We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Costly Discipleship
Zack Hunt over at The American Jesus is doing a series of posts called “Blogmatics” in which he fleshes out the theological assumptions that inform his blog posts. A couple of days ago he discussed discipleship and the life that believers are called to in a post entitled Blogmatics: The Cost of Discipleship. He draws heavily on the thoughts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in this post. God’s grace is given freely; it’s true. But the cost of accepting this gift of God is dear. We are called to imitate the life that Jesus lived, including his obedience and sacrifice. Zack nailed it in his blog post. We hope you’ll allow this post to challenge and encourage you.
From Zack’s thoughts:
I want a cross centered faith, a faith that makes demands of me each and every day to die to self in increasingly more radical ways. I want a faith that is fundamentally not about me, a faith that drags me kicking and screaming out of my comfort zone and to the feet of a stranger in need. I want a faith that tells me how to live, a faith that takes who I am and transforms me into who I need to be.
I want a faith that looks like Christ is still living and incarnate and walking the earth again through me.
Category: General
Tags: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, Kingdom Living, The American Jesus, Zack Hunt
Related Reading
Voluntary Suffering and the Kingdom
In a post from two days ago, I wrote about the call to voluntary suffering for others as it is laid out in the New Testament. For the first three centuries of the church, Christians understood this call as they sought to follow Jesus’ example of forgoing the use of violence and expressing God’s self-sacrificial…
Born Disciples: On Raising Kids to Follow Jesus
Article by Natalie Frisk In the sixth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. Klompstra. She was enthusiastic about two things: math and physical education. Now, I realize that these two things may be a bit of an odd combination, but Mrs. Klompstra married the combo in a way that really impressed the love of…
Smack Talk on the Idolatry of the Family
Ben Ponder doesn’t pull any punches in his article Idolatry of the Family. He argues that, contrary to some evangelical claims, “Jesus didn’t die on a God-forsaken cross to preserve your horn-rimmed vision of 1950s Americana.” Can a marriage or a family become an idol? Ben thinks so. What do you think? From the article:…
Everybody’s Got a Prequel
My wife and I, along with some friends, recently attended the Broadway Play Wicked. Without giving too much away, I’ll tell you the play attempts to answer the question: What could have possibly made the “Wicked Witch of the West” so [apparently] evil (as presented in the original Wizard of Oz)? After all, normal young…
Trapped in a Constantinian Paradigm
A Response to James Smith’s Review of The Myth of a Christian Nation In my book The Myth of a Christian Nation I repeatedly call on Christians to engage in social activism. Followers of Jesus are called to be revolutionaries, I argue, meaning that we are to revolt against the status quo insofar as the…
Be the Change Now
Ghandi once said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” It’s a profoundly Kingdom teaching. It seems to me, however, that few people adopt Ghandi’s philosophy. It’s far easier to focus our attention on how others should change. It’s far easier to spend our energy assigning blame for the problems of society…