Romans 1 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.

From Paul, a servant of the One, Jesus — called to be an ambassador, and set apart for God's good news.

This good news isn't new — God promised it long ago through his prophets in the sacred writings.

It's about his Son — who, in terms of his human ancestry, was born into David's royal line,

and who was powerfully declared to be the Son of God by the Breath of God when he was raised from the dead — Jesus the One, our master.

Through him and for his name's sake, we received the gift of being ambassadors — to call people from every nation to trust and follow him,

and that includes you — you who have been called to belong to Jesus the One.

To all of you in Rome who are loved by God and called to be set apart for him — may generous favor and peace be yours from God our Father and from the master, Jesus the One.

First of all, I thank my God through Jesus the One for every one of you, because the whole world is hearing about your trust in him.

God is my witness — the God I serve wholeheartedly by spreading the good news about his Son — that I constantly remember you

and always ask in my prayers that somehow, by God's will, the way might finally open for me to come to you.

I'm longing to see you so I can share something from the Breath of God to strengthen you —

or rather, so that we can encourage each other through the trust we share — yours and mine together.

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that I've planned many times to come to you — though I've been blocked until now — so that I could see real results among you, just like I have among the other non-Jewish communities.

I owe a debt to both Greeks and non-Greeks, to both the educated and the uneducated.

So I'm eager to share the good news with you in Rome too.

I'm not ashamed of this good news — it's God's power to rescue everyone who trusts in it, the Jewish people first and also the non-Jewish people.

Because in this good news, God's way of making things right is being revealed — a way that starts with trust and ends with trust, just as it's written: "The person made right by trust will truly live."

But God's fierce response is also being revealed from heaven against every form of wickedness and injustice committed by people who use their wrongdoing to suppress what's true.

What can be known about God is obvious to them, because God himself has made it obvious.

Ever since the world was created, God's invisible qualities — his never-ending power and divine nature — have been clearly seen through what he's made. So people have no excuse.

Because even though they knew God, they didn't honor him as God or thank him. Instead, their thinking became pointless, and their foolish minds were plunged into darkness.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools

and traded the magnificence of the immortal God for cheap knockoffs — images shaped like mortal humans, birds, animals, and reptiles.

So God let them go. He handed them over to the cravings of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies with each other —

because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator — who is praised forever. Absolutely.

Because of this, God handed them over to degrading desires. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones,

and in the same way, the men abandoned natural relations with women and burned with desire for each other. Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due consequence of their straying.

And since they didn't think it worthwhile to hold on to the knowledge of God, God handed them over to a worthless mindset, so they do what should never be done.

They've become filled with every kind of injustice, wickedness, greed, and malice. They're full of envy, murder, conflict, deceit, and cruelty. They're gossips,

slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, boastful, inventors of new ways to do wrong, and disobedient to their parents.

They have no understanding, no loyalty, no compassion, no mercy.

They know perfectly well that God's just standard says people who do these things deserve death — yet they not only keep doing them but actively cheer on others who do the same.