Dixon General Baptist Church

Have you ever looked at your own life, or at someone you love, and wondered whether anything is growing at all? Today we explore one of Jesus’ shortest and most overlooked parables, the story of a farmer who scatters seed, goes to bed, and wakes to find it growing “on its own.” From pencil marks on a kitchen doorframe to Martin Luther’s surprising words about what happened while he slept, this mes...

A special message from a church member, Rob Townsend, for this Pastor Appreciation Sunday.

Every Sunday at Dixon General Baptist Church, the congregation ends worship by saying the same words together: “I believe He is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, my Lord and my Savior.” In this message, we trace those words back to Matthew 16:13-20, where Jesus asks his disciples what people are saying about him and then turns the question on them: “But who do you say I am?” Peter’s answer sh...

When God called Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt, Moses had one excuse after another. Who am I? What if they won't believe me? I'm not good with words. Send anyone else. God answered every objection the same way, with a promise: "I will be with you." In this message, we look at how God took an ordinary shepherd's staff and made it the staff of God, why God's very name is...

A servant is handed a fortune, does nothing with it, and blames his master. Jesus's parable in Matthew 25 isn't really about talent or ability — it's about what we believe about the God who gave the gift in the first place. This message asks what's sitting in your own box right now, still unused, because somewhere along the way fear convinced you that playing it safe was the wiser...

You are God's masterpiece, raised to new life rather than built by your own effort. In this message from Ephesians 2 and 1 Peter 2, we explore what it means to be chosen and doubted at the same time: an identity secure enough to hold up whether you're facing skeptical peers, raising kids who are watching more than they're listening, adjusting to a newly empty house, or carrying a body...

Every believer has been given a gift by grace — not the talented few, not the ones who sit on committees, but every single person in the Body of Christ. Using the picture of a symphony orchestra and Paul's teaching in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, this message asks a simple question: do you know your part, and are you willing to play it — even when nobody's watching?

Standing firm was never the finish line. This Labor Day, we ask the question that comes after you've survived a hard season: now what? From Galatians 6:9-10 — if you're in a long stretch with nothing to show for it yet, your labor isn't wasted, because the same power that raised Christ from the dead is still at work in you.

Doubt, trials, temptation, weakness — you don't get through any of them by scrambling in the moment they hit. This week we look at what it actually means to stand firm when life gets hard, and why you don't have to face it empty-handed.

Paul knew a thing or two about exhaustion. He begged God three times to take away his "thorn in the flesh," and three times God said no. But the answer he got instead — "my grace is enough for you" — turns out to be a promise about today , not a lifetime supply banked in advance. This week we look at what it means to stop hoarding tomorrow's worry and simply ask for what to...

In this message, we look at what Scripture actually promises about temptation: that it's common to every single one of us, that God never leaves you to face it alone, and that there's always a way out, even when taking it feels harder than staying put. We'll also talk honestly about what it means to come to God in the middle of the pull instead of waiting until after you've already...

Trials don't send an invitation, they just show up and rearrange everything. In week two of "Tested Faith," we look at what James and Peter both say about what's actually happening underneath the pain of a hard season: that trials aren't punishment, and they aren't proof God has forgotten you — they're the very thing that proves your faith is real. We'll talk abou...

We call him "Doubting Thomas" like doubt was the whole of who he was. But look closer at John 20, and it's actually a picture of how Jesus deals with real, honest doubt: patiently, specifically, and without ever forcing the issue. In this opening message of our Tested Faith series, we walk through Thomas's story alongside the desperate father in Mark 9 (" I do believe — help...

Paul names God as the source of hope, the only place in the New Testament where God is described this way, and prays that believers would overflow with it, filled past their own capacity to contain it. That overflow doesn't come from circumstances, theological clarity, or spiritual discipline. It comes from the Holy Spirit, already at work whether or not it can be felt. Peter grounds that hope...

Paul's instruction to give thanks "in all circumstances" doesn't mean pretending things are fine. It means returning to a knowledge that runs underneath the circumstances. Psalm 100 names that ground plainly: the Lord is God, he made us, and we are his. The knowledge doesn't require the feeling to be true. Keep moving toward it anyway, and the feeling usually follows.

Paul's clothing metaphor in Colossians is doing something precise: forgiveness is a garment you put on in the morning before anything has happened to require it. The person who waits until they've been offended to decide whether to forgive is always starting from behind. And the word Paul uses for forgive isn't releasing a debt. It's gracing someone with what you yourself were give...

Paul's paradox in Galatians is that freedom is not the absence of obligation but the ability to choose service without keeping score. The person with nothing left to prove is the only person genuinely free to serve. Peter adds the practical frame: every person in the community has been given a specific gift, the community is deliberately diverse because nobody has all of it and everybody has s...

Real encouragement isn't cheerleading from a distance or a warm note slipped into someone's gear bag. It's getting close enough to see what someone is actually carrying, what they're capable of, and what they're in danger of leaving behind, and then naming it to their face. The writer of Hebrews goes even further: this community is supposed to provoke one another toward love an...

When someone in your community falls, the options are to close ranks, perform grace from a safe distance, or quietly scatter. Paul describes something different. There's a precise and necessary distinction in Galatians 6 between two kinds of weight: the baros, a crushing load too heavy for one person, and the phortion, the ordinary pack that belongs to each of us alone. The community is called...

Two unlikely friends stayed at the same table for forty years through friction, grief, and differences that should have ended it. What held them wasn't compatibility but something Jesus commanded the night before his death: love each other in the exact same manner I loved you. That's the standard Jesus set, measured against the man who washed Judas's feet knowing the betrayal was alrea...

Jesus gave the Great Commission to people still hiding in a locked room, afraid. The geography he named wasn't sequential but simultaneous: Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. Samaria matters because it's the village James and John wanted to incinerate. Jesus named it in their commission anyway. Paul's chain in Romans 10 is airtight: everyone who calls will be saved,...

Jesus gave the Great Commission to people who were still doubting, because disciple-making has never been the exclusive property of those whose faith is fully settled. There's only one command: make disciples. The rest describes what that looks like as you go . From a Roman prison, Paul shows Timothy the chain that outlasts empires: one person investing in another, who invests in another, who...

We've quietly accepted a gap between what we believe on Sunday and what we do on Monday. But James asks the uncomfortable question: what good is faith that never moves? Even demons have correct theology. The difference is whether the Spirit has made our faith alive enough to produce action. Through the unlikely pairing of Abraham and Rahab, and Jesus's parable of the sheep and goats, we se...

Most of us have quietly decided that witnessing is someone else's job, mistaking our silence for humility when it's often fear. But Peter and John couldn't be stopped because they had been with Jesus—and that proximity, not eloquence, made them unstoppable. The Spirit is already at work in the people around you, preparing them to ask about your hope; your job is simply to answer honest...

In the opening message of our series SENT , we begin, not with a call to action ,but with a promise - the Holy Spirit is already in you. Drawing from Acts 1:8 and John 14:15–21, this message explores why mission is not something we manufacture through willpower or spiritual readiness, but something the Spirit produces through us as we cooperate with what he is already doing. Whether you feel deple...