Romans 15:3-18

³Remember what Jesus Christ did for all of us. He didn’t just do things that made himself happy. No. He let those cheeky people say bad things about him, like we read in God’s book, “People said bad things about you, God, and they said those same bad things about me.”

⁴A long time ago God got his men to write things in his book. He did this to teach us mob here today about God. As we think about those things that they wrote, God cheers us up and helps us keep going for him, and we know for sure that God will do everything he promised to do for us.

⁵I want God, the Father of our leader, Jesus Christ, to do this for you. He is the one that can cheer people up and keeps them going. I’m asking him to help you follow Jesus Christ properly so that you all live happy together like one family. Then you will all thank him and say that he is really good.

⁷So be friendly to each other, just like Jesus Christ is friendly to you. Then people will say that God is really good.

⁸Remember this. Jesus Christ came here and worked for his own tribe, the Jewish people. A long time ago God promised some things to their elders, and later, Jesus came to show them that God will do what he promised.

⁹And he came for the people that are not Jews too, to show them that God is good to them, so that they will thank him and tell everybody, “God is really good.” God got his men to write about this, and their words are in God's book. One of them wrote, “Alright God, I will tell all the people that are not Jews about you, And I will sing to you and say, ‘You are really great.’”

¹⁰And another one of God's men wrote, “You mob that are not Jews can be happy, together with God’s people.”

¹¹And another one of God's men wrote, “All you mob that are not Jews can say, ‘God is really great,’ And all the people everywhere can say, ‘God is really good.’”

¹²And another one of God’s men, called Isaiah, wrote, “A Jewish man from Jesse’s family will get up and he will be the leader of all the people that are not Jews. They will be sure about him and trust him.”

¹³You see, you can be sure about God. So now I ask him to help you trust him properly, and to make you really happy, and really quiet and settled inside yourselves. Then you will be really sure that God will do everything that he said he will do. The Holy Spirit will use his power to do that.

¹⁴My friends, I’m sure that you know these things that I tell you now in this letter. Before I started to write this letter I remembered that you are good people and that you know a lot, and you even teach each other about these things. But I got brave and started to write to you anyway, to get you to think a bit more about some of these things. God is good to me

¹⁶and he picked me out to be a special worker for Jesus Christ. My job is to tell the good news about Jesus to you mob that are not Jews. Then God’s spirit works in you to make you good and right, and God is really happy with you. It is like I give you to God, like a really good present.

¹⁷So I’m happy to tell everybody about things that Jesus Christ has helped me do in my work for God.

¹⁸But I’m not happy to tell about things that I did just by myself. I just want to tell about whatever Jesus Christ did. He used me, but he is the one who did it. He got me to tell his true message to people that don’t know God, and his Holy Spirit got me to do powerful things too. After they heard my message and saw the things I did they turned around and believed God. I started to tell people in Jerusalem the good message about Jesus Christ and I kept telling people that message everywhere I went, right out to Illyricum.