What I’m Reading
The Cost of Discipleship
by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions,and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly.”
—Titus 2:11–12
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
That’s the line that gets quoted. And it deserves to be. But when I finally read The Cost of Discipleship, I found it wasn’t just a single sentence that cut me open—it was the whole weight of Bonhoeffer’s clarity. He wasn’t writing from theory. He was writing toward martyrdom. And he wasn’t calling readers to admire Jesus. He was calling us to follow Him.
The section on “Grace and Discipleship” hit hardest. He writes, “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves… grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.” That was the grace I’d been raised around. The version that let me live however I wanted as long as I said the right things on Sunday.
But what had saved me wasn’t cheap. It had cost me everything I thought I needed. And I had received more than I could have asked for.
Reading Bonhoeffer didn’t make me change direction. It made me realize I was already walking the road he described. When he wrote, “Only those who obey can believe, and only those who believe can obey,” it clarified the struggle I’d been in for months. Obedience wasn’t a performance—it was proof of grace at work
He also wrote, “The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ‑suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world” I’d given up many of the world’s attachments already—through surrender and desire. But it didn’t feel like loss. It felt like realignment.
This wasn’t a theological treatise for me. It was a mirror. I saw in his words a sharper version of what I was already learning: that discipleship isn’t about knowing the right path but walking it. Not because it’s easy—but because He already walked it first.
Bonhoeffer reminded me that grace doesn’t excuse us from cost. It empowers us to pay it—and to keep going even when we don’t know what’s coming next.
“Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend—it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do.”