14 So now, my friends, while you are waiting for that to happen, try hard to always do good things, so that God will not blame you for doing wrong things. And don’t get angry with anyone and don’t fight, then when God looks at you, he will not see any trouble between you and anyone else.
14 So, beloved, since you are expecting these things, be eager to be found by Him [at His coming] without spot or blemish and at peace [in serene confidence, free from fears and agitating passions and moral conflicts].
God is the one that helps people to be happy and quiet inside themselves. I want that for you, and I’m asking God himself to clean you properly inside, so that you will be his special people. I want God to help you be properly good in every way, with your body, and your spirit, and also that part inside you that thinks and that gives you your feelings. Yes, God can clean you and help you be properly good, so that at the time when our leader, Jesus Christ, comes back, God will not blame you for doing anything wrong.
We want Jesus to make you properly good and clean inside. You see, one day Jesus, our leader, will come back, and all his people will be with him. And then we will all meet God our father, and God will see that we are properly good and clean inside, so he will be happy with us, and he will not have to blame us for doing anything wrong.
Then you will know the right way to live, and you will do a lot of good things. And I ask Jesus Christ to help you so that you will always do good things, and never do bad things. Jesus is going to come back again, and I want you to be living in that good way. You will show people that God is good, and they will say that he is really great.
So always remember those things, my Christian friends. I love you, and I want you to stay strong for God. Don’t let anything take you away from him. Keep on working hard for our leader Jesus. Remember, he will help you, so that everything you do with him will be good. It will not be useless.
God will keep you believing properly in our leader Jesus Christ, and you will stay strong for him until the day when he will come back from heaven. At that time, nobody will be able to blame you or say that you did anything wrong.
Then you will be properly good, so that nobody can blame you for anything. You are God’s kids living among really bad people that always go wrong. So you have to live in a way that is properly good. Then everyone will see that you are properly good. You will be like bright stars in a dark sky.
And God also wants you to look after people that need help. He wants you to look after people that haven’t got any money to buy food, like kids that haven’t got a mother or a father, or women whose husbands have died. If you do that sort of thing, God will be happy with you. But God will not be happy with you if you just look after yourself, like the people that belong to this world do.
But we belong to heaven. That is our real home. And we are waiting for our leader, Jesus Christ, to come back from heaven. He is the one that saves us, and we really want him to come back.
You know about gold. It is very special. People put that gold into a fire to make it really clean. The fire makes it better, it burns away all the rubbish that isn’t real gold. But even gold will not last for ever. It belongs to this world. Now think about the troubles that come to us. They make us better because they show that we really trust God. If we keep on trusting him, God will say, “You are very special to me. You are much more special to me than gold.” So keep on trusting God, and after Jesus comes again, God will talk to you like that, and he will make you important.
My friends, this is now my 2nd letter that I’m writing to you. Both of these letters are to help you remember things. I want you to think properly about these things.
and he writes about them in all his letters. Some things in his letters are hard to understand. Some people don’t know much about God, and they are not sure about the things they believe. They talk about Paul’s letters the wrong way. They turn Paul’s words around so that they say something that is wrong. And they do that with other words in God’s book too. When they do that, they make things bad for themselves, and in the end God will punish them.