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

13 Who, indeed, is there to harm you, if you prove yourselves to be eager for what is good? 14 Even if you should suffer for righteousness, count yourselves blessed! 'Do not let men terrify you, or allow yourselves to be dismayed.' 15 Revere the Christ as Lord in your hearts; always ready to give an answer to any one who asks your reason for the hope that you cherish, but giving it humbly and in all reverence, 16 and keeping your consciences clear, so that, whenever you are maligned, those who vilify your good and Christian conduct may be put to shame. 17 It is better that you should suffer, if that should be God's will, for doing right, than for doing wrong.

18 For Christ himself died to atone for sins once for all--the good on behalf of the bad--that he might bring you to God; his body being put to death, but his spirit entering upon new Life.

19 And it was then that he went and preached to the imprisoned spirits, 20 who once were disobedient, at the time when God patiently waited, in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared; in which some few lives, eight in all, were saved by means of water. 21 And baptism, which this foreshadowed, now saves you--not the mere cleansing of the body, but the search of a clear conscience after God--through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 22 who has gone into Heaven, and is at God's right hand, where Angels and Archangels and the Powers of Heaven now yield submission to him.