Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a brilliant young German pastor and theologian. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer warned against what he called cheap grace. He wrote that cheap grace is “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” He did not just write it. He resisted, and he was arrested and imprisoned. He was moved from Tegel prison to Buchenwald and then to Flossenburg. On April 9, 1945, just one month before Germany surrendered, he was hanged with six other resisters. Grace is free, but it was never cheap. It cost Jesus His life, and following Him still calls for our whole lives.
John Wesley was an ordained minister who had even sailed to America as a missionary. Yet he struggled. He wrote that he was fighting continually but not conquering, falling and rising and falling again. On May 24, 1738, he went very unwillingly to a small meeting on Aldersgate Street in London. Someone was reading Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans. About a quarter before nine, as the reader described the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, Wesley said, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” He wrote that he trusted Christ alone for salvation and received assurance that his sins were taken away. He went on to preach some 40,000 sermons. Religion became a relationship.
Augustine was a gifted teacher who had spent years chasing pleasure and wrestling with his sin. He later wrote about stealing pears as a youth just for the thrill of doing what was forbidden. One afternoon, troubled and anxious, he was walking in a garden when he heard a child’s sing-song voice repeating, “Take up and read.” Nearby lay a collection of Paul’s letters he had been reading. He picked it up and read the first thing his eyes fell on, Romans 13:13-14, which says to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and stop feeding the flesh. He later wrote that instantly “all the darkness of doubt vanished away.” One verse, read at the right moment, changed a life that changed church history.
On the morning of July 6, 1885, a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister was brought to Louis Pasteur’s laboratory in Paris. A rabid dog had bitten him fourteen times. In those days rabies was a death sentence. Pasteur had been working on a vaccine but had never tried it on a human being. Over the next ten days the boy received thirteen injections. Joseph Meister never developed the disease, and he became the first person vaccinated against rabies. Soon patients with animal bites poured in from France and other countries, and that flood of need led to the founding of the Institut Pasteur. A frightened boy received something he could never earn, and it gave him life. That is a picture of grace.
In 1947 Corrie ten Boom was speaking in a church in Munich about how God forgives and throws our sins into the deepest sea. Afterward a balding man in a gray overcoat worked his way toward her, and she recognized him. He had been a guard at Ravensbrück, the concentration camp where she and her sister Betsie had been sent for hiding Jews, and where Betsie died. He told her he had become a Christian and knew God had forgiven him, but he wanted to hear it from her lips too. He held out his hand. Corrie stood there, wrestling. She remembered Jesus’ words about forgiving, and prayed for help. Woodenly she thrust her hand into his, and she felt warmth flood through her. “I forgive you, brother!” she cried.
