Letters to the Churches

For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.

Likewise, the men abandoned natural relations with women and burned with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Furthermore, since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, He gave them up to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.

They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice. They are gossips,

slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful. They invent new forms of evil; they disobey their parents.

They are senseless, faithless, heartless, merciless.

Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things are worthy of death, they not only continue to do these things, but also approve of those who practice them.

You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on another. For on whatever grounds you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.

And we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth.

So when you, O man, pass judgment on others, yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?

Or do you disregard the riches of His kindness, tolerance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you to repentance?

But because of your hard and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

God “will repay each one according to his deeds.”

To those who by perseverance in doing good seek glory, honor, and immortality, He will give eternal life.

But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow wickedness, there will be wrath and anger.

There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil, first for the Jew, then for the Greek;

but glory, honor, and peace for everyone who does good, first for the Jew, then for the Greek.

For God does not show favoritism.

All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law.

For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but it is the doers of the law who will be declared righteous.

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.

So they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts either accusing or defending them

on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Christ Jesus, as proclaimed by my gospel.

Now you, if you call yourself a Jew; if you rely on the law and boast in God;

if you know His will and approve of what is superior because you are instructed by the law;