1 TO conclude, brethren, we beg of you and urge you in the Lord Jesus that, as you learned from us how you ought to live to please God, and are living, you will excel still more.

2 For you know what directions we have given you through the Lord Jesus.

3 For this is the will of God: to have you become holy and have you shun unchastity;

4 to have each of you know how to take a wife for himself in holiness and honor,

5 not in the passion of lust, as the Gentiles do who know not God;

6 to have no one trespass or take advantage of his brother in this matter; for the Lord is the punisher of all such, as we have already told you and solemnly warned you.

7 God has not called us to live in impurity, but in holiness.

8 Therefore he who disregards this disregards not man, but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.

9 Regarding brotherly love you have no need for me to write to you. For you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another,

10 and you do the same to all the brethren in the whole of Macedonia. But we urge you, brethren, to excel still further

11 and to be ambitious to lead a quiet life and to mind each his own business and to work with your hands, as we instructed you.

12 Thus you will live becomingly in the sight of outsiders and will have need of nothing.

13 We do not wish you to be ignorant, brethren, regarding those who are sleeping, that you may not sorrow as the rest of men who have no hope.

14 For since, as we believe, Jesus died and rose, so too God will through Jesus bring with him those who have fallen asleep.

15 This we tell you by the word of the Lord: We, the living, who have been left until the coming of the Lord, will not have the start of those who have fallen asleep.

16 For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel and with God's trumpet-call, and first the dead in Christ will rise.

17 Then we, the living, who are left, will be caught up along with them into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall forever be with the Lord.

18 So encourage one another with these words.