RKJNT - I Thessalonians - 4

4:1  Furthermore, we urge you, brethren, and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you have learned from us how you ought to walk and to please God, as indeed you are doing, so you would do more and more.

4:2  For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.

4:3  For this is the will of God: your sanctification, that you should abstain from sexual immorality,

4:4  That every one of you should know how to possess his own vessel in holiness and honour;

4:5  Not in the lust of passion, as the Gentiles who do not know God:

4:6  That no man might transgress and defraud his brother in any matter: because the Lord is the avenger in all these things, as we also have told you and warned you.

4:7  For God has not called us to impurity, but to holiness.

4:8  Therefore, he who rejects this, does not reject man, but God, who has also given you his Holy Spirit.

4:9  But regarding brotherly love you do not need any one to write to you: for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another.

4:10  And indeed you do love all the brethren who are in all Macedonia: but we urge you, brethren, that you do so more and more;

4:11  And that you aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you;

4:12  That you may behave properly toward those who are outside, and that you may lack nothing.

4:13  Now I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not sorrow, as others who have no hope.

4:14  For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who sleep in Jesus.

4:15  For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord shall not precede those who are asleep.

4:16  For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:

4:17  Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

4:18  Therefore comfort one another with these words.