Nashville First Baptist Church

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 ti...

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;...

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, heave...

The one trust you are spending right now, this very second, is one you cannot pause or bank. In week two of Stewards, Dr. Thomas West turns to the parable of the talents and a master who hands over his property, goes away, and returns to settle accounts. The message sits with a hard question: what makes a servant who returns everything he was given still get called wicked and lazy?

We count almost everything — steps, calories, followers, the weeks until school starts — but rarely the one thing Moses prayed we would learn to number: our days. In the oldest prayer in the Bible, the God who made time and stands outside it hands us a way to live inside it well. This week opens a new series on stewardship, beginning not with money but with the hours already in your hands. Time is...

This message pauses to mark how far God has carried his church — and where he's leading next. From two words Israel carved into a stone comes a pattern for honest remembering: real progress, real dependence. The journey moves from twenty years of lament to a memorial raised at the very coordinates of defeat. Then Isaiah 58 turns from mirror to map, asking what kind of church God strongly supports...

Everybody is selling a secret, and nobody is giving one away — but a man chained to a Roman soldier writes to his friends and says he has learned one, then hands it over in a thank-you note. This final message in Philippians looks at the contentment Paul found in a prison cell: not the absence of desire, but a heart so satisfied by Christ that it stops grasping. Paul learned it in two classrooms —...

The thing most likely standing between you and joy this morning isn't your failure — it's your success. Writing from a prison cell, Paul audits everything he was proudest of, and the write-off where his assets became liabilities the day he met Christ. Along the way, it asks a plain question — what are you still holding onto to prove you're okay? The answer turns out to be a trade: put your own rec...

A rushed "how are you?" in a hallway becomes an unexpected test: will we actually stop and care? In this message from Philippians 2:19-30, Dr. Scott Harris looks at two men whose lives put flesh on the gospel they believed — genuine concern, costly generosity, and risk-taking love. He traces a remarkable circle of care running through an ancient church, where everyone gives, everyone receives, and...

There is a particular exhaustion that the most capable people carry, and trying harder only makes it heavier. In Philippians 2:12-18, Paul writes four words to a tired church that take the weight off our backs: God is working in you. This message follows that one truth through three places it changes everything — the pressure to change ourselves, the habit of grumbling under the strain, and the ur...

Working through Philippians 2:1–11, one of the earliest hymns the church ever sang, Dr. Thomas West traces how Christ ran that whole instinct in reverse: refusing the glory that was already his and emptying himself all the way down to a cross. Then one word turns the story over — therefore. This is a look at why the way up runs straight through the way down.

Dr. Thomas West | Philippians 1:12-30 Everyone in the room walked in already finishing one sentence: for me, to live is ___. This message works through Philippians 1:12-30, where Paul answers that question from a prison cell — living is Christ, and dying is gain. Three times the world comes to take his joy: his freedom, his life, and his church. Three times it leaves empty-handed, because his joy...

Dr. Thomas West | Philippians 1:1-11 The most joy-soaked letter in the New Testament was written from a prison cell. In the opening verses of Philippians, Paul thanks God for a church he helped plant and points to where lasting joy actually comes from. Drawing a line between first-century Philippi and modern Nashville, this message sits with the question that hums beneath so much of our striving:...

Most of the moments that change everything don't announce themselves — from the inside, they look like an ordinary morning. In Acts 13, an ordinary church in Antioch is simply worshiping and fasting when the Spirit speaks and sets the global mission of the church in motion. Dr. Thomas West's message asks what a Spirit-filled church is actually for, tracing the marks of the kind of church the Spiri...

In this message from Acts 6, Dr. Scott Harris looks at how the early church faced that tension head-on—taking the complaint seriously, sharing leadership, and restoring unity instead of splitting apart. It's a picture of what he calls the beautiful mess of ministry, where the Spirit works through both supernatural and practical means. Along the way, we consider why caring for the vulnerable has al...

Dr. Thomas West walks through how a single afternoon at the temple gate previews what Jesus is still doing through his people. The sermon presses into the questions the text asks of every life: who is your king, what's coming back, what did you come for, and who is at your gate? A word for graduating seniors, exhausted parents, and anyone whose hope has shrunk to fit a May calendar.

Dr. Thomas West draws out four marks of a Spirit-filled church from Acts 2:42-47, each anchored to one controlling word: devoted. This is not a checklist to grade yourself against, but a description of what Christ produces through His Spirit in people He has bought with His blood. What Jesus began, the Spirit continues — and what the Spirit continues, He transforms.

This week in Acts 2, four answers emerge to the question at Christianity's center: not what it does for you, not what flavor you grew up with, but what the thing itself actually is. None of the answers are comfortable, and none of them let anyone stay where they are. If your faith has felt small or tired lately — or if you've walked away from what you thought Christianity was — this sermon is wort...

Today we gather at Pentecost — where wind roared, fire rested, and ordinary people were filled with the living God.

Discover that the day Jesus left, He gave you three gifts most Christians have never fully unwrapped: His presence. His power. His promise.