We should always thank God for you, brothers and sisters. That’s only right, because your faith is growing more and more and your love for one another is increasing.
If anyone claims to love God but they hate a brother or sister, they’re a liar. If they don’t love their brother or sister, even though they’ve seen them, they can’t claim to love God, when they haven’t seen him.
By faith Abraham obeyed God and went to the place he would later receive as his own. He did that even though he didn’t know where he was going when God told him to start on his way there.
So how much cleaner will the blood of Christ make us! He offered himself to God without any flaw through the power of the eternal Holy Spirit. His blood washes away our feelings of guilt for committing sin. Sin always leads to death. But now we can serve the living God.
Wives, follow the lead of your own husbands. If any of them don’t believe God’s word, they may be won over to Christ without words by seeing how their wives live.
Don’t let anyone look down on you because you’re a young person. Instead, set an example for the believers in what you say and in how you live, how you love, and in what you believe. Show the believers how to be pure.
As I told you when I went into Macedonia, I want you to stay there in Ephesus. I need you to command certain people not to teach things that aren’t true and not to spend their time on made-up stories
But we should always thank God for you, brothers and sisters, because the Lord loves you and chose you as the first to be saved. This has happened through the work of the Holy Spirit, which makes people holy, and through your belief in the truth.
Through him we received grace to become apostles to the Gentiles and through that grace to bring them to obedience to God by trusting in Jesus. We do this to bring glory to him.
God the Father knew you ahead of time, and he chose to make you pure and holy through the Spirit’s work. Then you would obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with his blood to make you holy. May more and more grace and peace be given to you.
These were the spirits of those who had disobeyed long before, when God was being patient while Noah built the ark. Only a few people, eight in all, were saved from the flood in the ark.