A "Must Read" for every Christian! | The Cost of Discipleship

Maestro Bonhoeffer | The Cost of Discipleship | Dietrich Bonhoeffer

books:


	• The Cost of Discipleship Dietrich Bonhoeffer Touchstone, 1995 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 97 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Great reminder of what it is to be a Christian

This is the 2nd time I have read this in the last 5 years and it is once again an important reminder of what it means to follow Christ. Very well written it lays out a great case for active decipleship in our world.

A "Must Read" for every Christian!

For anyone wanting a great challenge to break free from the ho-hum of cultural Christianity, this book is for you! Bonhoeffer is one of those modern day theologians Christians can really look up to and learn from. In the Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer writes about grace, our call to discipleship, and what obedience to Christ should look like. He then goes through the Sermon on the Mount and seeks to unravel this all-important text so that today's Christians can better understand the words of Christ and put them into practice.
What many people fail to realize is that Christ did not just come to earth to save people, He came to teach people how to truly live! Bonhoeffer is one who realized this fact and he sought to live out this truth in his life. He wrestled with what it truly means to be saved by grace and understood that we can not simply live however we want after becoming "saved" but our lives need to be lived in obedience to Christ and following His call of discipleship. Without a life spent in obedience to God and following this call, who can say that they are saved at all? This is nothing short of cheap grace which costs the person nothing. However, costly grace (the grace which saves) costs a person everything!
I highly recommend this book for those people who desire something more out of this life than what modern day Christianity offers most of the time. This is not a quick fix however, but this is something which will take years to come to fruition. One thing I promise though: if you take this book seriously, you will never be the same!

for more information click here

Maestro Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship explores the challenges of embracing the gospel theme of sacrifice. His message, like the message of the Gospels, is not easy to hear. He writes something to the effect of "When Christ calls a [person] he bids them to come and die...that they might gain new life." In a direct, sometimes harsh assessment, he points up the difficulty of actually living a creed which embraces sacrifice of the individual believer called to task by the divine. Like a strict drill instructor in boot camp, his abrupt manner is designed to hit you in the face with your own (and his) inadequacies until you break. He intends with this treatment to save the reader's neck once one makes it to the front lines. His goal is to ensure the survival of your soul through salvation.

The book begins with a section entitled The Call to Discipleship. Each step of the way Bonhoeffer sets up a test, a test that this reader invariably fails each step of the way. The phrase "cheap grace" remains the watch-phrase of the work. "Cheap grace" refers to the counterfeit self-acceptance the would-be believer experiences, and is discussed in sharp contrast to the genuine experience caused by the demands of the Christian faith. Bonhoeffer cautions us against 'easy religion' and mere emotive response to the Christian message. He portrays Christian life as demanding unflinching self-awareness and struggle, culminating in surrender. Even if one cannot reach all of Bonhoeffer's conclusions, and even if one does not share Bonhoeffer's theology, the inquiry is certainly worth undertaking. He simply lays it on the line for the reader to either accept or reject. But he backs up his challenges with solid biblical research and great passion ... not to mention his own personal living example.

Please visit my website, Delight In Him, for more.

for more information click here

The Reality of True Discipleship

The Cost of Discipleship seems to have been presciently written for our modern and post-modern approaches to Christianity. Whether it is combating the consumerist approach, an enculturated church or a church cheap grace, the message of costly grace and repentant discipleship of Bonhoeffer is timely and necessary for Christians today, especially Christians in western cultures.

Bonhoeffer illustrates the call of Jesus to die to one's self and to follow him in the way of the cross. Bonhoeffer's writing may seem harsh and works-oriented at times, but overall it is congruent with the New Testament, the early church Fathers and the Reformers Luther and Calvin. However, it is harsh and alien to much of Christian culture of today that affirms rather than convicts, and coddles rather than challenges, and seeks to make comfortable rather than rejoice in sufferings and hardships.

I think Bonhoeffer's writing on grace is on par with Luther's disputations on the theology of the cross versus the theology of glory. Bonhoeffer exposits the Sermon on the Mount as being illustrative of life in the kingdom of heaven under Christ's rule and by his grace. He does not let readers off the hook due to the impossibility of fulfilling Christ's demands; rather, he urges readers to live into Christ's teachings through his grace and his presence working within us and by allowing ourselves to be crucified with Christ.

Bonhoeffer emphasizes the communion of saints and how all Christians are being transformed by God into the image of Christ. He writes that before we can experience of glory of Christ we are called to experience the death and suffering of Christ, even as Paul writes to the Phillipians.

The Cost of Discipleship ought to be a necessary read for today's Christian.

for more information click here

The Cost Of Discipleship

One of the opening lines in Cost Of Discipleship reads "Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace." Such is the book's theme.

The title is around 300 pages contains the major areas:

1. Grace And Discipleship.
2. The Sermon On The Mount.
3. The Messengers.
4. The Church Of Jesus Christ And The Life Of Discipleship.

Bonhoeffer makes many good points and speaks with moral authority - he was executed for his faith by Nazi Germany just days before World War 2 ended.

However, I agree with an earlier reviewer concerning the writing style. At times the writing was hard to follow and an updated version (as with other Christian classics) would be great.

Still, a good read. Be challenged and encouraged!

Recommended.

for more information click here

One of the most important theologians of the twentieth century illuminates the relationship between ourselves and the teachings of Jesus

What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the aristocrat? 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 ourselves...grace 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."

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.

for more information click here