Best Bonhoeffer Chapter Yet! Quote-mania!

Below is a repost from earlier this year. The more the past year has passed, the more this burns in my soul to wake up the church, especially in light of the Innovate Church conference that is going on at TRBC. When was the gospel ever easy? Wake up America. We are in a post-Christian society.

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WOW I read the chapter Discipleship and the Cross. BAM! Great stuff. Below are some of the best quotes from this chapter. The modern church needs to heed to the words this man as they are speaking to us from his grave. Powerful thoughts here:

"Jesus must therefore make it clear beyond all doubt that the must of suffering applies to his disciples no less than to himself...discipleship means adherence to the person of Jesus, and therefore submission to the law of Christ which is the law of the Cross."

"To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us."

"If in the end we know only him, if we have ceased to notice the pain of our own cross, we are indeed looking only to him."

"If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands and which fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence, then we cannot help regarding the cross as an ordinary calamity, as one of the trials and tribulations of life. We have then forgotten that the cross means rejection and shame as well as suffering."

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die."

"The call of Christ, his baptism, sets the Christian in the middle of the daily arena against sin and the devil. Every day he encounters new temptations, and every day he must suffer anew for Jesus Christ's sake."

"Suffering, then, is the badge of true discipleship."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Is ROCKIN My World!!!

So I picked up The Cost of Discipleship after hearing a lot about it from my brother Don. I finally picked it up from the library at Liberty. I'm not done Chapter 1 and there are TONS of things in it that are incredible! I love it! Nothing like starting your book with a chapter entitled "Cheap Grace" and going on about those who get people to pray the prayer and baptized, but don't encourage the whole idea of discipleship and growth. He wrote this during WW2, yet it is SO TRUE of so many megachurches and churches today. Some quotes:

• Cheap grace means the justification of the sin without the justification of the sinner.
• The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ.
• 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.
• (Grace) is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.