And he has hope that the Roman church will do the same. In other words, Paul is assisted by the community of believers, which is, in it's own broken and flawed way, the incarnation of God's love for a broken and flawed humanity. God has made us for relationship, and we have no spiritual life without it. In any case, it's what the Bible calls church. The word religion comes from the Latin ligio , to bind, as in Blest Be the Tie .
Religion is the ligament of spiritual life.
It is the recognition that in some way beyond our understanding, good and evil, suffering and glory, pain and gain are bound together. They are all connected, and God is in it all. It is a recognition that we are inextricably bound to God, to one another, to our friends, to our enemies, to all humankind. Religion at its best is our attempt to improve the quality of these connections, and at it's worst becomes our way to resist them. Like it or not, God has created us for relationship, and faith is a journey.