Romans 1:5-18

⁵God is very good to me. He picked me out to go to all the people that are not Jews to tell them about Jesus, and get them to believe in him and do whatever he says.

⁶You people are not Jews, so God sent me to you too. You heard God call out to you to come to Jesus Christ, so now you belong to him.

⁷I’m sending this letter to all you people that belong to God, and that live in the city called Rome. God called out to you to come and follow him, and to be his people. I pray to God, and to our leader, Jesus Christ. I ask them to show you that they love you, and to make you feel happy and quiet inside yourselves.

⁸The first thing I want to do is to say thank you to my God. Jesus Christ has opened the way for me to talk to God like this. I thank him for all of you Christian mob there. You really believe in Jesus now and people everywhere in the world tell about you to other people.

⁹I pray to God all the time and I ask him to help you. (This is true – God knows it is true.) I work hard for God, I tell everyone the Good News about his son.

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.