1 FINALLY, therefore, brothers, we beseech and exhort you by the Lord Jesus, as you have received from us how you ought to walk and please God, that you abound still more.
2 For you know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus.
3 For this is the will of God, your purity, that you should abstain from fornication,
4 that each one should know how to have his wife in purity and honor,
5 not with inordinate desires like the gentiles who know not God,
6 that he should not go beyond and defraud his brother in the matter, because the Lord is a punisher of all these, as we also told you before and fully testified.
7 For God has not called us to impurity, but to purity.
8 He therefore that despises, despises not man, but God, who also gives us his Holy Spirit.
9 But concerning brotherly love, you have no need that I should write to you; for you are taught by God to love one another;
10 for you also do the same to all the brothers in all Macedonia. But we exhort you, brothers, to abound still more,
11 and strive to be quiet and pursue your own business, and work with your hands, as we charged you,
12 that you may walk becomingly towards those without and have need of nothing.
13 And we wish you not to be ignorant, brothers, concerning those that have fallen asleep, that you may not grieve as others who have no hope.
14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also will God bring with him those that have fallen asleep on account of Jesus.
15 For we tell you this by the word of the Lord, that we who live and remain till the coming of the Lord, shall not anticipate those that have fallen asleep,
16 for the Lord himself will 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 the living who remain shall be caught up together with them in clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall be always with the Lord.
18 Comfort one another, therefore, with these words.