that you teach your kids the gospel, that you want them to believe the gospel, and that they are able to make this belief and the gospel something that is lived out in their life. You want them to be saved. When we think about that, we also have to remember the fact that there are different ways to talk about the gospel. We can have a very sophisticated conversation about the gospel, and we can talk about the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus. We could have a theological conversation about the doctrine of justification or the doctrine of justification by faith alone. We could talk about all sorts...