Harvest Blog

My mother died on August 14, 2000, after a long battle with Non Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I was 16 at the time, about to begin my junior year of high school, and suddenly without the strongest spiritual influence in my life to that point. My mother fought valiantly and was full of faith in the Lord, knowing both that he could heal her at any moment but also that his purposes w...

For the better part of a year, we will be studying the book of Mark together and the series title is Discipleship Defined. In light of the mission and the momentum God has been building in our church, I felt that it would be essential to define what our mission is again, which is glorifying God by making disciples. If you were to poll an assortment of Christians and ask th...

"This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes" Psalm 118:23 In February of 2013, Harvest Bible Chapel was nothing more than a pipe dream. Jeremiah captures the calling God placed on my heart well when he wrote, "If I say, "I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name," there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary wit...

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?...

As we bring our series, Rest: Summer in the Psalms, to a close this weekend, I’m reminded of so many of the truths that came out of our study. Were I to rank them all, the one that stands out most prominent to me in my life is my need to talk to myself more than I listen to myself. ...

The men’s Bible Study I lead on Thursday mornings has been going through the book of John ever since we started about 9 months ago. It has been a very fruitful time together, with everything you can expect from a good men’s Bible Study in the morning… coffee, scones or cinnamon rolls, open Bibles, some banter and meandering, and a sincere desire to understand the Wor...

I love my small group. And I’m not just saying that because I’m the pastor and I’m supposed to say that. Sure, I have the weeks where I barely get everything together in time to have small group in the first place. But within minutes of group starting, I’m overwhelmed. Not by the stress of another activity on the schedule but by the sheer blessing of redemptive rel...

In the early church, it used to be a lot simpler. You'd meet in the temple courts for corporate worship and house to house for small groups (Acts 2:46). Two ministries done with excellence that fueled their mission-minded emphasis as they scattered into their spheres of influence to proclaim the excellencies of him who called them out of darkness and into his marvelous lig...

At Harvest, we LOVE baptism. It's a big celebration for our church family to see what God has been doing in people's lives. Thus far, baptism celebrations are a mix of new Christians proclaiming their faith in Jesus but also folks who have been Christians for perhaps many years, but never really understood why it mattered so much that they get baptized. At our most recent ...

"What do you do?" This question was posed to me by a teenager at Harvest last week. I had hired 2 students to help me move some things from my house to the dump in Lincoln, and while we were driving one of them asked me what my job was. When I told him I worked full time at Harvest as the Associate Pastor, he looked a little confused and then asked (politely), "What do you...