Romans 1

Paul’s greeting to Rome

1From Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called as an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— 2the gospel God promised long before through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, 3the gospel about his Son, who as to the flesh was born of David’s line, 4and who, by his resurrection from the dead, was marked out as Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness: Jesus Christ our Lord. 5Through him we received grace and the commission of an apostle, to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles, for the sake of his name; 6and you are among them, you who have been called to belong to Jesus Christ. 7To all in Rome whom God loves, called to be saints: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 8First of all, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for every one of you, because your faith is being talked about all over the world. 9God, whom I serve with my whole spirit in the gospel of his Son, is my witness that I never stop mentioning you, 10asking always in my prayers that somehow, at long last, by God’s will, the road may open for me to come to you. 11I am longing to see you, to share with you some spiritual gift that will make you strong— 12or better, so that we may encourage one another, you by my faith and I by yours. 13I want you to know, brothers and sisters, how often I have planned to come to you and been kept away until now. I wanted some harvest among you too, as I have had among the rest of the Gentiles. 14I am in debt to Greeks and to foreigners, to the learned and to the simple; 15hence my eagerness to announce the gospel to you as well, there in Rome.

The power of the gospel

16For I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is God’s power for the salvation of everyone who believes, the Jew first and then the Greek. 17In it God’s righteousness is being revealed, from faith to faith, as it stands written: “The righteous will live by faith.”*

What they did with the truth

18For God’s wrath is being revealed from heaven against every kind of godlessness and wrongdoing of people who smother the truth by their wrongdoing. 19What can be known about God is plain to them; God himself has made it plain. 20Ever since the world was created, his invisible qualities—his eternal power and his divine nature—have been there to be understood in the things he has made. So they have no defense. 21They knew God, and still they did not honor him as God or give him thanks. Their thinking turned to futility, and their senseless hearts went dark. 22Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23and they traded the glory of the immortal God for images shaped like mortal human beings, or birds, or animals, or reptiles. 24So God handed them over, in the cravings of their hearts, to an uncleanness in which they degraded their own bodies among themselves. 25They swapped the truth about God for a lie, and they worshiped and served the creature instead of the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. 26That is why God handed them over to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for what is against nature, 27and the men did the same: they abandoned natural relations with women and burned with desire for one another—males doing shameless things with males, and receiving in themselves the due payment for their straying. 28And since they saw no value in holding on to the knowledge of God, God handed them over to a worthless mind, to do what should never be done. 29They are filled with every kind of wrongdoing, wickedness, greed, and malice; brimming with envy, murder, quarreling, deceit, and spite. They are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to their parents, 31without sense, without loyalty, without affection, without mercy. 32They know God’s just sentence—that those who practice such things deserve death—and yet they not only do them, they applaud the ones who do.