¹³ He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son,^(A)

⁹ But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,^[a] in order that you may proclaim the excellence of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.^(A)

³⁰ While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent,^{(A) 31} because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”^(B)

⁴ In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing clearly the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.^{(A) 5} For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’s sake.^{(B) 6} For it is the God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.^(C)

The Old Life and the New

¹⁷ Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer walk as the^[a] gentiles walk, in the futility of their minds;^{(A) 18} they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart.^{(B) 19} They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. ²⁰ That is not the way you learned Christ!

²¹ for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened.^{(A) 22} Claiming to be wise, they became fools, ²³ and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.^(B)

²⁴ Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.^{(C) 25} They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.^(D)

²⁶ For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse^[a] for unnatural,^{(E) 27} and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse^[b] with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.^(F)

²⁸ And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done.^{(G) 29} They were filled with every kind of injustice, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters,^[c] insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents,^{(H) 31} foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.^{(I) 32} They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die, yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.^(J)

¹⁸ to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’^(A)

² But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.^(A)