Living to Please God

1Finally therefore, brethren, we pray you and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how it behooves you to walk about and to please God, as you do indeed walk about, in order that you may abound more and more. 2For you know what promises we gave unto you through our Lord Jesus. 3For this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from fornication; 4that each one of you know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor, 5not in the passion of lust, as indeed the Gentiles who do not know God; 6that one should overreach and defraud his brother in a business transaction: because the Lord is the avenger concerning these things, as we indeed before told you and witnessed to you. 7For God did not call us to uncleanness, but in sanctification. 8Therefore the one rejecting (sanctification), does not reject man, but God, who indeed gives to you his Holy Spirit.

9But concerning brotherly love you have no need that I write to you: for you yourselves are taught of God to love one another with divine love; 10for you indeed are doing the same thing unto all the brethren in all Macedonia. And we exhort you, brethren, that you abound more and more; 11and that you aspire to be quiet, and to prosecute your own employments, and work with your hands, as we proclaimed unto you; 12in order that you may walk about circumspectly toward the aliens, and you may have need of nothing.

The Return of the Lord

13For we do not wish you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep; in order that you may not sorrow, even as those having no hope. 14For if we believe that Jesus died and is risen, so also will God bring with him those who sleep in Jesus. 15For we speak this to you in the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left unto the coming of the Lord, can not anticipate those who are asleep, 16because the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first; 17then we who are alive, who are left, will at the same time along with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be always with the Lord. 18So comfort one another with these words.