1 Thessalonians 2:11Plain English VersionAnd you know that we treated each one of you the same way a father treats his own kids. See the chapter |
God made us Jesus’s special workers, and he sent us to you. But we didn’t say, “We are Jesus’s special workers, so we are your bosses, and you have to do what we say.” No, we didn’t talk like that. We were like little kids with you. We talked easy to you. We were good to you, like a mother taking care of her kids.
None of you men can ever sleep with a woman that is not your own wife. If you do that, you are doing a bad thing to her husband. He is the only person that can sleep with her, so don’t cheat him out of that. Don’t do that bad thing to another Christian, or to anyone else. God is the one that will punish you if you do that. We told you about that when we were with you, and we mean it.
And as you do that, you have to treat everybody the same way. You know, God sees everything I’m writing here, and so does Jesus Christ, and so do God’s angel messengers. They know everything that I am telling you now. I’m saying that you can’t treat your family and friends any better than anybody else.
You know about God. He makes things live. And you know about Jesus. People took him to Pontius Pilate, and he told that boss the true story about himself. Well, God is watching us now, and Jesus is listening to us. So I want you to promise me this one thing with both of them listening to you. I want you to promise me that you will do everything that I’m telling you to do in this letter. Promise me that you will do it all properly, so that nobody can say you did it wrong. And keep on doing it until we see Jesus Christ come back again.
There are some people that have a lot of money and a lot of things. You have to tell them that they can’t think that they are smart just because they are rich. They still have to pray to God, and they have to trust him for everything they really need. They can’t trust their money. But they have to trust God. He gives us everything we need to be happy. So we have to trust him, not trust money.
If a worker’s boss is a Christian, that worker can’t think like this, “My boss is my Christian brother so I can be lazy.” No, that boss believes in Jesus, and that boss loves Jesus too, so the worker has to work harder for that boss. You have to teach people those things, and tell them to live that way.