The Cost of Discipleship

Introduction

One of my general principles of advice for all Christians is that in addition to reading their Bibles, they ought always to have one solid Christian book which they are also reading alongside of their regular time in God’s Word. This is general advice, not a rule, but I think it is good wisdom. Our God has communicated himself to us not with visuals, not with movies, not even through an oral tradition, but through written Words, Scripture. As such, Christians are words people.

And as we read good Christian books, we not only increase in our Christian knowledge and so forth, but we improve in our ability to understand words. As we grow in our ability to use words, we become better students of the Word. And whether it takes you a week or a month to get through a book, such resources serve as tools for our growth in Christlikeness. Again, not a rule, but advice that I generally think is sound and helpful.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the 20th century German theologian who died in a Nazi camp, is known for writing several good books, and likely had a bright academic future ahead of him had his life not been cut short at the hands of the Nazi regime. Two of his books in particular stand out as ones which I believe every Christian ought to read, as they are some of the best books written on the subject matter. The first is titled Life Together, and is an examination on what the Christian community ought to look like, and how Christians apply the gospel in their relationships with other Christians. It is without a doubt one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read, and I hope you will some day make time for it if you have not yet.

But another book, perhaps his most famous book, is of special importance to our passage today. It is titled The Cost of Discipleship, and it is Bonhoeffer’s treatment of what the costly life of a Christian who follows Christ will look like. It is a heavy book, because it does not sympathize with our Western/American comforts and ideas of the Good Life. Instead, it confronts us with the weighty and sacrificial calling of following Christ, which Christians in every time and place must truly wrestle with.

The Cost of Discipleship was written in 1937, nearly four years after Hitler came to power when he was appointed chancellor in Germany. For several years, Bonhoeffer watched with anger and a broken heart as countless German Christians swore their allegiance to the Nazi party, who said that their platform was based on Christian values.

Although the Confessing Church had formed in protest to Christian-Nazi Allegiance, and had rallied around the 1934 Barmen Declaration, it was not enough to stop the flood of professing Christians giving their allegiance to the Nazi Party.

Bonhoeffer responded with great personal sacrifice, forming underground seminaries and doing his best to faithfully lead others in allegiance to Christ, not Hitler. Bonhoeffer knew first hand that there was a cost to being a disciple.

It was into this context which he wrote The Cost of Discipleship. In Bonhoeffer’s analysis, the problem he was seeing with Christian allegiance to the Third Reich was not primarily a political one, nor a sociological one, but a theological problem. In his analysis, the church had for too long been dispensing cheap grace, rather than teaching the truth of costly grace. Here is how he defined the difference between the two. This quote is in your bulletin. He wrote:

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace…Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

[Costly grace] is costly, because it calls us to follow; it is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it costs a man his life; it is grace, because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price,” and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us…Grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

In other words, for too long the church had preached a message that you could follow Christ without any significant life change. Grace came cheap. The call was not to follow Christ no matter the cost, the call was to have just a little bit of Christ at no cost. The message of grace and forgiveness of sin was given without any serious consideration given for what kind of life a disciple was truly called to.

This fight for costly grace over cheap grace is alive and well today, and it is this call of costly grace which we find in our text this morning. If you’ve been around Reformed churches long enough, you know that we tend to go passage by passage through books of the Bible. One of the reasons why we do this is because this method does not permit us to skip over the hard, uncomfortable passages. This may be one of those passages for you this morning. I hope you will be quick to listen, and honest in your response to our Lord’s call as it is heard this morning. Let’s give our attention to the reading of God’s word from Matthew 8:

Matthew 8:18–27 ESV

Now when Jesus saw a crowd around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. And a scribe came up and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Another of the disciples said to him, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.” And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”

We’re going to consider this cost of discipleship looking at these two prospective followers in verses 19 and 21. We’ll do that under two headings, 1) Counting the Cost and 2) Paying the Cost. Then we’ll conclude with a couple brief remarks about Jesus on the boat as we prepare to come to the table together.

Counting the Cost

In verse 19, we encounter a scribe who volunteers himself to follow Jesus. In the scribe we meet a man who, like many Reformed and Evangelical Christians, is well versed in the Scriptures. But in this character we also meet one who is presumptuous about what the life of a disciple looks like. He does not wait to be called by Jesus, he presumes for himself that he knows what such a life will look like, and so he offers his service in following Christ. There may even be a hint of arrogance in this offer: “I am a trained scribe, Jesus, would not I be good for your following? Think of how much I could do for you.”

But Jesus’ reply exposes the heart of this scribe, and it exposes our hearts as well. The emphasis of his response is on the lack of a basic human necessity: a home. Jesus did not even have the equivalent of what foxes and birds possessed. One commentator put it this way: “Jesus lived a life that was devoid of all middle-class security.”

If the scribe wished to follow Jesus, he must keep such a reality in mind. Jesus sat to lose his possessions, he had no secure job, he owned very little. To be a disciple of Jesus will most certainly be interesting, but it would be far from comfortable.

The scribe had not yet considered this. He had not yet counted the cost on his own life for following Christ. 19th Century Anglican J.C. Ryle summarized the thought this way:

Expository Thoughts on Matthew Matthew 8:16–27: Christ’s Wisdom in Dealing with Professors,—The Storm on the Lake Calmed

that people who show a desire to come forward and profess themselves true disciples of Christ, should be warned plainly to “count the cost,” before they begin.—Are they prepared to endure hardship? Are they ready to carry the cross? If not, they are not yet fit to begin.

If we are to be his disciples, we too must count the cost of following Christ. This was precisely Jesus’ point in the parable of the tower we read in Luke 14. Are you prepared to finish what you started? Are you prepared to go wherever Jesus takes you, no matter how uncomfortable, no matter how much suffering it may require, no matter what cost it may come to you? If not, then you are not ready to be a disciple. That’s the cost of discipleship.

Have you counted the cost? Truly? I fear today that there are many who have made professions of following Christ, but who had not seriously given thought to what would be required of them to do so. I fear that there are many who, like the scribe, have confused their own gifts and “What they can do for God” with a genuine call to submit and follow Christ.

Perhaps a good question that many of us ought to be asking ourselves is, “In what way does our life look any different from the average Montgomery County resident who is in our life stage and socio-economic class?” If the answer to that question is a short one, then maybe we too have confused cheap grace with costly grace. Maybe we need to go back and count the cost of the call to follow Jesus.

Paying the Cost

Because there is a cost for each of us, it may look different, but there is a cost, and it is one which we all must pay. That is the second lesson we learn from this other would-be disciple in verses 21 and 22.

Here we meet another man who protested the call to follow Jesus in order to first go bury his father. On the surface it might look like Jesus is calling this man to follow at the expense of giving honor to his father. But throughout his ministry, Jesus emphasizes the importance of honoring our fathers and mothers. We dealt with that in the podcast this week, where we find in Mark 7 that the religious leaders had set up extra rules that prevented people from honoring father and mother. With his dying breaths, Jesus honors his mother by ensuring she would be cared for by John. So calling a man to dishonor his father cannot be what is happening here.

What we must understand is that in Jewish law, attending to the last rites of a parent was considered of utmost importance. Keeping that in mind, let’s consider what this man was really saying to Jesus. Were his father already dead, then there is almost no possibility that the son would be out and about interacting with Jesus at all. He would’ve been completely caught up in all the last rites for caring for his father.

So, what is most likely is that the man’s father was still alive, and this man was simply saying he needed to remain and care for his ailing father until his eventual death. Such a duty is still a good one, and a very important one. But in this case, he is postponing the call to follow Christ, perhaps for several years. In effect, this man was saying, “Some day, after my father has died, I will follow you.”

Jesus’ response perplexes us, as it often does. He may mean that “Those who are soon to die should concern themselves with burials, but you must follow me.” Or he may be referring to those still spiritually dead, “Let the spiritually dead be concerned with those matters.” But in either case, Jesus is summoning this man to follow him now. The call of the kingdom is absolute and immediate.

This is a hard saying, and one that ought not to be taken lightly. We must count this cost, because there is a cost we all must pay to follow Christ.

I know of many professing Christians who have said things to me like, “I’ll have more time to take my faith more seriously after college, after I get settled in my career, after things die down from our wedding, after our family gets started, when the kids are old enough, after we find a home in a place where we truly feel we belong, after I retire and have more time.”

My friends, this is not the right answer to following Jesus Christ. He says to each and every one of us, “Follow me.” There can be no delay. We are to respond just as Matthew did, leaving our tax booths to follow him, just like James and John did, who put their fishing nets down and eagerly followed Christ, like so many thousands of disciples before us who knew that their life could not be as it once was after they encountered Christ.

Bonhoeffer captured the point this way:

The disciple is dragged out of his or her relative security into a life of absolute insecurity, from a life which is observable and calculable into a life where everything is unobservable and fortuitous, out of the realm of finite into the realm of infinite possibilities. This is nothing else than bondage to Jesus Christ alone, completely breaking through every program, every ideal, every set of laws. No other significance is possible, since Jesus is the only significance. Beside Jesus nothing has any significance. He alone matters.

I stand before you this morning merely as one trying to amplify this call of Christ, for each and every one of us, myself included. So I ask you dear friends, if you are considering Christ, have you yet counted the cost which he would have you pay? What about you, brothers and sisters who profess Christ? Have you truly considered the cost of being a disciple?

After Jesus encounters these two would-be disciples, he gets on a boat. He tries to take a rest, but even here we find that Jesus has no place to lay his head. For no sooner does he seek rest than do his disciples succumb to fear.

It is here we learn that even those who give up everything to follow Christ will stumble on the way. As Ryle said, true saving faith is often mingled with much weakness and infirmity.

Here we find a picture of all those believers who love Christ enough to forsake all to follow him, and yet are filled with fear when trial comes upon them. “Lord save us,” they cry, as we often do. And Jesus responds. He is compassionate and tenderhearted. He knows our frame and considers our infirmities. He does not cast us off. Even the prayers of “little faith” are answered.

And so his word goes out once again, not to his followers, but to the creation. At the sound of his command, even the winds and the seas obey him. Will you?

Will you count the cost of discipleship, and pay it, willingly, knowing that nothing in this world is worth having if it keeps us from Christ?

The call of Jesus Christ goes forward to all who hear me this morning. As we come to the table this morning, Jesus summons each of us to follow him. If you are here this morning and you do not yet consider yourself a disciple of Jesus Christ, let me welcome you on behalf of our church. We are so glad that you are with us this morning. What you are about to witness is a meal which was instituted by Christ on the night of his death. This meal is to be celebrated by his followers in every age until he comes again, as a means of remembrance, of strengthening our faith, and of communing with our Savior. This is a meal for those who have counted the cost of following Jesus and who have willingly paid it.

And so if you’re here and you know that is not you, then I would simply ask you not to partake of this meal with us. I do not say that to be exclusive in any way, but because apart from saving faith this meal only brings judgement on those who want cheap grace, those who want to claim Christ without the cost of discipleship. Instead I call you by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ to come to him, to confess your sins, and to trust in him for forgiveness and new life. If you have any questions about what that means, please come and talk to me after the service.

And to those here who have given their life to following Christ, you of little faith, I invite you to come to the table with confidence this morning as we feed on Christ and with Christ. Here at the table this morning, may we be strengthened to follow Christ, no matter the cost.