It's Shrove Tuesday, which is a great time to get back into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. In the 1930s, a time when the vast majority of Christians in Germany had bought into a nationalistic distortion of Christian faith, Bonhoeffer warned of cheap grace: grace as a doctrinal idea, requiring no repentance or commitment to actually follow Jesus. Instead Bonhoeffer lifts up costly grace: grace that comes with Jesus' call to follow him and model our lives on his.
When I first read The Cost of Discipleship, my little Lutheran mind was blown. I had grown up learning about grace: God's gift of love and salvation that we can never earn by any action we do. Now, here's Bonhoeffer, saying we have to follow Jesus, and that doing so will cost our lives. I remember telling a friend, "that sounds like works-righteousness!" But there's one sentence in there that has been rolling around in my head for fifteen years now: "It is costly because it calls us to follow; it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ."
If Jesus is God's presence made flesh, and heaven is to be with God, then the call to follow Jesus is the call to participate in Heaven starting right now. Faith isn't just believing Jesus has saved us; it's putting down what we're doing and experiencing what salvation feels like. It's more than just believing we'll go to Heaven someday. It's seeing Heaven happen around us and being Heaven for those who need it.
It's not about grace versus works. The grace is the chance to get to work, today, for Jesus.
Prayer: Jesus, thank you for calling me to follow you. Help me say "yes" with my thoughts, words and actions, day by day, moment by moment. Amen.
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