Live to Please God

1Finally then, brothers, we request of you and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, that you do so more and more.

2For you know what commandments we gave you through the Lord Jesus.

3For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality,

4that each of you should know how to control his own body in sanctification and honor,

5not in lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God,

6that no one should transgress against and to defraud his brother in this matter, because the Lord is the avenger in all these things, just as we told you before and solemnly warned you.

7For God did not call us to uncleanness, but in sanctification.

8Therefore he who rejects this does not reject man, but God, who has given 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.

10For indeed you do so toward all the brothers in all Macedonia. But we exhort you, brothers, that you increase more and more,

11and that you aspire to be quiet, and to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, just as we commanded you,

12in order that you may walk decently toward those that are outside, and may have need of nothing.

The Coming of the Lord

13Now we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you be sorrowful as those who have no hope.

14For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, thus also God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.

15For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord shall by no means precede those who have fallen asleep.

16Because the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first.

17Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we shall always be with the Lord.

18So then comfort one another with these words.