2
Paul asked the Christians at Thessalonica to remember the time he visited them
1 Christian friends, you know that it was good that we went to your town and told you God’s message. It wasn’t a waste of our time, because you believed that message.
2 And you know that before we came to you, we told God’s message to the people in Philippi. Some of those Philippi people got really cheeky to us, and they beat us up. After that, we came to your town, and God made us brave, so we told God’s message to you too. We didn’t get frightened of the cheeky people that tried to stop us.
3 You see, we only told you true things. We told you the good news so that you can believe God’s message. We were not trying to trick you. We were not trying to get you to believe things that are not true.
4 No way. You see, it was God that sent us. He knew us, and he trusted us to tell people his message. So we only say what he wants us to say. We don’t try to make people happy. We only try to make God happy.
5 And when we talked to you, we didn’t say nice things about you, so that you will like us. We didn’t make a secret plan to get you to give us things. God knows that.
6 And we didn’t try to get anyone to say good things about us. We didn’t want you or anyone else to do that.
7 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.
8 We loved you so much that we told you the good news about Jesus. And more than that, we were ready to do anything to help you.
9 Christian friends, remember what we did when we were there with you. We worked to get money, and while we did that, we told you the good news from God. We worked a lot to get enough money to look after ourselves. We didn’t only work in the day time, but we worked at night time too. So you didn’t have to give us anything.
10 While we were with you mob, we only did things that made God happy. We did things that are good and right. You know that, and God knows it too.
11 And you know that we treated each one of you the same way a father treats his own kids.
12 We taught you, and we helped you to be brave and strong. And we told you very strongly to do things that make God happy. You see, God is the one that picked you to be in his own family, and you will be really great with him.
People at Thessalonica believed God’s message
13 And we always thank God for the way you listened to us. We told you God’s message, and you knew that it wasn’t only a message from people. You believed that we told you words from God, and that it was God’s message. And you were right. It is God’s word. And now that you believe that word, it helps you grow strong for him.
14 And, Christian friends, your countrymen gave you a lot of trouble after you believed in Jesus. You know, the same thing happened to the Christians in the churches in Judea country. They believed in Jesus, and their Jewish countrymen gave them a lot of trouble too.
15 That Jewish mob didn’t want to believe God, and they made trouble for Jesus. You see, a long time ago, it was the Jewish mob that killed the men that told God’s messages, and it was the Jewish mob that killed our leader Jesus too. And it was the same for us. Wherever we told people about Jesus, the Jewish mob chased us out of those places. They make God angry. They work against everyone.
16 They try to stop us telling everyone that God can save people that are not Jewish. That Jewish mob did a lot of bad things in the past, and they are also doing those bad things now, so they make God angry, and he is going to punish them.
Paul wanted to go back and visit the Thessalonica people
17 Look, Christian friends, we never wanted to leave you mob, but we had to. But it was only for a little while, and we kept on thinking about you, and we really wanted to go back to you.
18 I, Paul, tried to go back lots of times, but Satan, the boss over the bad spirits, he stopped me every time.
19-20 Listen. One day our leader, Jesus, will come back, and he will ask us about the things we did. Then we will tell him about how we got you mob to trust him. And you will be there with us on that day, so we will be really happy. We are like athletes that run in a race and win the prize, because after Jesus comes back, he will tell us that we did a good job with you, and that will be like a prize for us.