Instructions on the Way Christians Should Live

1Now then, brothers, you learned from us how you ought to live and to please God, as in fact you are doing. We ask and encourage you in the Lord to do so even more. 2You know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. 3For it is God’s will that you be sanctified: You must abstain from sexual immorality. 4Each of you must know how to control his own bodya in a holy and honorable manner, 5not with passion and lust like the gentiles who do not know God. 6Furthermore, you must never take advantage of or exploit a brother in this regard, because the Lord avenges all these things, just as we already told you and warned you. 7For God did not call us to be impure, but to be holy. 8Therefore, whoever rejects this instructionb is not rejecting human authority but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit.

9Now you do not need anyone to write to you about brotherly love, since you have been taught by God to love each other. 10In fact, you are showing love to all the brothers throughout Macedonia, but we urge you, brothers, to keep on doing this even more. 11Also, make it your goal to live quietly, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we instructed you, 12so that you may win the respect of outsiders, and have need of nothing.

Comfort about Christians who Have Died

13But we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve like other people who have no hope. 14For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so through Jesus God will bring those who have died with him. 15For we declare to you what the Lord has told us to say:c We who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who have died. 16With a shout of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of God’s trumpet, the Lord himself will come down from heaven, and the dead who belong to the Messiahd will rise first. 17Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 18So then, encourage one another with these words.