Cheap Grace

Boy do I feel stressed... pressed in... overwhelmed. Things just seem to have piled up. Next week is NMI Convention and District Assembly, pile on top of that school, and church. Anyway, I'm just feeling stretched a bit thin.

For class I just finished Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship and now need to write a paper on it. I'm thinking along the lines of "Cheap grace makes for a cheap God." Bonhoeffer talks a lot about the idea of how cheap grace is being peddled in churches. He calls it a cheap covering for sin. "Cheap grace," he says, "is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion with confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate."

You see, I think we've made grace about us. And that cheapens it. We've made grace about forgiveness, about what we get. We've even created a cheesy little acronym: GRACE, God's Resources at Christ's Expense. The implication is, of course, that it is God's resources for our use (or misuse).

Grace, though, God calling us to follow. And as Bonhoeffer points out, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." The thing about grace is it has very little to do with us. It is about God; it is about God taking on flesh and blood, coming into a world of suffering to suffer with it, and ultimately to die for it. Nothing cheap about that. Grace is about God becoming incarnate. And that's why grace is so important for the church to get hold of--not cheap grace that is dispensed as a doctrine or a principle, but costly grace that bleeds for sin. You see, the Church is the presence of Christ just as Christ is the presence of God. And when the Church peddles cheap grace it turns God into a dollar store God.