What Is Costly Discipleship? Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship in Plain English

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was thirty-one years old, sitting at a desk in a small German town called Finkenwalde, when he wrote a sentence the church would still be quoting a hundred years later.

“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church.”

He was watching pastors around him bend their knees to Adolf Hitler. He was watching a Christianity that asked for nothing reshape itself into a Christianity that did nothing. And he was trying to put a name to what was missing. The phrase he landed on, the one we are still talking about today, was costly discipleship.

This is a pastor’s plain-English look at what Bonhoeffer meant by that phrase, where the idea actually comes from in Scripture, what it has looked like in real lives across church history, and what it might look like for you and me tomorrow morning when the alarm goes off and life starts again.

Pull up a chair. There is more here than you think.

The Phrase That Wouldn’t Let Bonhoeffer Go

The book was called Nachfolge in the original German. In English we know it as The Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer wrote it in 1937, four years after Hitler took power and eight years before the Gestapo would hang him from a meat hook in Flossenbürg concentration camp.

He opens the book with a hammer. He says the greatest enemy of Christianity in his day is not atheism. It is not communism. It is not the rising Nazi state. The greatest enemy is something he calls cheap grace, and it is being preached every Sunday from German pulpits to people who go home no different than they came.

Cheap grace, Bonhoeffer writes, is “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.” It is grace that does not actually cost anything because it does not actually change anything. It is the Christianity that lets you keep your old life and your old self and your old comforts, and just adds a religious sticker to the bumper.

Then he names the opposite. Costly grace. The grace that follows Jesus, costs the disciple something real, and reshapes a life from the inside out.

Here is the line that catches most people. Both of them are grace. Bonhoeffer is not saying costly grace is something you earn. He is not saying you have to pay for salvation. Grace is free. Always free. He is saying the grace that has actually taken root in a person will cost that person something, because it will start to ask things of them. The same way a marriage is free when you say “I do” at the altar but starts to cost something the next morning when you wake up and your life is no longer your own.

The shortest version of what Bonhoeffer is saying is this: cheap grace says yes to God and changes nothing. Costly grace says yes to God and changes everything.

He did not make this up. He found it in his Bible. Which brings us to the next thing you have to see.

The Biblical Roots You Have to See First

Costly discipleship is not a twentieth-century invention. Bonhoeffer was simply reading what was already there, sitting in the four Gospels, in plain Greek, for two thousand years. There are four passages worth slowing down on.

The first is in Luke 14. The crowds are following Jesus. He turns to them and starts talking about cost. He talks about a man who wants to build a tower and the wisdom of counting whether he can finish it before he starts. He talks about a king going to war and the wisdom of knowing whether his ten thousand soldiers can stand against the enemy’s twenty thousand. And then he lands it. “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.” (Luke 14:27)

That is Jesus, not Bonhoeffer. Jesus is the one introducing cost into the conversation. He is not pulling a bait and switch on the crowds. He is naming the price out loud, before anyone signs up, and asking them to count it honestly.

The second passage is in Matthew 16. Peter has just made his great confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” A few verses later Jesus starts to talk about going to Jerusalem to suffer and die, and Peter takes him aside to rebuke him. Jesus turns and gives Peter one of the sharpest sentences in the Gospels. “Get behind Me, Satan!” And then this, to all of them: “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” (Matthew 16:24)

Three verbs. Deny. Take up. Follow. Notice the order. The denying comes first.

The third passage is John 12:24, and this one I quote often around here because it is the seed verse of Lottie Moon’s whole life. “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it produces much grain.” A buried seed multiplies. A seed that refuses to be buried stays one seed forever.

The fourth is Philippians 3:7-8, written by a man who lost his social standing, his career, his comforts, his freedom, and eventually his head, all for the sake of Jesus. “What things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Paul does not call the cost a tragedy. He calls it a trade. Loss for the excellence of knowing Christ. He sounds, in that one verse, like a man who has done his math and discovered the deal is the best one going.

Those four passages are where Bonhoeffer got costly discipleship. He did not coin the idea. He just gave it a name we could not unhear.

What It Has Looked Like in Real Lives

If you want to see what costly discipleship actually looks like when it stops being a theology textbook and starts being a person, here are five lives that show it. Each of these stories has a full Take 5 episode on this site if you want the rest.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was safe. In June of 1939 he sailed to New York to teach at Union Theological Seminary, and almost everyone he loved told him to stay. He could have ridden the war out from a desk in Manhattan. He lasted twenty-six days before he boarded a ship back to Germany. He wrote to his American friends, “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.” He paid for that sentence with his life. Read his story.

Lottie Moon. A famine swept through the part of China where she was serving as a missionary. She gave away her food. She gave away her money. She gave until there was nothing left to give, including her own meals. The woman who had fed so many was quietly starving herself. She died on Christmas Eve, 1912, weighing fifty pounds. The Christmas offering that now bears her name has raised more than five billion dollars for missions. She never saw a dime of it. Read her story.

John Newton. He started out as a slave ship captain. By the end of his life, frail and going blind, he picked up his pen and wrote a public confession of every cruelty he had committed in the trade. Then he poured his last years into mentoring a young Parliament member named William Wilberforce. He told him to stay and fight for abolition. Wilberforce stayed. England outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the year before Newton died. Newton lived just long enough to hear that the chains were coming off. Read his story.

Amy Carmichael. She was a young Irish woman with a teaching career and a circle of friends and a calm life ahead of her. She sailed to India in 1895 and stayed for fifty-five years. She never married. She never came home. She built Dohnavur Fellowship into a refuge for hundreds of children rescued out of temple slavery. The cost was her entire planned life. The harvest was a generation of children who had a future because she did not have one. Read her story.

George Müller. A teenage thief in Germany who got saved at a prayer meeting and never recovered. He moved to Bristol, England, and started taking in the city’s orphans. He made one rule. He would never ask a single human being for money. When a need came he told God and no one else, and then he waited. Before he was done, more than ten thousand children had passed through his houses. He spent his entire adult life saying no to security so that other people could be secure. Read his story.

Five lives. Different centuries, different countries, different stations. The same shape. Each of them got a moment where God asked for something costly, and each of them said yes.

What Costly Discipleship Is NOT

Before we talk about how this lands on ordinary people in ordinary lives, we need to clear up some misreadings. Bad theology about cost has done a lot of damage in the American church, and I want to head it off before we go further.

It is not earning your salvation. The cost is not the price of grace. Grace is free. Always free. Anyone who tells you otherwise has missed the entire New Testament. The cost is the response, not the payment. A bride does not buy her marriage at the altar. She enters it. Then the marriage starts to ask things of her.

It is not self-flagellation. Bonhoeffer was not preaching misery. He was preaching reality. The cost is real, but the joy on the other side is realer. If your version of Christian discipleship requires you to be miserable in order to feel holy, you have wandered into the wrong room.

It is not the prosperity gospel turned upside down. Costly discipleship does not promise that the more you sacrifice, the more God owes you. God does not owe us anything. He gives us everything anyway. That is the whole point.

It is not only for missionaries and martyrs. This is the biggest misreading of all. Most costly discipleship is ordinary. Most of it happens at a kitchen table, in an inbox, on a phone call you did not want to make. Lottie Moon’s story is in the Bible we read because most of our stories will not be. But the same kind of yes is being asked of every Christian, every day, in much smaller doses. Which brings us to the next section.

What It Looks Like in Ordinary Life

You are probably not going to be hanged at Flossenbürg. I am not either. Most of us will live and die in homes with electricity and a refrigerator. So what does costly discipleship look like for us, here, this week?

• It looks like forgiving the family member who never apologized.
• It looks like telling the truth at work when the lie would protect your job.
• It looks like spending your money differently because the kingdom matters more than the upgrade.
• It looks like loving your spouse the way Christ loved the church, even on the days you do not want to.
• It looks like saying no to the relationship, the career move, the secret habit that is slowly eating your soul.
• It looks like going to the hard conversation you have been avoiding, because grace requires honesty.
• It looks like praying for the person who hurt you instead of rehearsing the story.
• It looks like quietly giving away something you wanted to keep.
• It looks like being patient with the slow growth of someone you love.

Most costly discipleship does not make the news. It just makes a life. And if you are looking around your life right now and feeling a small pang as you read those lines, the Holy Spirit is doing what He does. Stay there a minute. He is the one talking.

How to Begin (When You’re Just Starting)

If costly discipleship is new language for you, or if you have been a Christian for years but the cost has stayed theoretical, here is the smallest possible place to start. No spiritual gymnastics required.

Start with what is in front of you. Ask yourself one honest question. Where in my life right now am I saying yes to Jesus with my mouth and no with my schedule, my wallet, or my mouth?

Pick one. Just one. Bonhoeffer would call this single-minded obedience. Do not try to solve everything at once. Pick the area that came to mind first when you read that question, because that is the area God has been gently knocking on for a while.

Bring it to God honestly. He already knows. He is not waiting for you to fix it. He is waiting for you to come.

Find a friend who will tell you the truth. Costly discipleship was never designed to be a solo sport. There is a reason the New Testament keeps saying “one another” over and over again.

Stay close to Scripture. If it has been a while since you read one of the four Gospels straight through, this is the month. Mark is the shortest. Start there.

And do not try to be Bonhoeffer. Be the disciple Jesus is actually inviting you to be today. Your story will be smaller than his. It will also be enough.

Why It’s Still Grace

This is the most important section in the whole piece, so do not skim it.

The cost is never paid as a fee. It is paid as a response. A bride does not earn her marriage by saying yes at the altar. She enters it, and the marriage starts to reshape her life, and the reshaping is part of the gift. That is what costly discipleship is. Grace that has actually taken root in a person starts to do things in that person. It costs the old self. It does not cost salvation.

Bonhoeffer said it this way. “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” That sentence has scared a lot of people. But look at what he means by “die.” He means the death of the false self. The death of the version of you that was never going to make you happy in the first place. The version that was small, defensive, scared, and addicted to its own comfort. Jesus is not asking for that version to keep going. He is asking for it to be buried, so the real you can come up out of the ground.

The cost is real. The joy on the other side is realer.

The opposite of cheap grace is not earning. The opposite of cheap grace is real grace. Grace that actually does something. Grace that actually saves. Grace that actually makes you new.

That is the kind of grace Jesus offers. Not the kind that lets you keep your old life and add a bumper sticker. The kind that breaks open the old life so a new one can begin.

Closing

Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. American troops liberated the camp two weeks later. The camp doctor on duty that morning watched Bonhoeffer climb the steps to the gallows. He later said he had rarely seen a man so calm. He had spent the night before in his cell, leading a small worship service for the few prisoners who could gather. His last recorded words were spoken to a fellow prisoner. “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.”

That is what costly discipleship looks like when the bill comes due in full.

The good news is most of us will not be asked to pay it that way. We will be asked to pay it in a thousand smaller ways across an ordinary life. The yes you say tomorrow morning, in the quiet, before anyone is watching, is the same kind of yes Bonhoeffer’s was. Just smaller. Just yours.

And that, friend, is how grace stops being cheap and starts being real.

Heaven comes down. Lift up your day.

Related Devotionals

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Faith on the Last Ship
• Lottie Moon’s Last Christmas: The Seed That Fed Millions
• John Newton: The Slave Trader Who Wrote Amazing Grace
• Amy Carmichael: The Prayer God Answered with No
• George Müller: The Life That Proved God Answers Prayer
• What Does the Bible Really Say About Anxiety?
• Where Do You Live?
• Eric Liddell: The Runner Who Gave Up Gold
• Samuel Rutherford and the Higher Summons