Living to please God
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📚Finally then we urge you, brethren, and encourage you in the Lord Jesus, that as you have learned from us how you ought to behave and please God, so you would excel in this more and more. 2 📚For you know what instructions we gave you by the Lord Jesus.
Holy living
3 📚For this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you should abstain from sexual immorality, 4 📚that every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in holiness and honour, 5 📚not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God, 6 📚that no man transgress and take advantage of his brother in this matter; because the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also warned you before and solemnly affirmed. 7 📚For God has not called us to uncleanness, but to holiness. 8 📚So he who rejects this teaching is rejecting not man but God, who has given to us his Holy Spirit.
Brotherly love
9 📚But concerning brotherly love you have no need of my writing to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another. 10 📚And indeed you do so toward all the brethren who are in all of Macedonia. But we urge you, brethren, to excel in this more and more,
Living in a way that attracts others
11 📚and to aim to live a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we instructed you, 12 📚so that you may behave honorably toward outsiders, and that you will lack nothing.
The second coming of Christ, the Rapture
13 📚But I would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, so that you do not grieve like others who have no hope.
14 📚For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, just so God will bring with him those who sleep in Jesus. 15 📚For this we tell you by the word of the Lord: that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 📚For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
17 📚Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be forever with the Lord. 18 📚Therefore comfort one another with these words.