1I am Paul, and this letter is from me and Silas and Timothy. They are helping me write this letter. We are sending it to you people that belong to God, the father of our leader, Jesus Christ. We are sending it to you Christians that live in the city called Thessalonica.
2We are asking God, our Father, and Jesus Christ our leader, to be good to you, and to make you feel happy and quiet inside yourselves.
3Our Christian friends, we know you are learning to trust God more and more, and you are loving each other more and more. So we have to thank God for you all the time.
4And whenever we visit God’s people in the churches in other places, we tell them all about you. We tell them that you keep on believing in Jesus, no matter how much trouble people give you or how much they hit you.
5All this shows us that God always judges people the right way. You see, you let God be your boss and you are in his family now, so other people don’t like you and they give you trouble. God lets them do that now so that you will be better people, and you will join his family.
6God is a good and fair judge, and in the end he will do payback to them and give them trouble, just like they gave you trouble.
7And he will let you rest and be happy, without any trouble. He will do this for you, and for us too, when Jesus, our leader, comes back. Everyone will see him come from heaven with a big mob of his strong angel messengers,
8and with a lot of fire. They will punish all those people that don’t want to know God. Those people will not listen to the good story about Jesus, or do what he says.
9God will go on punishing them for ever. He will properly ruin them. He will shut them out so they can never come near our leader, Jesus. They will never see how really great and powerful he is.
10All this will happen on the day when Jesus will come back to the earth. His own people will show what great things he has done for them, and they will really respect him. And you will be there too in this mob. You believed what we told you about Jesus, so you will be with his people when he comes back to earth.
11So we always pray for you. God picked you to be his own people, so we ask God to keep making you better people so that he will be happy to have you in his mob. You believe in Jesus and you want to do good things, so we pray that God will work powerfully in you, and that he will give you the power to do all those good things that you want to do.
12We ask God to do this so that people will see how he works in you and they will really respect our leader, Jesus, and say good things about him. And we want you to be so good that Jesus will be happy with you too. We are asking those 2, God and our leader, Jesus Christ, to be really good to you.