Romans 1:10-22

¹⁰Whenever I pray to him I ask him to let me come and see you soon, if he agrees to that.

¹¹I have been waiting for a long time. I really want to see you. I want to help you get more power from God to make you strong.

¹²Then I will see how much you trust God and you will see how much I trust God, and this will make all of us happy.

¹³You know, I tried to come and see you many times, but God stopped me every time up till now. I want to come and work there with you and get more people to follow Jesus, just like I did at other places.

¹⁴I’ve got to tell God’s word to all kinds of people. I have to tell it to people that have my culture, and to people that have other cultures. I have to tell it to people that can think good and to people that can’t.

¹⁵So I want to come to Rome and tell God’s good news to all you mob there, too.

¹⁶I’m not ashamed of this good news. It is a really strong story because it has God’s power in it. Whenever people believe this good news God saves them. It is the same for everybody, for Jewish people and for people that are not Jews.

¹⁷This good news is this. God saves people that trust him, and he makes them really good. We read this in his book, “If you trust God he will make you really good, and you will really live.”

¹⁸God in heaven gets very angry with people that do bad things, whenever they do wrong against God and they do bad things to other people. They themselves do wrong, but that’s not all, they try to block other people so they will not know the true story about God. And this makes God very angry.

¹⁹God clearly shows everybody enough for us to understand the true story about him. Everybody knows about him.

²⁰Even though we can’t see God we can know about him. If we look at the things he has made we can know about him, that he is really great and really strong. Ever since he made the world we can look at everything that he made, and we can know about him from those things. So nobody can say that he doesn’t know about God.

²¹The trouble was this. Even though people could work this out about God, they really didn’t want to know him. They didn’t want to tell him, “Thank you, you really are the true God.” They couldn’t think properly about him. They could only think in stupid ways. They didn’t understand anything.

²²They told everybody that they could think really good, but they were fools.