The Cost of Discipleship

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Men go to God when he is sore bested: find him poor and scorned , without shelter and bread, whelmed under weight of the wicked , the weak, the dead. Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.12

“If we claim to be Christians, there is no room for expediency.”

it is not only my task to look after the victims of madmen who drive a motorcar in a crowded street, but to do all in my power to stop their driving at all.

So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus. Are we determined to have nothing to do with all these people?

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices.

Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before.

It was grace because it cost so much, and it cost so much because it was grace. That was the secret of the gospel of the Reformation—the justification of the sinner.

Is there a more diabolical abuse of grace than to sin and rely on the grace which God has given?

When you have made your eye the instrument of impurity, you cannot see God with it.

The genuine work of love is always a hidden work.

Strict exercise of self-control is an essential feature of the Christian’s life. Such customs have only one purpose—to make the disciples more ready and cheerful to accomplish those things which God would have done.

When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.

for he sets his heart on his accumulated wealth, and makes it a barrier between himself and God. Where our treasure is, there is our trust, our security, our consolation and our God. Hoarding is idolatry.

But the Christian is not only forbidden to judge other men: even the word of salvation has its limits. He has neither power nor right to force it on other men in season and out of season. Every attempt to impose the gospel by force, to run after people and proselytize them, to use our own resources to arrange the salvation of other people, is both futile and dangerous.

The disciples of Jesus must not fondly imagine that they can simply run away from the world and huddle together in a little band.

God will not ask us in that day whether we were good Protestants, but whether we have done his will. We shall be asked the same question as everybody else. The Church is marked off from the world not by a special privilege, but by the gracious election and calling of God.

His gospel of the kingdom of God and his power of healing belonged to the sick and poor, wherever they were to be found among the people. God’s beloved people had been ill-treated and laid low and the guilt belonged to those who had failed to minister to them in the service of God.

What use were all these orthodox preachers and expounders of the Word, when they were not filled by boundless pity and compassion for God’s maltreated and injured people? What is the use of scribes, devotees of the law, preachers and the rest, when there are no shepherds for the flock?

On the contrary, the Word moves of its own accord. and all the preacher has to do is to assist that movement and try to put no obstacles in its path.

It is fatally easy to prostitute divine salvation to material gain, in the shape of prestige, power or filthy lucre.