Romans 5:5-13

⁵And the Holy Spirit is in us, so we know that God loves us. Yes, God gave us his Holy Spirit and now his spirit in us makes us really love everybody.

⁶Jesus Christ died for us while we were still really weak. At that time we didn’t care about God at all. But he came, just at the right time, and he died instead of us.

⁷You know, people don’t usually agree to die instead of somebody else, not even for a good person. (Maybe there is somebody that will risk their life for a really good person.)

⁸But Jesus Christ died for us while we were still really bad people. This shows that God really loves us very much.

⁹And that’s not all. Jesus Christ bled and died for us, so now God tells us, “You are all right,” and there is no way that he will get angry with us or punish us.

¹⁰It is like this. We were God’s enemies, then his son Jesus died for us, so now we are God’s friends. And that’s not all. Now that we are God’s friends Jesus lives in us and saves us.

¹¹So we are really happy now, because Jesus has saved us and made us good friends with God.

¹²Think about the story about Adam. God told him, “If you eat any fruit from that tree you will die.” He did wrong, he ate that fruit, so he died. And that is the way it is with all of us people now. We all came from Adam, we all do wrong, and so we all die.

¹³All the people that came from Adam did wrong in one way or another, so they all died at some time. This was the way it was before Moses came and wrote down the Law, everybody died. And it is just the same now after the law came, everybody still has to die. Before the law came, if somebody did wrong, nobody could point to a law to show that it was wrong. But they all died, so we know they all did wrong, even though they didn’t do it the same way as Adam did.