"The Cost of Discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonfoeffer was a Lutheran pastor who studied in Berlin & the Union Theological Seminary in NY, and later taught Systematic Theology in Berlin University. He returned to Germany to be a part of the resistance to the Nazi regime. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, and hanged by order of Himmler at the concentration camp in Flossenburg in 1945 at the age of 39.

“Cheap grace,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is grace we bestow on ourselves … grace without discipleship…. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift 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. … When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”