Nashville First Baptist Church

In this message, we look at what happens when the hard work is done and despair moves in. We consider how God's holiness sets a table for people who repent, how the joy of the Lord becomes a stronghold, and how God roots His people in rhythms and routines that rehearse His story. It all leads to Jesus, who endured the cross for the joy set before Him, and to the Lord's Table.

Getting started takes courage, but keeping it going takes something else entirely. In Nehemiah 4–6, the work on Jerusalem's wall is halfway done, and the opposition gets organized. This sermon walks through five old tactics the enemy uses to stop what God has started: derision, dread, division, distraction, and deception. 

Through the prophet Haggai, God calls them to stop and "consider your ways." This message looks at delayed obedience, the emptiness of misplaced priorities, and the promise that the latter glory will be greater than the former. It points to Jesus as the true and final temple and asks what rebuilding looks like for us today.

Priests, goldsmiths, merchants and a father with his daughters all worked on the wall, and not one professional builder is named. The sermon asks where your gifts meet your griefs, and ends with the Savior who stooped to serve.

Dr. West draws five principles from the chapter for how God's work gets done and how He leads people into it. The sermon ends by pointing past Nehemiah to Jesus, the true and better Nehemiah, who finishes what no human reformer can.

Have you ever been up in the middle of the night with a problem you couldn't set down? Nehemiah rode around the broken walls of Jerusalem at night, counting stones and telling no one — and most of us know something about that. This message is an overview of Ezra-Nehemiah, a hundred years of God's people walking back into a ruin and trying to put the pieces back together. 

The first sound in the Bible's great rebuilding story isn't a hammer or a prayer meeting. It's God quietly stirring the heart of a pagan king. As we begin a new season in Ezra and Nehemiah, we look at why these neglected books matter for a church that needs reviving, and it's a story about seasons of waning and rebuilding. Ezra 1 shows us three things about God. He keeps his promises on his own time; he stirs hearts for his purposes, and he restores what exile carried away. All of it points past the rebuilt temple to Jesus, the one who rebuilds ruined lives from the heart outward.

We live in what's been called a self-defined age — an age that assumes we get to make truth up for ourselves. But you cannot run a hospital, a courtroom, or a marriage on "my truth," and a faith you assemble a vibe here and a verse there has no grandmother and no grandchildren. This week, Dr. Thomas West looks at Paul's final letter to Timothy and the idea that no one in Scripture produces truth; we are only ever custodians of it.

Jesus talked about money more than almost anything else, and never once because heaven was short on funds. In Matthew 6, He treats your treasure as a paper trail that leads straight to your heart — and then flips the way we assume it works, showing that the heart follows the treasure, not the other way around. This message walks through what Jesus teaches about treasure: God owns everything, heaven is our home, and we were made to live for the line of eternity rather than the dot of this brief life.