September 8, 2022

Jesus knew the cost of living God’s mission of reconciliation and love.
He knew exactly what living God’s love with all of his heart, strength, soul, and mind and loving his neighbor as himself would cost him.
Jesus knows when he tells his disciples that “the Son of Man must go, suffer, die, and on the third day be raised,” his ministry will be met with the cross. 

So when Jesus tells his disciples to carry their cross, he is fully aware of the implications – of the cost of following him in living God’s love.

Twentieth Century German Lutheran theologian and leader in the Confessing Church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote about the cost of discipleship extensively. He remarked that grace costs nothing because it comes to us freely without any doing of our own as pure gift from God. And that grace is the most costly thing because when we receive it demands of us our whole lives, famously saying, “When Christ calls a person, he bids them come and die.”

Jesus calls us to follow him in giving our lives away. In eating with the outcasts and often being cast out alongside them. To join Jesus in daring to cross social norms when they get in the way of God bringing wholeness to a broken creation. To stand up to systems of injustice that perpetuate harm and oppression even when those systems wield instruments of death like a cross. 

The call of Christ, the free gift of God’s grace, are costly.
And yet, it is in losing our life that we find life, it is in giving away our possessions we cling to the one who gave us everything to begin with, in hosting and eating with the people who cannot invite us back to their house for dinner we eat with the giver of life, in crossing boundaries and social norms we find Jesus already ahead of us and waiting on the other side.

God’s grace comes to us freely, sets us free to give all that we have and all that we are for the sake of the gospel.
The cost is high, but the good news is we are already fully funded on Christ’s account.
Thanks be to God!

Grace & Peace,
Pastor Drew