1I am Paul, and this letter is from me. Silas and Timothy are here with me, and they are helping me write this letter. We are sending this letter to you Christians that are in God’s church, in the town called Thessalonica. You belong to God our father and to Jesus Christ our leader.

2We are asking God our father, and Jesus Christ our leader, to be good to you, and to make you feel happy and quiet inside yourselves.

Paul thanked God for the Christians at Thessalonica

3Christian friends, we know that you are learning to trust God more and more, and you are loving each other more and more. So we have to thank God for you all the time.

4And whenever we visit God’s people in the churches in other places, we tell them all about you. We tell them that you keep on believing in Jesus, no matter how much trouble people give you, and no matter how much they hurt you.

Jesus will come back, and God will judge people properly

5You keep on believing in Jesus, and that shows us that God always judges people the right way. It is right for you to be in God’s family, because you keep on believing in Jesus, no matter how much trouble people give you.

6God is a good and fair judge, and in the end, he will do payback to those people. He will give them trouble, just like they gave you trouble.

7And he will let you rest and be happy, without any trouble. He will do that for you, and for us too, when Jesus, our leader, comes back. Everyone will see him come from heaven with a big mob of his strong angel messengers,

8and with a lot of fire. They will punish all those people that don’t want to know God. Those people don’t listen to the good story about Jesus, and they don’t do what he says.

9God will go on punishing them for ever. He will properly ruin them. He will shut them out so they can never come near our leader Jesus. They will never see how really great and powerful he is.

10All that will happen on the day when Jesus will come back to the earth. His own people will show what great things he has done for them, and they will really respect him. And you are his people, so you will be there when he comes back. You believed what we told you about Jesus, so you will be in that mob of his people.

God can work powerfully in Christians

11So we always pray for you. God picked you to be his own people, and he wants his mob to be good people, so we ask God to keep making you better people. You believe in Jesus, and you want to do good things, so we pray that God will work powerfully in you, and we pray that he will give you the power to do all those good things that you want to do.

12We ask God to do that, so that people will see how he works in you, and then they will really respect our leader, Jesus, and they will say good things about him. And we want you to be so good that Jesus will be happy with you too. We are asking those 2, God and our leader Jesus Christ, to be really good to you.