UST ROM Chapter 1

1 I, Paul, am writing this letter. I serve the Messiah Jesus. He called me to represent him and specially chose me to proclaim God’s good news. 2 God previously promised this good news by means of his spokesmen who prophesied about it and wrote it down in the sacred writings. 3 This good news is about God’s Son. He was born a natural descendant of David. 4 In accordance with the Holy Spirit, God powerfully demonstrated that Jesus is his Son by causing him to live again after he had died. God’s Son is Jesus the Messiah, who is our Lord. 5 Jesus favored us who represent him and authorized us to represent him on his behalf in order that all the nations would obey God by trusting in Jesus the Messiah. 6 Jesus the Messiah has also called you who are living among the nations. 7 I am writing this letter to all of you believers who dwell in the city of Rome. God loves you and has called you to be people who belong to him. May God our Father and the Lord Jesus the Messiah continue to be kind to you and make you peaceful.

8 Now, the first thing I want to tell you, is that I am constantly thanking my God through Jesus the Messiah for all of you believers in the Messiah. I thank him because people throughout the known world are proclaiming how you trust in Jesus. 9 I can say this truthfully because God testifies for me that I frequently pray for you. I serve him devotedly by proclaiming the good news about his Son, Jesus. 10 When I pray, I very often request that I might finally succeed in coming to visit you because God wants me to. 11 I pray for this because I deeply desire to see you in person in order to share some kind of gracious gift with you from the Holy Spirit in order to help you become spiritually stronger. 12 In other words, I want to share some gracious gift with you in order that we may mutually encourage one other. Both you and I can help each other by sharing how we mutually trust in God. 13 My fellow believers, I certainly want you to know that I planned to visit you many times. But God has prevented me from visiting you until the present time. I planned to visit you in order to lead some people to believe in Christ among you as well, just like how I have also done so among the other nations. 14 I am obligated to proclaim the good news to all non-Jewish people, whether or not they are culturally Greek and whether or not they are educated. 15 So then, if it were my choice, I would gladly proclaim the good news to you who dwell in Rome.

16 I would gladly do this because I am deeply honored to proclaim the good news because it is the powerful way that God uses to save anyone who believes it. This is true for both the Jews who first heard the good news and then everyone else. 17 This is true because whenever people proclaim the good news, they reveal how God makes people righteous, which is entirely through trusting in the Messiah. This is what the prophet Habakkuk meant when he wrote in the Scriptures, “But the person whom God makes righteous will live forever by trusting in God.”

18 This is true because from where God dwells he is revealing how he is furious toward and will judge every person who does ungodly and unrighteous things. These people suppress the things that God says are true by living in an unrighteous manner.

19 God will judge them because what anyone can know about God is obvious to these people since God has made it obvious to them. 20 This is true because people can clearly perceive those things about God that they cannot see with their eyes. These things are how powerful God is and the fact that he is God. People could perceive these things since the time God created the universe. The things that God has made have understood these things. For this reason, people cannot excuse themselves from acknowledging that God exists. 21 People cannot excuse themselves because they do not honor him as God, even though they know that he exists. They also refuse to thank him. In contrast, they think about worthless things, and they are unable to understand spiritual things. 22 Although they assert that they are wise, they are actually fools. 23 They stop glorifying the God who is immortal, and instead they glorify idols that resemble mortal people, birds, four-legged animals, and animals that crawl on the ground.

24 Consequently, God lets these people do the lustful things that they desire to do, so that they become spiritually impure and they disgrace their bodies with one another by doing sexually immoral acts. 25 These people stop believing what is true about God and instead believe what is false about idols. They reverently worship things that God has created, instead of worshiping the God who created those things. He is the one whom people should bless forever! May it be so!

26 Because these people do that, God lets them do the dishonorable things they strongly desire to do. For example, their women stop doing natural sexual acts with men and instead do unnatural sexual acts with women. 27 Similarly, the men also stopped doing natural sexual acts with women and lusted intensely after other men. These men do shameless sexual acts with each other. They experience God penalizing them in their own bodies. God must penalize them because they pervert God’s natural sexual acts.

28 As these people thought that acknowledging God was worthless, God let their minds become worthless. As a result, they do inappropriate things. 29 These people are completely controlled by all kinds of unrighteous, wicked, covetous, and malicious thoughts. They are completely willing to be jealous, take another’s life, argue, deceive, and commit evil deeds against others. They reveal secrets about others. 30 They speak badly of other people. They hate God. They act violently. They think too highly of themselves. They boast about themselves. They think of new kinds of evil things to do. They do not obey their parents. 31 These people are morally foolish. They do not do what they promise to do. They do not care about other people. They do not show mercy to others. 32 These people fully understand that God has righteously declared that people who keep doing such inappropriate things deserve to die spiritually. Nevertheless, they not only keep on doing those inappropriate things, but they even happily approve of people who do such things!

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