1:1 Paul, a slave of Anointed Jesus, called as an Ambassador and set apart for the Gospel of God

1:2 (which he promised before through his prophets in the holy scriptures)

1:3 concerning his Son (who as far as the flesh is concerned was of the ancestry of David,

1:4 and is the One powerfully identified as the God-Man, according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead), Jesus the Anointed, our Master.

1:5 Through Him we obtained favor and a commission into compliant faith among all the non-Judeans for the sake of his Name,

1:6 along with you who are also called by Jesus the Anointed.

1:7 To all who are in Rome, loved by God and called holy ones: Favor and peace to you from God our Father and Master Jesus the Anointed!

1:8 First, I thank my God through Jesus the Anointed concerning all of you, because your faith is being announced all over the world.

1:9 God, to whom I offer divine spiritual service for the Gospel of his Son, is my witness of how I never stop mentioning you

1:10 in all my prayers, pleading that somehow, sometime, in some way, the will of God would permit me to come visit you.

1:11 I very much want to see you so I can share some spiritual gift with you, to anchor you.

1:12 In this way you can all be a comfort to each other through your faith and mine.

1:13 Now I don’t want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of the fact that I wanted to visit you many times but was prevented until now, so that I would have some of the same results among you as among the rest of the non-Judeans.

1:14 I am indebted to both Greeks and barbarians, the wise and the foolish;

1:15 that is why I was eager to bring the Gospel to those of you in Rome as well.

1:16 I am not ashamed of this Gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to all who believe— first to the Judean and then to the Greek.

1:17 This Gospel is revealing God’s justice, beginning and ending in faith. As it is written, “The just will live by faith.”

1:18 God’s rage is being revealed from heaven against every kind of irreverence and injustice committed by people who unjustly suppress the truth.

1:19 And it’s because what can be known about God is obvious among them, since God has shown it to them.

1:20 For his invisible qualities can be seen by means of the creation of the world; we catch a glimpse of them— as well as his unknowable power and divinity— by his achievements, so that people are without excuse.

1:21 They know God but give him no honor and show him no gratitude.So their thinking became futile and their stupid minds were darkened.

1:22 Claiming to be wise they were made fools instead,

1:23 and they traded the honor of the incorruptible God for things made in the images of people, flying creatures, four-legged creatures, and reptiles.

1:24 For that reason God handed them over to the desires of their hearts, into the filth of polluting their bodies among themselves.

1:25 They turned the truth about God into a lie and worshiped the creation instead of the Creator— who is blessed forever, absolutely!

1:26 So God handed them over to their disgusting passions: women traded natural intimate relations for unnatural,

1:27 and men abandoned natural intimate relations with women to be inflamed with lust for other men, spawning indecency. They were then directly paid back as they deserved for their perversion.

1:28 Since they did not see a reason to give God recognition, God saw a reason to hand them over to an unreasoning mind so that they would do inappropriate things.

1:29 They have been filled with all kinds of injustice, evil, greed, and malice; they are saturated with envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and depravity; they gossip

1:30 and trash talk; they hate God; they are arrogant, contemptuous impostors; they invent new forms of evil; they set themselves against their parents;

1:31 they are stupid and honor no agreements; they are devoid of natural feelings and have no mercy.

1:32 Since they know what is right, those who make a habit of such things are deserving of God’s death sentence. Yet they not only do these things, they also approve of everyone else who makes a habit of them.