It's time for real change to happen.
3 God’s will is for you to be holy, so stay away from all sexual sin. 4 Then each of you will control his own body and live in holiness and honor—5 not in lustful passion like the pagans who do not know God and his ways. 6 Never harm or cheat a Christian brother in this matter by violating his wife, for the Lord avenges all such sins, as we have solemnly warned you before. 7 God has called us to live holy lives, not impure lives. 8 Therefore, anyone who refuses to live by these rules is not disobeying human teaching but is rejecting God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.
9 But we don’t need to write to you about the importance of loving each other, for God himself has taught you to love one another. 10 Indeed, you already show your love for all the believers throughout Macedonia. Even so, dear brothers and sisters, we urge you to love them even more.
11 Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before. 12 Then people who are not Christians will respect the way you live, and you will not need to depend on others.
It is the end of another year, the time when we start looking around and evaluating our lives, we usually look in two directions, back at what we did last year and we also look ahead on the coming year. First we judge our performance for the past year and then we recall the things that we could have done better and we determine to do better in the new year.
Here is a huge goal for 2011 "live to please god." Paul encourages us to live with a new goal in mind, he challenges us to please God. Living to please God isn't a task that you can complete and scratch off of your to-do list, this is something that we will always be working on, after all it is God's will for me to be holy and that is a pretty big goal. We can follow the advice from Paul and determine to:
- Stay away from sexual sin
- Love one another
- Live a quiet life
Help me to become more like you Lord in 2011.
