1 Thessalonians
Chapter 4
Overview
Paul writes to the community of Jesus-followers in Thessalonica about how faith should shape ordinary life. He urges them to grow in sexual integrity, mutual love, honest work, and respectful conduct toward outsiders. His tone is warm but direct: they are already doing well, yet love always has room to stretch. He then addresses a painful concern about believers who have died before Jesus returns. Grief remains real, but it does not stand alone. Paul describes a future reunion with vivid images of a royal arrival and tells the community to strengthen one another with this hope.
1Finally, brothers and sisters, we ask and urge you in the name of the Lord Jesus to keep growing in the way you live. You learned from us how you must live to please God, and that is already how you are living. Now do so more and more.
2You know the instructions we gave you with the authority of the Lord Jesus.
3This is what God wants: that you be set apart for him and stay away from sexual immorality.
4Each of you must learn to control your own body, treating it with holiness and honor,
5rather than being ruled by uncontrolled desire like people who do not know God.
6No one should cross the line and exploit a fellow believer in this matter. The Lord punishes all such wrongdoing, as we told you before and strongly warned you.
7God did not call us to live impure lives, but to live as people set apart for him.
8So anyone who rejects this instruction is not rejecting a human being but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit.
9Now, about loving one another as brothers and sisters, you do not need us to write to you. God himself has taught you to love one another.
10In fact, you show this love to all the fellow believers throughout Macedonia. Still, brothers and sisters, we urge you to do so more and more.
11Make it your aim to live quietly, take care of your own responsibilities, and work with your hands, just as we instructed you.
12Then you will live in a way that earns the respect of outsiders, and you will not need to depend on anyone.
13Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who have died. We do not want you to grieve like everyone else who has no hope.
14We believe that Jesus died and rose from the dead. In the same way, God will bring with Jesus those who have died.
15We tell you this on the Lord’s authority: those of us who are still alive when the Lord comes will certainly not go ahead of those who have died.
16The Lord himself will come down from heaven with a commanding shout, with the voice of the chief angel, and with God’s trumpet call. First, those who died belonging to the Messiah will rise.
17Then those of us who are still alive will be swept up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. In this way, we will always be with the Lord.
18So encourage one another with these words.