1 Peter 3:13-22 - Suffer For Doing What Is Good

¹³ Yet who will wrong you if you have a passion for goodness? ¹⁴ Even supposing you have to suffer for the sake of what is right, still you are blessed. Have no fear of their threats, do not let that trouble you, ¹⁵ but reverence Christ as Lord in your own hearts. Always be ready with a reply for anyone who calls you to account for the hope you cherish, but answer gently and with a sense of reverence; ¹⁶ see that you have a clean conscience, so that, for all their slander of you, these libellers of your good Christian behaviour may be ashamed. ¹⁷ For it is better to suffer for doing right (if that should be the will of God) than for doing wrong.

¹⁸ Christ himself died for sins, once for all, a just man for unjust men, that he might bring us near to God; in the flesh he was put to death but he came to life in the Spirit.

¹⁹ (It was in the Spirit that Enoch also went and preached to the imprisoned spirits ²⁰ who had disobeyed at the time when God's patience held out during the construction of the ark in the days of Noah ??the ark by which only a few souls, eight in all, were brought safely through the water.) ²¹ Baptism, the counterpart of that, saves you to-day (not the mere washing of dirt from the flesh but the prayer for a clean conscience before God) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ ²² who is at God's right hand ??for he went to heaven after angels, authorities, and powers celestial had been made subject to him.)