2 Thessalonians 1

₁I, Paul, am writing this letter to you with Silvanus and Timothy. We write to you, the congregation in Thessalonica which belongs to God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. ₂We greet you and we pray that God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ will be gracious to you and give you peace.

₃Friends, we always thank God when we think of you and it is right to thank Him because your faith is growing and you all love each other more and more. ₄This is why we are proud of you and why we tell the other congregations of God these things about you. We tell them that you keep on loving God and believing in Him, even while you suffer because people persecute you and do bad things to you.

₅You are suffering now and it shows that God is right and fair when He judges people. You are suffering now because you belong to God, but this is how God is preparing you for the time when He will be King over everyone. ₆God will do what is right. He will punish the people who are making you suffer. ₇You are suffering now, but God will help you and us, and we will not suffer anymore. He will do this when the Lord Jesus comes from heaven with his strong angels, when God shows Him to all people. ₈It will be like a burning fire when God punishes everyone who does not know Him, that is everyone who did not want to listen to us when we preached the Good_News of our Lord Jesus to them. ₉They will be punished badly. They will suffer forever because God will not be with them and they will not see Him, the King who can do anything. ₁₀On the day when Jesus comes, all the believers will rejoice and say how glad they are that He came and that He is their King. Everyone who believes in Him will praise Him. You will also praise Him because you believed what we told you.

₁₁We always pray for you. We pray that our God will prepare you to live as He wants. He has chosen you to belong to Him and we pray that God will finish the good things that He has started doing in your lives and the good things that you have started to do because you believe in Him. God has the power, and He can do it. ₁₂We pray that God will do this so that you can praise the name of our Lord Jesus and He can also praise you. All these things can happen only because our God and the Lord Jesus Christ is good to you.