1Finally then, brothers, we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus that, just as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God—as indeed you are walking—so you may abound more and more.
2For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus.
3For this is the will of God: your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality,
4that each of you know how to acquire his own vessel in sanctification and honor,
5not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God,
6that no one transgress and take advantage of his brother in the matter, because the Lord is an avenger concerning all these things, just as we also told you beforehand and solemnly warned you.
7For God did not call us for impurity, but in sanctification.
8Therefore the one who rejects this is not rejecting man but God, who also gives his Holy Spirit to you.
9Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for me to write to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another;
10and indeed you are doing this toward all the brothers in the whole of Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to abound more and more,
11and to make it your ambition to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your own hands, just as we instructed you,
12so that you may walk properly toward those outside and be dependent on no one.
13But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, concerning those who are asleep, so that you may not grieve as also the rest do, who have no hope.
14For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep through Jesus.
15For this we say to you by the word of the Lord: that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep.
16For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first,
17then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will always be with the Lord.
18Therefore encourage one another with these words.
Open in the interactive reader →