Therefore I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice – alive, holy, and pleasing to God – which is your reasonable service.

For by the grace given to me I say to every one of you not to think more highly of yourself than you ought to think, but to think with sober discernment, as God has distributed to each of you a measure of faith.

(for rulers cause no fear for good conduct but for bad). Do you desire not to fear authority? Do good and you will receive its commendation,

for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be in fear, for it does not bear the sword in vain. It is God’s servant to administer retribution on the wrongdoer.

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in him, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Now I urge you, brothers and sisters, through our Lord Jesus Christ and through the love of the Spirit, to join fervently with me in prayer to God on my behalf.

and likewise the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed in their passions for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

First of all, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed throughout the whole world.

and I always ask in my prayers, if perhaps now at last I may succeed in visiting you according to the will of God.

For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give him thanks, but they became futile in their thoughts and their senseless hearts were darkened.

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what should not be done.

For whenever the Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature the things required by the law, these who do not have the law are a law to themselves.

Against hope Abraham believed in hope with the result that he became the father of many nations according to the pronouncement, “so will your descendants be.”

but also for our sake, to whom it will be credited, those who believe in the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.

Not only this, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation.

And the gift is not like the one who sinned. For judgment, resulting from the one transgression, led to condemnation, but the gracious gift from the many failures led to justification.

because those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

For I could wish that I myself were accursed – cut off from Christ – for the sake of my people, my fellow countrymen,

Has the potter no right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special use and another for ordinary use?

But what if God, willing to demonstrate his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath prepared for destruction?