Astonishing Grace, Studies on Gospel Centered Worship Leadership, Week 8

INTRODUCTION WEEK 8: Cheap Grace

READ:
Philippians 3:7-11

DISCUSS:
1. Over the past weeks we have been defining and exploring Grace. If you had to give a one sentence explanation of Grace to a friend, what would you say?

2. How can we ‘cheapen’ Grace? What are some characteristics of ‘cheap grace’?

3. Read our passage for this morning. What is Grace costing Paul? Does he see this cost as a burden? What is so costly about Grace that everything else is ‘rubbish to Paul’?

REFLECT:
When we think of something as ‘cheap’, usually we think of something that is poorly made, easily breakable, or not worth much. When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and pastor who lived during the turbulent years of WWII, reflected upon the Christian church around the world and especially in Germany, he noticed that the Grace that many churches preach is cheap. It is not worth much to those who espouse it and it is easily breakable in the midst of the culture around them.

Over the past weeks we have discussed the importance of founding our lives and worship leading on GRACE. As we conclude this introduction and begin to explore how GRACE impacts our beliefs, our thoughts on excellence, discipleship, artistry, and leadership, it is important for us to think about the difference between ‘cheap’ and ‘costly’ grace.

When we sing about Grace we often use words like ‘Amazing’, ‘Indelible’, or ‘Bountiful’, but we have very few hymns that term Grace as either ‘cheap’ or ‘costly’. How can grace be cheap? It is God’s action, God’s initiative, God’s work….if anything it is our greatest treasure in the Christian church. How can it be cheap? For Bonhoeffer, it is not God who cheapens Grace but people, and especially Christians individually and churches as a whole. He writes about cheap grace in this way:

“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. It 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. We are fighting for Costly Grace.” Deitrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, p43-44

Bonhoeffer defined cheap grace in three ways: it is data without life, forgiveness without repentence, and Grace without discipleship.

1. Cheap Grace is data without life
Grace becomes ‘cheap’ when it firstly becomes just another belief, another doctrine, which fails to touch us and change our lives. For Bonhoeffer, cheap grace is just data; it is just another thing people believe and churches confess. It is a nice idea that is not really followed or a nice ideal that is rarely lived. Grace is so radical that it changes everything about us and the world around us, yet so often Christians and churches believe in Grace, but don’t LIVE in it. Grace is just a suggestion or worse, an excuse or a justification.

For Bonhoeffer, Grace that is not lived is not real Grace, but a cheap imitation that only serves us and not God. And more than just being selfish, cheap grace is actually damaging to proclamation of the gospel and the witness of the church. As I quoted before, Bonhoeffer writes that ‘cheap grace is the enemy of the church.’ Cheap grace distorts the gospel and can lead us away from blessings of real grace. And it cripples or destroys the churches’ mission and reputation. Bonhoeffer saw this first hand in the German church that he was a part of during WWII. Every week the state church preached the gospel of Jesus Christ, yet at the same time they supported Hitler’s campaign of hatred and violence. Bonhoeffer himself and many others had to preach illegally because of this and eventually he was arrested and put in a concentration camp because he followed the gospel of Grace and helped seven Jews escape Germany in 1943. He and many others at that time were heartbroken by a church that had lost Grace and therefore lost its mission and purpose as the church.

2. Cheap Grace is forgiveness without repentence
As we believe in Grace we necessarily need to take sin and brokenness in humanity seriously. The gospel of grace necessitates that believe that we need grace, that we are broken, depraved, and bent towards selfishness and self-justification of our actions. Grace then becomes cheapened, when we cease to emphasize sinfulness. Paul Zahn writes that one must have a high view of human sin to have a high view of Grace, and Bonhoeffer echoes that when he writes that cheap grace is ‘forgiveness without repentance, communion without confession.”

Cheap grace often entices us to believe that since Christ paid for human sin on the cross and forgives us when we call upon him, we don’t really need to worry about repenting, confessing, and trying to live Christ-centered lives. We know that we are being enticed by cheap grace when we start making justifications and excuses for our lives: “I know I am sinning now, but I will come to God later and repent of my sins and turn my life around. I know He will forgive me.” Yet real, costly grace takes sin and our capacity for self-deception and self-justification seriously and also the cost that God paid to heal and redeem us. As our Pastor Tim (and before him Tim Keller) always says “we are far worse than we could ever know and far more loved than we could imagine.” Yet cheap grace does the opposite….we are not that bad, we really don’t need to work on our sins, we don’t need to change, we don’t really need to do anything because God loves us. Cheap grace is often an excuse to do nothing, change nothing, and stand by while we see injustice or overwhelming human need pass us by.

3. Cheap Grace is grace without discipleship
Lastly, with cheap grace there is no need to become a disciple of Christ. Bonhoeffer writes that grace in itself is not complete; it should lead us to follow Christ. It should deeply confront everything that we are and call us, like Peter to leave everything and follow Jesus. Disciples are those who follow someone or something. Jesus has always called disciples, and Bonhoeffer argues that we cannot know real Grace without becoming disciples of Christ. As Bonhoeffer writes: “If grace is God’s answer, the gift of the Christian life, then we cannot dispense with following Christ.” He goes on to write:

“[With cheap grace] the Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that. Grace as the data for our calculations means grace at the cheapest price, but grace as the answer to the sum means costly grace.” Deitrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, p51

We can only know the Grace of God by following closely the author of Grace, Jesus Christ. In Bonhoeffer’s life, he saw his beloved church is Germany be transformed by cheap grace from Christ followers to followers of Hitler who condemned the Jews, put swastikas in the churches instead of crosses, and eventually were forced for worship Hitler instead of Christ. If we don’t follow Jesus Christ, we can make grace into anything we want. Yet grace only gains it’s definition through Jesus Christ. That is why Bonhoeffer wrote during his last days in a German prison, before he was executed in 1945, three weeks before the war ended: “The only thing we can hold on to is Jesus and the only true thing we can do is to follow Jesus.”

Are we holding on to Jesus, and only to Jesus, in our churches? What does that mean for our worship programs? For our lives?

ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURES (to read throughout the week):
Galatians 1:1-10, 1 Timothy 1:12-17, Colossians 3:1-4, 5-17

REFERENCES (for further reading)
-To learn more about Bonhoeffer’s life, watch the movie Bonhoeffer, "Agent of Grace” by Gateway films.
-The best biography, though very long, is Eherhard Bethge’s "Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Man for His Times: A Biography".