And now, brethren, this is what we ask, this is our appeal to you in the name of the Lord Jesus. We gave you a pattern of how you ought to live so as to please God; live by that pattern, and make more of it than ever.

You have not forgotten the warnings we have handed on to you by the command of the Lord Jesus.

What God asks of you is that you should sanctify yourselves, and keep clear of fornication.

Each of you must learn to control his own body, as something holy and held in honour,✻

not yielding to the promptings of passion, as the heathen do in their ignorance of God.

None of you is to be exorbitant, and take advantage of his brother, in his business dealings. For all such wrong-doing God exacts punishment; we have told you so already, in solemn warning.✻

The life to which God has called us is not one of incontinence, it is a life of holiness,

and to despise it is to despise, not man, but God, the God who has implanted his Holy Spirit in us.

As for love of the brethren, there is no need to send you any message; you have learned for yourselves God’s lesson about the charity we ought to shew to one another,

or you could not practise it as you do towards all the brethren throughout Macedonia. We would only ask you, brethren, to make more of it than ever.

Let it be a point of honour with you to keep calm and to go on looking after your affairs, working with your hands as we bade you; thus your life will win respect from the world around you, and you will not need to depend on others.✻

Make no mistake, brethren, about those who have gone to their rest; you are not to lament over them, as the rest of the world does, with no hope to live by.

We believe, after all, that Jesus underwent death and rose again; just so, when Jesus comes back, God will bring back those who have found rest through him.

This we can tell you as a message from the Lord himself; those of us who are still left alive to greet the Lord’s coming will not reach the goal before those who have gone to their rest.✻

No, the Lord himself will come down from heaven to summon us, with an archangel crying aloud and the trumpet of God sounding; and first of all the dead will rise up, those who died in Christ.

Only after that shall we, who are still left alive, be taken up into the clouds, be swept away to meet Christ in the air, and they will bear us company. And so we shall be with the Lord for ever.✻

Tell one another this for your consolation.