I don’t usually blog about work but I wanted to write about something God has orchestrated in my professional life. I work as a technical consultant for a local consulting firm here in Omaha. Just a couple of months ago I was doing a gig for one of our clients who is located in the heart of of downtown Omaha. I was traveling over an hour each way to do this gig. I also found myself doing basically the same kind of analyst work I’ve been doing for the past several years which is fine, but the travel each day was a killer. To shorten a somewhat long story I would just like to say that God ended that contract. He has also put me onto a project with some other consultants in our firm. I am only traveling half the distance for work and I am working with a dear friend who is a Christ follower, and with some other folks who have professional skills I dearly want to learn. The project will last a couple of years and I will be getting some wonderful hands on experience using development tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005 Database, and C# (Sharp).Net. Included with these tools I will be learning about Reporting Services in the .Net framework, LINQ which stands for Language Integrated Query which is used to easily hook queried data from a database into your code, and AJAX which is a group of interrelated techniques used for creating interactive web applications. With these techniques you can retrieve data from the web server in the background without interfering with the behavior of the existing web page. Needless to say I am extremely excited. I am giving all the glory to God. Ok, enough of the geeks stuff, now for some Romans.

This morning, Pastor Pat continued directing us through our verse by verse bible study of Romans. This morning we looked at Romans 1 and verse 18. Romans 1:18 thru 3:20 is a section of text in the bible some scholars have deemed the most horrible part of the New Testament. Why is that you might ask? It is because Paul, with inspiration from the Holy Spirit, is writing about God’s wrath upon sinful man. According to Pat, and I would have to agree, we look at this section of scripture because it shows just how good the “good news” of Jesus Christ is. Pastor Pat broke down this section between Rom. 1:18 and 3:20 into a theme of sorts titled:

Three Universals Regarding the Wrath of God that help us see just how good the Gospel of Christ really is.

This is sort of like having to come to grips with the problem in order to see just how wonderful the solution is. The first universal is; God’s wrath is universally revealed. This “horrible” section begins with Roman 1:18 and the revealing of God’s wrath. God’s wrath is being revealed against those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. This truth, that men suppress, is the truth of God which has been made known to them. (Rom. 1:19) This suppressing is more easily known as actively pushing the truth down, or holding it down, like someone would hold something under water. This is idolatry. For when you are pushing down the truth of God you are also making a god in your own image. This is much like I’ve heard many times “I know in my heart who God really is.” Oh, really? Is He the same God who is revealed in scriptures?

As Pat wrapped up our study he provided a neat quote from John Calvin that points to this deception:

The human heart is an idol factory.

Yeah I know, but to me God is ……… (insert your favorite attribute here)

You can hear the audio of the sermon here.