Pat's Ponderings

Well, I re-started reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship a few days ago on the way to go kayaking with my dad. I'd gotten a little over halfway through it a long time ago; so, I just decided to start from scratch. Anyway, this book is really intense and challenging. I am constantly amazed by old-school authors like Bonhoeffer and Chambers and tons others how every single word seems to be perfectly hand-selected to be overflowing in depth and insight.

In the first chapter, Bonhoeffer presents the idea of costly grace versus cheap grace, costly being grace viewed from a Biblical standpoint and cheap from a watered-down and 'easy' viewpoint of the bloody Cross of our Lord. So, here are a couple things he says:

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

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: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God 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.

[...] Grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."

[...] It was grace because it cost so much, and it cost so much because it was grace.

The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ. Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace. But those who try to use this grace as a dispensation from following Christ are simply deceiving themselves.

This standpoint of grace seems to have lost its place in our churches today. I make a generalization, yet I think for the most part a fair one, in saying that most churches have strayed from the truth of the Lordship of Jesus. Let me explain. Last Sunday, in his sermon, Chris Osborne talked about the common 'American' philosophy that God's grace allows us a license for sin. People think they can go about their lives without submitting to Jesus as Lord, continuing in rebellion against His standards, and God will still forgive their sin. This is straight-up self-deception. Paul talks about grace like this: "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?" (Romans 6:1-2). Hebrews is even more demanding: "For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins" (Hebrews 10:26). If we look at the life of Paul, the love and grace of God changed his life dramatically. He was 'glory-driven' because He knew "the breadth and length and height and depth" of the love of Christ in a real, deep way (Ephesians 3:18-19). As American Christians, we are plagued by the false doctrine of being 'pleasure-driven' believing that, because God loves us, He wants us to be happy. Bonhoeffer's idea of 'cheap grace' is similar:

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. 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. [...] In both cases [of cheap and costly grace] we have the identical formula - "justification by faith alone." Yet the misuse of the formula leads to the complete destruction of its very essence.

Oh, where have we strayed and distorted our Lord's blood to such an extent? How can we look upon the Cross of Jesus and not offer Him our everything? He is so worth it!

By no means, do I have this whole thing figured out, and I am challenged to say that, as Bonhoeffer describes Martin Luther's realization of the magnitude of grace, that it has completely "shattered [my] whole existence." But, I do know that "Jesus asks nothing of us without giving us the strength to perform it. [...] Only Jesus Christ, who bids us follow him, knows the journey's end. But we do know that it will be a road of boundless mercy. Discipleship means joy" (Bonhoeffer). What amazing promises we have in Jesus!

Lord Jesus, bind my life to Your own. Let it be poured out as a drink offering for the Glory of Your Name. You deserve all praise for your inexplicable grace!