Christmas traditions on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Dale Johnson, and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions to the problems that people face.

This week on the podcast I have with me, Dr. Heath Lambert.

He's a 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 as 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's married to Lauren,

and they have three children, Carson, Chloe, and Connor.

Heath, man, it's always good to have you back on the Truth and Love podcast.

So grateful for you starting this whole thing.

In the coming year, in 2024, we will surpass 500 episodes.

Would you ever imagine something like that?

No.

Isn't that crazy?

No, we were going to give it a run back in the day and see if it worked and I kind of thought maybe it will, maybe it won't, but it's worth a shot. So that's funny. And here we are. Yeah, how about that? The ripple effect, pretty wild. And Lord continues to bless, you know, listeners growing consistently and yeah, grateful for that vision that you had that we're still picking the fruit of, man. That's kind of cool. Praise the Lord. Well, listen, it's good to have you here. I want to say, first of all, to 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, 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 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.

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

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