The Costliness of Discipleship
The Costliness of Discipleship by Rev. L. John Gable
September 13, 2020
In 1937 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who was arrested and ultimately executed for his outspoken resistance to the Nazi movement and his participation in an assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler, wrote his classic book, The Cost of Discipleship. In it he speaks of the contrast between what he calls “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” He writes, “Cheap grace is the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it one will gladly go and sell all that they have. It is the pearl of great price for which the merchant will sell all of his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out his eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows Him.
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which each one must knock.
Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a person his life, and it is grace because it gives them the only true life…Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son: ‘You were purchased at a price’ and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered Him up for us (and for our salvation).”
This morning, as we continue our study of the book of Acts, I would like for us to reflect upon the cost or the costliness of our discipleship. Bonhoeffer is right in saying that the first cost, the most costly cost, has already been paid for us by God in the sending of His Son and His sacrificial death for us and our salvation on the cross of Calvary. Everything else we do and anything else we say about the “cost” of discipleship must be done and said in the light of this great cost which God has already paid for us.
Yet, there are other costs to our discipleship which we must also keep in mind, not only as we come to faith, but also as we make the commitment to live by faith. By discipleship I mean the desire and commitment on our part to enter in to a relationship with Jesus Christ, to accept Him as Savior and follow Him as Lord, to being formed and shaped in to His image as we seek to align ourselves with His Kingdom purposes and values. Discipleship, from the same root word as disciple and discipline, is an action we take in response to the action God has already taken on our behalf. As we have said numerous times before, God is always the first Mover, the Initiator, the One who first comes to us, and we then are always the responders. So any cost to us is in response to the greater cost God has already paid.
As we have seen, the book of Acts tells the story of the spread of the Gospel message and the growth of the early church. It is the story of new Christians, new disciples, responding to Jesus’ invitation to “Come and follow” and then obeying His Great Commission to “go and make disciples.” While there are many who were doing that work of outreach and evangelism, we hear primarily of Paul’s ministry because Luke, the writer of Acts as well as of the Gospel which bears his name, was a traveling companion of Paul’s. So while the book of Acts seems to focus primarily on one person and the difference Christ made in his life, we need to keep in mind Paul is not the hero of the story, God is, and there were countless others doing the same missionary work, some whose names we know: Peter, Phillip, Barnabas and John Mark, and countless others we don’t know, and for each of them, as we have heard in the telling of Paul’s story, there was a cost to their discipleship, as there is for all who hear the call of Christ and follow.
Several years ago Harold Kurtz, one of our Presbyterian mission partners, told of attending an international mission conference in Nairobi during which an elderly, much beloved pastor from Zaire, called the Son of Thunder rose to speak. He startled his audience by opening his message by saying, “I am going to criticize the missionaries! But first I want to tell you about them”; then he went on to take that 1000 plus congregation on a trip down the west coast of Africa describing the graveyards of missionaries and their children; Kurtz would have been numbered among those who suffered the loss of a child while in service there. As he moved from country to country, graveyard to graveyard, that African congregation began to quietly weep! Most had helped bury members of the missionary community. Kurtz writes, “I will never forget the compassion of those gathered there, nor will I ever forget the Son of Thunder thundering out, “Yes, the missionaries made mistakes, but one mistake they did not make was in believing that the Good News of Jesus Christ was worth dying for. That was a message which counteracted all of their other mistakes. And because of that, we have come in to Christ’s Kingdom.”
There is a cost to discipleship, a costliness to following Jesus. As one has said, “following is costly, shining is using up that which produces light.” We certainly see that is our study of Acts and in the costliness of Paul’s discipleship. In every city and town he visited he faced resistance and persecution, suffering and imprisonment. As an antidote to any who think, or are told, that coming to faith in Jesus will make life easier and more carefree, that all is goodness and kindness, grace and glory, blue birds and butterflies, Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians, “Five times I have received the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked” and he could go on. He didn’t go looking for suffering and persecution as some kind of badge of honor; rather such suffering and persecution came his way simply because he was naming the name of Jesus and sharing the Gospel of salvation. Such is the costliness of discipleship which we too should consider as we “take up His cross and follow.”
There is yet another aspect to the cost of discipleship that is evident in the passages we read this morning, a connection which I had quite candidly never noticed before.
Of course, Paul’s great desire, in obedience to the Great Commission, was to take the Gospel message to the ends of the earth, that being Rome, about that we will talk more in the weeks to come, but at this point in the story he is not heading west to Rome, but east, back to Jerusalem. Why is that? He is just completing his third missionary journey throughout Greece and is well on his way west, so why not continue on? Why go all the way back to Jerusalem? Even as we read in our passage this morning, as he is stopping to visit all of the churches he has planted along the way, they beg and plead with him not to go back to Jerusalem. They knew that it was dangerous for him to do so, as did he, yet he was bound and determined to go. Why? Because he had an offering to give to them, a “generous gift”, a collection of funds which he had for years been collecting from among the Gentile churches he had founded to support the primarily Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. This is yet another aspect of the costliness of discipleship. Those of us who are not called by God to go out into the mission field are called to support those who are, with our prayers and with our financial support.
The new believers in Jerusalem, primarily Jewish converts were suffering intense persecution, not only from Rome since this new found religion called Christianity was outlawed by the state, but also social and economic ostracism. Those who confessed Jesus as Messiah were being banished from the synagogue and outcast by many of their friends, so they lost relationships and opportunities for fellowship and business in their shops. Paul knew this, so as he planted churches in Gentile Greece he also planted seeds of support for those in the mother church back in Jerusalem. It is evident then that as important as evangelism was for Paul, the sharing of the Gospel of salvation, of equal importance to him was the meeting of very human needs, like hunger and depravation.
“Needs come in two categories: the ultimate need for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, knowledge of God and obedience to Christ’s commandments; AND felt needs that vary with time, place and personal circumstances. There is an old African proverb saying that “empty stomachs have no ears”. That is why missionaries help feed the hungry and heal the sick so that they will be able to listen to the Gospel and have their ultimate needs met. Food is the felt need; God-in-their-lives is the ultimate need” (Leith Anderson). Of course evangelism, our sharing of the Good News of Jesus through preaching and teaching and personal witness, is essential to the spread of the Gospel, but so also is the giving of our tithes and gifts and offerings in support of the missions and ministries designed to help meet the equally real human needs. Both of these are in response to what God has first done for us in Jesus Christ and both are part and parcel of the cost of discipleship. Our giving, our stewardship, is not just a due or tax levied against us in order to pay the church’s utilities and staff, but is part of our discipleship, our support of the mission and ministry of sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with both our words and our actions, from the pulpit and from the parking lot, in here and out there.
This is why Paul was committed to going back to Jerusalem before setting out for Rome. He wasn’t in any way less committed to sharing the Gospel message with new hearers, as much as he was equally committed to helping to meet the very real needs of those who had already heard and received it, those who in some ways had helped him come to the faith.
Friends, we must ever be committed to the same today. Both to the counting of the cost of discipleship in our willingness to share the Good News of God’s love and the saving grace of Jesus Christ in everything we say and do AND in the meeting of the very real human needs all around us even as Christ came to meet our needs. Both call for an investment on our part. Both have a cost and a costliness to them. Both reflect the call of the Gospel and are in response to the cost which God has already paid for us in the sending of His Son. Amen.