Romans 1:8-27

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.

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.

²³They didn’t want the wonderful God that never dies, but instead they made models of things that do die. They made things that look like people, or birds, or animals, or snakes or those kinds of things, and they respected those things. They didn’t respect God.

²⁴So God let them go their own way and they did whatever they felt like doing. They did whatever their dirty minds thought about, and they hurt each other’s bodies whenever they did it.

²⁵They didn’t want the true story about God but they wanted to believe a lie, and they respected the things that God made instead of respecting God himself. (God is really great and everyone has to tell him, “You are really good,” and they have to keep doing it for ever. Yes, that’s right.)

²⁶So, after people turned away from God he let them do whatever dirty thing they thought about. Even women no longer wanted to sleep with men any more, like wives do with their husbands, but instead they did things with each other that were not normal.

²⁷And men too did the same kind of thing. They forgot about women and really wanted to sleep with other men, as if they were women. They did bad things with each other, and this gave them real problems. They hurt each other. And these problems were the right thing for them.