Cheap grace……… the ruin of many church people ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

April 8, 2015 by Healing From Complex Trauma & PTSD/CPTSD

Reading through ‘The Cost Of Discipleship’ – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and it is challenging for me. Many terms used I don’t know, and Bonhoeffer is clearly way beyond my intellectual level, but I am attempting to take it in.

This is going to take time for me to read, and digest. And that’s okay. God, Jesus, my faith, are worth it. And I need spiritually feeding and nourishing and I need that from wise and spiritually progressed Christians.

This following section, I understand.

---

This cheap grace has been no less disastrous to our own spiritual lives. Instead of opening up the way to Christ it has closed it. Instead of calling us to follow Christ, it has hardened us in our disobedience.

Perhaps we had once heard the gracious call to follow him, and had at this command even taken the first few steps along the path of discipleship in the discipline of obedience, only to find ourselves confronted by the word of cheap grace. Was that not merciless and hard?

The only effect that such a word could have on us was to bar our way to progress, and seduce us to the mediocre level of the world, quenching the joy of discipleship by telling us that we were following a way of our own choosing, that we were spending our strength and disciplining ourselves in vain – all of which was not merely useless, but extremely dangerous.

After all, we were told, our salvation had already been accomplished by the grace of God. The smoking flax was mercilessly extinguished. It was unkind to speak to men like this, for such a cheap offer could only leave them bewildered and tempt them from the way to which they had been called by Christ. Having laid hold on cheap grace, they were barred for ever from the knowledge of costly grace.

Deceived and weakened, men felt that they were strong now that they were in possession of this cheap grace – whereas they had in fact lost the power to live the life of discipleship and obedience.

The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (2011-08-16). The Cost of Discipleship