a promise that our twelve tribes hope to attain as they earnestly serve God night and day. Concerning this hope the Jews are accusing me, Your Majesty!

I punished them often in all the synagogues and tried to force them to blaspheme. Because I was so furiously enraged at them, I went to persecute them even in foreign cities.

We went on board a ship from Adramyttium that was about to sail to various ports along the coast of the province of Asia and put out to sea, accompanied by Aristarchus, a Macedonian from Thessalonica.

We sailed slowly for many days and arrived with difficulty off Cnidus. Because the wind prevented us from going any farther, we sailed under the lee of Crete off Salmone.

So for this reason I have asked to see you and speak with you, for I am bound with this chain because of the hope of Israel.”

But we would like to hear from you what you think, for regarding this sect we know that people everywhere speak against it.”

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.

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.

And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, since we have been reconciled, will we be saved by his life?

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

We know that our old man was crucified with him so that the body of sin would no longer dominate us, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.

Indeed, he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, freely give us all things?

nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

But about Israel he says, “All day long I held out my hands to this disobedient and stubborn people!”

But what was the divine response to him? “I have kept for myself seven thousand people who have not bent the knee to Baal.”

And do this because we know the time, that it is already the hour for us to awake from sleep, for our salvation is now nearer than when we became believers.

The night has advanced toward dawn; the day is near. So then we must lay aside the works of darkness, and put on the weapons of light.

I know and am convinced in the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean in itself; still, it is unclean to the one who considers it unclean.