5/10/2023 0 Comments The cost of discipleship bookHe spoke them to a group of twenty-three ministerial students in a small town of Finkenwalde in northern Germany, the site of the illegal Confessing Church Seminary. These were the words of young pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I wanted to explode out of my seat and run up and down the skinny airplane aisle to burn off the excitement I was feeling. These words reset the course of my life, they opened my theological eyes, and helped me see clearly that grace was an active force that created action, or it wasn’t grace at all. Cheap grace is, thus, denial of God’s living word, denial of the incarnation of the word of God.” The world finds in this church a cheap cover-up for its sins, for which it shows no remorse and from which it has even less desire to be set free. Our struggle today is for costly grace… The church that teaches this doctrine of grace thereby confers such grace upon itself. “ Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. As beautiful as the snow-capped Andes were, it was the majesty of the words I had just read that caused my soul to rise in admiration. It was circa May 1971 and I was flying across the Andes looking out of the airplane window contemplating what I had just been reading.
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