Good morning! I do not know of anyone who likes pain. I get the sniffles or a little headache and I’m ready to go to bed for two weeks. Somewhere along the way we believed that any kind of pain or discomfort was always a bad thing. That we are ones who are the recipients and beneficiaries of God’s blessings and assume that is a love for God Himself.

The cost of being and making hopeful, joyful disciples is an exchange of life (yours for His). The cost of being and making hopeful, joyful disciples is realizing two things:

1. There is no joy like the joy of Jesus in rescuing us from our sin and our brokenness (see 1 John 1:4).
2. There is no hope like the hope we have in strengthening us in the midst of trouble (John 16:33).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German preacher and theologian who helped the Christians endure the opposition and persecution of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany wrote one of the most influential books of the 20th century, The Cost of Discipleship. If that book, he wrote a paragraph about ‘cheap grace,’ that is, a grace that is all about receiving all the benefits of Christianity (heaven, eternal life, forgiveness of sin, etc.) but not wanting the cost.  He wrote this:

Cheap grace is 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.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer wrote this in the middle of Germany’s persecution from the government in 1937, but what he writes here is timeless.

• Forgiveness we love, but do we really want to turn from sin that strays from what God wants? 
• We like being a part of the church–but do we want the church to provide discipline and boundaries and to keep you accountable? 
• We love how taking the Lord’s Supper ministers to us, but do we do so with a humble and confessing heart?
• We love grace, but are we willing to be and make hopeful, joyful disciples that are growing in the things of God?
• We love the empty tomb, but are we willing to have grace that brings the picture of our sin at the cross of Christ right to our front door?