1 Now 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.

2 You know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus.

3 For it is God's will that you be sanctified: You must abstain from sexual immorality;

4 each of you must know how to control his own body in holiness and honor,

5 not with passion and lust like the Gentiles who do not know God;

6 and you must never take advantage of or exploit a brother in this regard. For the Lord is an avenger in all these things, just as we already told you and warned you.

7 For God did not call us to impurity but to holiness.

8 Therefore, whoever rejects this instruction is not rejecting human authority but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit.

9 Now you do not need anyone to write to you about brotherly love, since you have been taught by God to love each other.

10 In fact, you are showing love to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this even more.

11 Also, make it your goal to live quietly, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we instructed you,

12 so that you may win the respect of outsiders, and have need of nothing.

13 But 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.

14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so it is through Jesus that God will bring back with him those who have died.

15 For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who have died.

16 With 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 in Christ will rise first.

17 Then 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.

18 So then, encourage one another with these words.