4
Live to Please God
1 Finally 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.
2 For you know what commandments we gave you through the Lord Jesus.
3 For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality,
4 that each of you should know how to control his own body in sanctification and honor,
5 not in lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God,
6 that 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.
7 For God did not call us to uncleanness, but in sanctification.
8 Therefore he who rejects this does not reject man, but God, who has given His Holy Spirit to you.
9 Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for me to write to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another.
10 For indeed you do so toward all the brothers in all Macedonia. But we exhort you, brothers, that you increase more and more,
11 and that you aspire to be quiet, and to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, just as we commanded you,
12 in order that you may walk decently toward those that are outside, and may have need of nothing.
The Coming of the Lord
13 Now 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.
14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, thus also God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.
15 For 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.
16 Because 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.
17 Then 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.
18 So then comfort one another with these words.