1 Thessalonians 4

₁Friends, there is another important thing that the Lord Jesus wants us to tell you. We have taught you how to live so that God will be pleased with you. We know that you already do this, but we ask that you do it even better. ₂You know everything that we have told you to do, things that the Lord Jesus told us.

₃God wants you to live like people who completely belong to Him. Do not have sex with anyone who is not your wife or husband. ₄God wants every man to respect his wife and to live with her like God wants. ₅Do not be like the Gentiles who do not know God. They want to have sinful sex and they can not stop themselves. ₆God also does not want believers to sin_against one another. A man must not desire another man's wife and take her for himself. The Lord will punish people who do that. We have told you this and warned you. ₇God has chosen us to belong to Him. That is why we must live as He wants us to live and we must not be immoral. ₈So, anyone who does not listen to what we teach is disobeying God, who gave his Holy_Spirit to you. He is not disobeying only people.

₉We do not need to write to you and tell you to love each other because God Himself has taught you to love each other. ₁₀We know you love all the believers in the whole province of Macedonia. But friends, we ask you again to do it even better. ₁₁You must try to live quietly and peacefully. Keep on doing and being busy with your own things, and do not try to find out everything that other people do. Work hard like we told you to. ₁₂Then the people outside of the congregation, the people who do not believe in Christ, will respect you and you will get everything that you need.

₁₃Friends, we want you to know what will happen to the believers who have died. If you know this, you will not cry and mourn them like the Gentiles who have nothing that they can hope for. ₁₄We believe that Jesus died, but that He is alive again. Therefore we can be sure that God will bring with Him the people who are now dead but who believed in Jesus before they died.

₁₅We are telling you what the Lord Jesus told us, that when He comes again, we will not meet Him before the people who have already died. ₁₆The Lord Jesus Himself will come down from heaven. He will shout a command and the most important angel will blow the trumpet of God loudly. Then the people who believed in Christ before they died will be raised first and they will live again. ₁₇Then God will take away those of us who are alive on earth at that time. He will take us with the people who have died and started to live again. He will take us with them into the clouds. Then we will meet the Lord Jesus in the sky and we will be with the Lord Jesus forever. ₁₈Tell these things to each other and encourage each other so that you will not cry and mourn.