In his book The Cost of Discipleship Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests that perhaps we have secularized the Christian religion as never before. Here is what he says about Cheap Grace, what I am calling here Fake Discipleship:
"The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is 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 all 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 . . . The only man (or woman) who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man (or woman) who has left all to follow Christ . . . It is becoming clearer every day that the most urgent problem besetting our Church is this: How can we live the Christian life in the modern world?"
Comment: What kind of grace have you found in Christ? If you have the cheap kind or you willing to trade it in for the costly kind? Bonhoeffer defines it this way:
Cheap Grace: the preaching of forgiveness without requiring 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.
Costly Grace: the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.
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