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¹ Wherefore, my brethren, I entreat you, and beseech you by our Lord Jesus, that, as ye have received from us how ye ought to walk, and to please God, so ye would make progress more and more.² For ye know what command we gave you in our Lord Jesus the Messiah.³ For this is the pleasure of God, your sanctification; and that ye be separated from all whoredom;⁴ and that each one of you might know how to possess his vessel, in sanctity and in honor;⁵ and not in the concupiscence of lust, like the rest of the Gentiles who know not God:⁶ and that ye dare not to transgress and to overreach any one his brother, in this matter; because our Lord is the avenger of all these, as also we have said and testified to you in time past.⁷ For God did not call you unto impurity, but to sanctification.⁸ He therefore who spurneth, spurneth not man but God, who hath given his Holy Spirit in you.

⁹ Now concerning love to the brethren, ye need not that I should write to you; for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another.¹⁰ Ye likewise do so, to all the brethren who are in all Macedonia: but I entreat you, my brethren, to be exuberant:¹¹ and that ye strive to be quiet, and to attend to your own affairs; and that ye labor with your own hands; as we directed you;¹² and that ye walk becomingly towards those without; and that ye be dependent on no man.

¹³ And, I wish you to know, my brethren, that ye should not mourn over them who have fallen asleep, like other people who have no hope.¹⁴ For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them who sleep, will God, by Jesus, bring with him.¹⁵ And this we say to you, by the word of our Lord, that we who may survive and be alive, at the coming of our Lord, shall not precede them who have slept.¹⁶ Because our Lord will himself descend from heaven, with the mandate, and with the voice of the chief angel, and with the trump of God; and the dead who are in the Messiah, will first arise;¹⁷ and then, we who survive and are alive shall be caught up together with them to the clouds, to meet our Lord in the air; and so shall we be ever with our Lord.¹⁸ Wherefore, comfort ye one another with these words.