The 2nd letter that Paul wrote to the Christians at Thessalonica
(The book in the Holy Bible called 2 Thessalonians)
About this letter
Paul wrote this letter about 2,000 years ago, about 20 years after Jesus went back to heaven, and it is now in the Holy Bible.
After Jesus went back to heaven, God sent Paul to lots of countries and lots of towns to tell people about Jesus. One of those towns was Thessalonica (see Acts 17:1-9). It was a big town in the country called Greece, where the Greek people come from, and it is still there today. Sometimes people now call that town Salonica.
Paul wrote his 1st letter to the Christians at Thessalonica soon after he left there. Then about 6 months later, Paul heard that there were people making trouble for those new Christians at Thessalonica and telling them that Jesus already came back from heaven. So Paul wrote this 2nd letter to them, to tell them the true story about what will happen on the earth before Jesus comes back.
Paul said a lot of important things in this letter, so today we have to take notice of what he wrote to the Christians at Thessalonica.
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1 I am Paul, and this letter is from me. Silas and Timothy are here with me, and they are helping me write this letter.
We are sending this letter to you Christians that are in God’s church, in the town called Thessalonica. You belong to God our father and to Jesus Christ our leader.* Acts 17:1
2 We 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.
Paul thanked God for the Christians at Thessalonica
3 Christian friends, we know that 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. 4 And 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, and no matter how much they hurt you.
Jesus will come back, and God will judge people properly
5 You keep on believing in Jesus, and that shows us that God always judges people the right way. It is right for you to be in God’s family, because you keep on believing in Jesus, no matter how much trouble people give you. 6 God is a good and fair judge, and in the end, he will do payback to those people. He will give them trouble, just like they gave you trouble. 7 And he will let you rest and be happy, without any trouble.
He will do that 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, 8 and with a lot of fire. They will punish all those people that don’t want to know God. Those people don’t listen to the good story about Jesus, and they don’t do what he says. 9 God 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.* Isaiah 2:10
10 All that 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 are his people, so you will be there when he comes back. You believed what we told you about Jesus, so you will be in that mob of his people.
God can work powerfully in Christians
11 So we always pray for you. God picked you to be his own people, and he wants his mob to be good people, so we ask God to keep making you better people. You believe in Jesus, and you want to do good things, so we pray that God will work powerfully in you, and we pray that he will give you the power to do all those good things that you want to do. 12 We ask God to do that, so that people will see how he works in you, and then they will really respect our leader, Jesus, and they will 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.