“Cheap grace is grace without discipleship,
grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945)
Spiritual growth is a passion of
mine for the very reason that I never really ‘got’ Christianity for nearly the
first 13 years I was a Christian. I had been baptised, but not discipled. I
could try to lob the blame onto the pastors of that day, but there was a reason
I was uninterested. I hadn’t really understood the real need of grace in my
life. I probably understood the role of sin in my life, but I didn’t understand
how much it distanced me from God when I engaged in it, because I took grace
for granted.
I had been forgiven! But my
understanding of grace was it was a very cheap thing.
I hadn’t made the connection, not
truly, that Jesus had been pinned to the cross on my behalf. My sin put him
there, yet Jesus put himself there that I may be forgiven.
Perhaps I wasn’t ready to truly
receive Christ until I was ready. And when I was ready, when I prayed tearfully that Saturday
morning, completely bereft of hope; then my need of Christ was suddenly truly
real. Then, and only then, was discipleship a natural extension of salvation.
Could we then suppose that those
who have experienced the transaction of salvation are validated or invalidated
by their willingness (or lack thereof) to engage in discipleship, in becoming
more like Jesus? True believers will want to be discipled. True believers will
want to grow. True believers will want to please God. These things are evidence
of the transformation of salvation; that the saving effect has been made.
Linking Salvation and Discipleship With
Repentance
I see that salvation is the
upstream transformation in God, whereby the downstream transformation is via
discipleship—the intentional process of growing into Christ-likeness. These
two—salvation and discipleship—are critically linked.
Grace ought never to be cheapened
by a faked salvation or vacuous discipleship. And, at the end of the day, our
true status in Christ will be adjudged by the fruit of repentance (Matthew
3:8).
Both salvation and discipleship are
characterised by our repentance; by our initial and subsequent turning back to
God, from the first time through the rest of our history.
A life without a throbbing
heartbeat of repentance is an unbeliever’s life, for there is no recognition of
the work of God’s grace in that life, and therefore no power.
***
God is power for our lives through
Christ crucified and the grace begotten us to be saved. There is power in
salvation and through discipleship, but only through repentance. Only through
repentance do we attribute the right price to grace. It cost our Saviour his
life; at the very least grace should inspire us to repent.
To be a disciple is to repent in
an ongoing sense.
© 2013 S. J. Wickham.
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