As the book points out, when I sin, I stop following Jesus. Like many, I like to think that since I trust Jesus to forgive my sins, the sins I do commit really don't matter.
The difficulty arose from my conscience when Bonhoeffer talked about what is and isn't following Jesus. No, what Herr Bonhoeffer had to say was quite clear. Not that the translation from the German was obtuse. The Cost of Discipleship is a compelling statement of the demands of sacrifice and ethical consistency from a man whose life and thought were exemplary articulations of a new type of leadership inspired by the Gospel, and imbued with the spirit of Christian humanism and a creative sense of civic duty. What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the government worker? What did Jesus mean to say to us? What is his will for us today? Drawing on the Sermon on the Mount, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answers these timeless questions by providing a seminal reading of the dichotomy between "cheap grace" and "costly grace." "Cheap grace," Bonhoeffer wrote, "is the grace we bestow on ace without discipleship.Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the girl which must be asked for, the door at which a man must know.It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most important theologians of the twentieth century, illuminates the relationship between ourselves and the teachings of Jesus in this classic book on living as a Christian.
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