First Baptist Podcast

Philippians 2:12-13 calls believers to “work out your salvation.” This doesn’t mean working for salvation, which is a free gift of grace, but letting what God has placed inside show on the outside, just as a little boy once wondered if Jesus should “stick out” if He lives in us. The reminder is simple: don’t expect God to do what He expects you to do. Working out our faith demonstrates it, brings blessings, and glorifies God, whether through the walls of Jericho, the widow’s oil, and the blind man’s healing, or through the church serving together with shoebox gifts, benevolence, hospitals, and wells.

Ever notice that as soon as you clean up one mess, another one shows up? In this message from Nehemiah 6:15-7:3, the wall is finished in just 52 days, yet Nehemiah still has to stay alert. The struggle doesn’t end when the work is done. So give God credit when He works in your life, live with integrity, and don’t let your guard down. Rather than praying for an easy life, pray like Nehemiah: “Lord, strengthen my hands.” One day, in the new Jerusalem, the gates will never shut because there will be nothing left to guard against. Until then, you can face every challenge with confidence, knowing the God who carried you through the last one will carry you through this one and the next.

We’re back in Nehemiah 6, where the wall is nearly finished and the opposition is louder than ever. If you’ve been with us through this series, you’ve seen the pattern: the closer God’s work gets to completion, the harder the pushback becomes. That shouldn’t surprise us. We live in a world caught in a cosmic battle, and when you set out to do something great for God, you should expect resistance. Most of us don’t have an enemy like Sanballat, but we face the same strategies every day. In this message, we walk through three tests Nehemiah faced and what they teach us.

What if the biggest threat to your mission isn’t coming from the outside, but from the inside? In Nehemiah 5, the wall around Jerusalem is going up, the enemies have been silenced, and then the work grinds to a halt. Hungry families are mortgaging their homes and even selling their children into slavery, and the ones profiting are their own leaders. This message shows how unaddressed problems quietly erode our families, our churches, and our hearts. Watch how Nehemiah stops, thinks, and then courageously confronts the powerful, why real repentance means making things right and not just saying sorry, and why “Iowa Nice” might be the most dangerous habit in your life. Because confronting sin isn’t cruel. It’s how burdens get lifted.

Nehemiah’s wall is going up, and so is the opposition. In this message from our series through the book of Nehemiah, we look at Nehemiah 4 and how mockery, threats, and discouragement threaten to derail the work God called His people to do.

We see how Nehemiah responded to critics by going to God first and then back to work. We also learn what it looks like to pray and act together, to encourage weary people, and to stand beside one another as a church. The same God who can bring stones back to life from the rubble will fight for us.

Nobody builds a sandbag wall alone. In this message from our Nehemiah series, we look at Nehemiah 3, a chapter that names the real people who rebuilt Jerusalem’s wall, gate by gate, side by side.

Some built near their own homes. Some refused to put their shoulders to the work. Others did double duty. People from outside the city joined in even though the wall didn’t protect them. Priests, goldsmiths, merchants, and daughters all worked together. Along the way, we look at what real leadership is (it’s earned, not given by a title) and how God builds His church through the whole body of Christ, each person doing their part.

Whether you’ve been serving for years or haven’t yet found your place, there’s room for you in the work God is doing. And if you’ve never decided to follow Jesus, we hope you’ll consider His forgiveness and the mission He gives to those who follow Him.

What do you do when the ruins around you become normal?

Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem to find a wall that had sat broken for 140 years. Everyone had gotten used to it. In this message from Nehemiah 2:11-20, we look at how one leader quietly prepared, told the truth about the damage, and got a whole city to say, “Let us start rebuilding.”

We look at it two ways: what it teaches us about leading, and what it says about the walls in our own lives that we’ve let crumble.

Nehemiah had to ask his boss, the most powerful king in the world, for something the king had already said no to 16 years earlier. After four months of praying and planning in silence, the door finally opened, and Nehemiah had to decide whether to walk through it.

This week we look at Nehemiah 2:1-10 and what it means to wait on God, prepare while you wait, and courageously step through the doors He opens, even when what you’re asking for feels impossible.

We’re starting a new series through the book of Nehemiah, the story of one ordinary man with a burden to rebuild Jerusalem’s broken down walls, and the God who made it possible.In this first message, we trace how Nehemiah fits into the bigger story of Scripture: from Israel’s exile in Babylon, through the prophecies of Isaiah, to God keeping every promise along the way. We watch Nehemiah receive devastating news about Jerusalem and respond not with despair, but with prayer, fasting, and confession, a model for how we bring our own hard truths before God.

This week we wrap up our “Under Construction” series with a message about hospitality — what it looks like to actually open our lives to people, not just our calendars. We hear the story of building a spare room without knowing who’d ever fill it, and looking at Abraham’s welcome of three strangers in Genesis 18, we dig into what it really means to love people we don’t yet know. It’s a challenge to move past “entertaining” and into true hospitality: blessing instead of impressing, listening more than talking, and making room in our homes and hearts for friend and stranger alike. Because before any of us were welcomed into God’s family, we were strangers too — and He made room for us first.