The Cost

"When Christ calls a man,

He bids him come and die."
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer~

I am slowly making my way through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. When I have more time to think and write I shall give you a more inside view into my thoughts. For now, though, I will just give you highlights from chapter one.

~Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace.

~Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system.

~Cheap grace mean the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner.

~Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has.

~Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son: "you were bought at a price" and what has cost God so much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered Him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

~As Christianity spread, and the Church became more secularized, this realization of the costliness of grace gradually faded. The world was Christianized, and grace became its common property.

~I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that.

~The price we are having to pay to-day in the shape of the collapse of the organized Church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost.

~The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works.

Soak that in. More to come...