This past week has been filled with such a vast contrast between the darkness that can accompany a broken heart and the light of enduring love. This past week, I sat with my brother and listened to the pain and brokenness that comes when we do not love Jesus above all others. And yesterday, I witnessed a beautiful celebration of the life and wholeness that overflows when loving Jesus above all others enables you to love others better than you could otherwise.
It is a startling realization to know that you love yourself over Christ. We constantly ask in our hearts, "What can God do for me?" And when life doesn't happen exactly how we want it to happen, we turn on him.
But if we consider who Jesus is, the profundity of what he did, then for us to respond to him in any other way than completely is just scandalous. When I bear witness through history to lives like that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—who stood firm through the terror of Nazism and gave up his life, persevering to the last minute with great faith and strength—I am convicted of my own lack of love for Christ, my own busyness that causes me to forget the magnitude of his sacrifice. The words he wrote so many years ago still resonate with my spirit, and I see the same disease still prevalent in the church today.
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace...Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing...
Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian 'conception' of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins...In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God...
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...
Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate...
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and 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.
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