First Baptist Podcast

The Journey Home: Stay in lane

We all know the feeling — you’re driving down the road, and suddenly your car drifts. That’s exactly what sin looks like in the Christian life. In this week’s message from our series The Journey Home, Pastor Ryan unpacks the honest struggle every believer faces: knowing what’s right and still veering off course. Drawing from Romans 6–8, he tackles the three ways we try to handle sin on our own — minimizing it, hiding it, and making amends — and why none of them actually work. The real answer? Stop fighting sin by staring at it, and start each day asking the Holy Spirit to guide your mind and set your eyes on the road ahead. When you walk by the Spirit, living for Jesus stops being about white-knuckling your way through temptation and starts being about fixing your gaze on the One who already set you free. There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus — and that freedom is exactly what makes it possible to stop hiding your struggles and start bringing them into the light.

The Journey Home: U – Turn

In this week’s message from The Journey Home series, Pastor Ryan digs into one of the most misunderstood words in the Christian faith — repentance. It’s not just feeling bad when you get caught, and it’s definitely not trying harder through willpower and self-improvement. True biblical repentance, or metanoia in the Greek, means a complete 180-degree shift in how you see everything — God, yourself, and the world around you. And here’s the part that changes everything: you can’t do it on your own. Through the parable of the Prodigal Son and passages from Mark, Acts, Romans, and Ephesians, Pastor Ryan walks us through how the Holy Spirit convicts us, the Father’s kindness draws us, and Christ’s work on the cross makes it all possible. The U-turn was never yours to make alone — and that’s the whole point of the gospel.

The Journey Home: Dead End

Just like carbon monoxide — odorless, colorless, and silently deadly — sin causes damage you don’t see coming until it’s too late. In this message, Pastor Ryan walks through five real consequences of sin straight from Scripture: it separates us from God, it enslaves us in patterns we can’t break on our own, it places us under God’s righteous wrath, it leaves us spiritually dead — unable to fix ourselves no matter how hard we try — and perhaps most dangerously, it deceives usinto thinking none of this applies to us at all. The good news? There’s only one solution that actually deals with sin at its root. His name is Jesus — and that’s exactly where we’re headed next week.

The Journey Home: Wrong Way

Life is a highway — but what happens when we’re heading the wrong way? In this message we tackle one of the most misunderstood topics in the Christian faith — sin. Using the hilarious scene from Planes, Trains & Automobiles, it paints a picture of how sin blinds us to the fact that we’re going the wrong direction — and how we often don’t even realize it until years later. You’ll discover what the Bible really means by sin — it’s far more than just a list of rules. It includes our attitudes, our desires, and even the good things we fail to do. We’ll trace sin all the way back to its origin — from Satan’s rebellion in heaven to Adam and Eve in the Garden — and explain why every one of us is affected by it today. Whether you’ve felt beaten down by guilt or you think you’re “good enough” on your own — this message is for you.

The God Of Life

We spend a lot of time and money trying to hold onto life — but have you ever stopped to ask where life actually comes from? This Mother’s Day, we trace the thread of life through the pages of Scripture: from the moment God breathed life into the first human being, to the holy calling of motherhood, to the eternal life Jesus makes available to every one of us.