A Call to the Unconverted

It is Richard Baxter's earnest plea to anyone who has not yet turned to Christ. Built on God's oath in Ezekiel 33:11 — 'As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked… why will ye die?' — it reasons, answers objections, and refuses to let the reader remain undecided, pressing the unconverted to turn and live before it is too late.

Richard Baxter was a seventeenth-century English Puritan pastor, one of the most influential of his age, remembered for his tireless ministry at Kidderminster and for classics like The Reformed Pastor and The Saints' Everlasting Rest. A Call to the Unconverted is his best-known evangelistic work, written to bring sinners to Christ.

Ezekiel 33:11, in which God swears that he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked but desires that they turn and live, and pleads, 'why will ye die?' Baxter builds his whole appeal on this divine oath, using it to assure the reader of God's willingness to save and to press the urgent question of why anyone would refuse life and choose death.

The unconverted — those who have not yet truly turned from sin to God, however outwardly religious they may be. Baxter writes directly to such readers, refusing to let them hide behind excuses or delay, and pleading with them personally, as a pastor who longed for their salvation, to turn to Christ while there is still time.

The familiar ones sinners raise to put off conversion: that they will repent later, that they are not so bad, that turning is too hard, that God's demands are unreasonable. Baxter takes them up one by one and answers them plainly, stripping away every excuse and leaving the reader face to face with the choice of life or death set before them.

Because Baxter wrote as a pastor who expected to give an account for souls and believed eternity hung on the reader's response. He could not treat conversion as a matter for leisurely consideration; he pleads, argues, and presses because he loved the people he wrote to and dreaded their ruin. The urgency is that of a physician warning of a mortal danger.

It is aimed at the unconverted, but Christians have long valued it too — for their own self-examination, and as a model of earnest, loving evangelistic appeal. Baxter's reasoning and pleading show how to press the gospel on others with both clarity and compassion, so the book instructs the believer even as it calls the sinner.

At the beginning, letting Baxter set out God's oath in Ezekiel and his own earnest plea, then follow him through the reasons and the answers to objections. It is a short, closely argued appeal meant to be read straight through and taken personally, so its power is felt most by the reader who lets it question them directly.