Andrew Kesterson

"Love God. Live Righteously. Die Well."
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# The Cost of Discipleship

2023-10-10 Books Faith 510 words

Rating: 7/10
Amazon Link: click here
TL;DR An honest (and, perhaps, frightening) look at the true cost of following Jesus Christ in your life, and how far you must be willing to go in order to claim Christ as Lord.

It’s important to understand who the author was. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany. Born 1906, he was one of the founding members of the Confessing Church in the mid 1930s, and afterward he wrote this book in 1937. From day one he was an outspoken dissident against the Nazis, their euthanasia program and genocidal persecutions. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1945, imprisoned at Tegerl Prision for 1.5 years, and later hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp in 1945.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a man fully acquainted with the cost of discipleship, and I feel he is (as select few others in history are) uniquely qualified to have penned a volume like this.

All that being said, I can sum up the cost of discipleship: everything. All you have ever had, known, or loved. Everything you will ever be promised in this world, all your potential gains and pleasures. All of it. The cost of discipleship is to lay all of your earthly being at the feet of Christ, at the foot of the cross, and to give it all up in exchange for the gift of God’s mercy and grace, and to live a life of total devotion to God in Christ, wherever that may lead you.

It’s a path few can walk. I openly admit I fail in it daily. I look around me and consider all the things I cherish too dearly to do some of the crazier things I can imagine doing as a Chrisitian; my family which I love, my home where I find comfort and constance, my job where I find the means to sustain myself and do good works in the name of God. My various worldly possessions with their utilitarian purposes so essential for daily life. I say that God will provide, that he will clothe His believers more gloriously than the lilies of the field, that He will feed us our fill daily if we rely on Him, and yet there are so many things that I do not do. And I think it is because I, like many other Christians, are not willing to pay the full cost of discipleship.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer paid the ultimate price for his beliefs and his stand against earthly tyranny. He knew the cost of discipleship. But in a way, it is easier to die for your faith than to live for it. You die, once, and you’re done. I’m by no means discounting his faith or his sacrifice. What I’m saying is that it’s easy for us to idolize the one-time glorious sacrifice of the martyr while being unwilling to daily crucify our flesh, pick up our cross, and follow Him wherever He may lead. And that is the cost of discipleship.

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