If you have ever wondered why a loving God would let anyone perish — or whether there is still hope for a life that feels wasted — Richard Baxter wrote A Call to the Unconverted for you. It is one of the tenderest evangelistic books in the English language: not a scolding, but a plea. Baxter takes a single verse, Ezekiel 33:11, and turns it over and over like a man holding out both hands to a friend who is walking toward a cliff. This guide gives you a warm, plain summary of the book, shows how Baxter builds his appeal, and offers a few questions to read it by. The whole text is free to read on Ochorus, so you can move straight from this page into Baxter’s own words.
What the book is, and what Baxter is trying to do
A Call to the Unconverted is a short book of gospel sermons written in 1657 by Richard Baxter, the great Puritan pastor of Kidderminster. Baxter was a sick man for most of his life, forever expecting to die, and he preached, as he famously said, “as a dying man to dying men.” That urgency saturates this book. He wrote it because it grieved him that so many people around him were drifting toward eternity without ever seriously facing the question of their own souls.
His aim is disarmingly simple. He wants the reader who is still unconverted — still living for self and sin rather than for God — to stop, to turn, and to live. The whole book is an unfolding of one text, where the Lord swears: “As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn ye, turn ye, from your evil ways, for, why will ye die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11). Baxter is not trying to win an argument. He is trying to save a life. He even worries aloud that a reader might mistake his warnings for despair, and he rushes to correct it:
Sinners, there are none of you shall have cause to go home and say I preach despair to you. Do we use to shut up the door of mercy against you? O that you would not shut it up against yourselves!
Richard Baxter
That single sentence tells you the temperature of the whole book. This is a man pounding not on the sinner but on the closed door of the sinner’s own heart, begging him to leave it open to mercy.
How the appeal is built
Baxter builds his case the way a good preacher builds a sermon: patiently, one plank at a time. He begins by answering the hardest objection first — if so few are saved, whose fault is it? Baxter clears God of the charge. God does not force anyone into sin, nor drag anyone to hell; the ruin of a lost soul is self-chosen. Echoing Paul’s cry over the depth of God’s wisdom (Romans 11:33), Baxter insists that the controversy is really between God and the sinner, and that God will not take the blame the sinner tries to lay on Him.
From there the argument turns from warning to wooing. Baxter labours to prove God’s willingness. The mercy of God, he writes, “not willing that man should perish in his sin,” provided a remedy in His own Son — the same tenderness Peter names when he says God is “not willing that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9), and Paul when he says God “will have all men to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4). Baxter points to God’s gentle protest in Isaiah 27:4, “Fury is not in me,” as proof that the Lord takes no delight in destroying anyone.
Then comes the folly of dying. Baxter cannot understand why anyone would refuse so free an offer, and he lays the invitation out in its fullest breadth:
It is life, not death, that is the first part of our message to you, our commission is to offer salvation, certain salvation; a speedy, glorious, everlasting salvation, to everyone of you; to the poorest beggar as well as the greatest Lord; to the worst of you, even to drunkards, swearers, worldlings, thieves…
Richard Baxter
Finally he presses the invitation home. Salvation requires a real turning — the new birth that Jesus told Nicodemus he could not enter the kingdom without (John 3:3), the childlike conversion He demanded in Matthew 18:3. Baxter closes the door on any false peace, quoting the Lord’s own verdict that “there is no peace…to the wicked” (Isaiah 57:21; see also Isaiah 48:22), and then throws the door of grace wide open once more.
Central themes
Three great themes run like cords through the book.
The mercy and willingness of God
Baxter’s deepest concern is to overturn the lie that God is reluctant to save. Again and again he returns to the oath of Ezekiel 33:11 — God swears by His own life that He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. In Baxter’s hands, this is the most reassuring sentence in Scripture. The obstacle to a sinner’s salvation is never a grudging God; it is a stubborn will. God is more willing to give mercy than we are to receive it.
The sinner’s responsibility
Yet Baxter never lets the reader hide behind God’s sovereignty. If a soul is lost, it is because that soul would not turn. He faces this head-on in Ezekiel 18:25, where the people complain that “the way of the Lord is not equal,” and Baxter turns the charge back: it is their way that is not equal. The refusal to repent is not a fate that happens to us; it is a choice we make, and it is the one choice God will hold us to.
The urgency of turning
Because life is short and death is certain, Baxter will not let the reader postpone. “Turn ye, turn ye” — the doubling in the text is not accident, and Baxter presses it as a matter of today, not someday. He writes as a physician who knows the disease is fatal and the cure is at hand, and cannot bear to see the patient refuse it. The pathos of the book’s great question — “why will ye die?” — is that dying is so needless.
Who should read it
This is a book for several kinds of reader. If you are not yet a Christian, or are not sure where you stand, Baxter wrote it directly to you; few books make the gospel offer so plainly and so kindly. If you are a believer who has grown cold, its warmth will thaw you, and its urgency will remind you what is at stake for the people around you. If you share your faith — as a parent, friend, or preacher — Baxter is a master teacher of how to plead with love rather than browbeat, and reading him will reshape the way you speak to those you long to see saved. And if you simply love the Puritans, this is one of the most accessible doorways into that whole tradition of heart-searching, God-exalting preaching.
How to read it today
Baxter’s seventeenth-century English is rich but occasionally dense, so a few habits make it far more rewarding. Read it slowly, and out loud where you can — these were spoken sermons, and they land differently on the ear than on the eye. Keep the anchor verse open beside you; nearly every paragraph is a fresh angle on Ezekiel 33:11, and holding the text in view keeps you oriented. When Baxter asks a question, pause and actually answer it before reading on, because the questions are the doorways he built into the book. It also helps to remember that Baxter’s “wicked” is not a cartoon villain but the ordinary person living without God, so let his descriptions search you rather than someone else.
If the book stirs you and you want to keep going, two of Baxter’s own emphases are worth following. His classic The Reformed Pastor shows the same pleading love turned toward those who shepherd others, and it explains where the tenderness of this little book came from. For a fresh statement of the same free-grace gospel in plainer, later English, Spurgeon’s All of Grace is a natural next step, taking the reader from Baxter’s call to turn straight into the doctrine of how a sinner is received. Baxter would have been glad to hand you either one.
For reflection
Use these questions on your own, in a journal, or with a group, reading the relevant sermon first.
- Baxter builds everything on God’s oath that He has “no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11). How does picturing God as eager to save, rather than reluctant, change the way you approach Him?
- Baxter insists the sinner shuts the door of mercy against himself. Is there a door in your own heart you have been holding closed, and what is it you are afraid to lose by opening it?
- The book’s central question is “why will ye die?” What reasons — spoken or unspoken — do people give for putting off turning to God, and how would Baxter answer yours?
- Baxter is desperate that no reader mistake his warnings for despair. When you hear hard truths about sin, do you tend toward despair or toward hope, and why?
- Think of one person you long to see turn to God. What would it look like to plead with them the way Baxter pleads — with more love than pressure?
When you are ready, the whole of Baxter’s appeal waits for you in A Call to the Unconverted, free to read on Ochorus. Read it slowly. It was written, after all, for exactly one reader at a time.
