Cost of Discipleship in Comfortable Times

The danger of comfortable Christianity is not that it makes people immoral. It’s that it makes them soft — content with a faith that costs nothing, demands nothing, and therefore changes nothing.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship from inside a Germany that was watching the church fold in real time. Pastors who had once preached the gospel were blessing Nazi flags. Congregations that had sung hymns for generations were looking the other way while their neighbors were hauled away. The church, by and large, had made peace with the culture — and in doing so, had lost its soul.

Bonhoeffer gave that compromise a name. He called it “cheap grace” — grace without discipleship, forgiveness without repentance, Christianity without the cross. And he argued with everything in him, at the cost of his own life, that cheap grace is no grace at all.

We are not in Nazi Germany. Our comfortable times look different — Netflix instead of propaganda films, consumerism instead of nationalism, therapeutic self-help instead of ideological conformity. But the pressure on the church to make peace with the surrounding culture is just as real. And the temptation to embrace a Christianity that asks nothing of us is just as powerful.

The question Bonhoeffer put to his generation is the same question the gospel puts to ours: what does it cost you to follow Jesus? And if the honest answer is “not much” — that’s worth sitting with for a while.

Cheap Grace: The Deadliest Heresy You’ve Never Heard Of

Bonhoeffer’s definition of cheap grace is worth reading in full because it is one of the most devastating descriptions of comfortable Christianity ever written. He described it as the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace, he wrote, is grace without the cross — the grace we bestow on ourselves.

The operative phrase is “grace we bestow on ourselves.” Cheap grace is what happens when we take the genuine, costly, blood-bought grace of the gospel and repurpose it as permission to stay exactly as we are. We tell ourselves: God loves me unconditionally. God forgives me completely. And therefore I don’t really need to change, sacrifice, or submit to anything that genuinely inconveniences me.

That logic sounds almost right, which is what makes it so dangerous. God does love unconditionally. God does forgive completely. But the New Testament never presents those truths as reasons to avoid transformation. It presents them as the foundation from which transformation becomes possible. Romans 6:1-2 anticipates the cheap-grace reasoning exactly: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?”

Paul is appalled by the question. The idea that grace is a reason to stay unchanged is, for him, a theological impossibility — a fundamental misunderstanding of what grace actually does. Grace doesn’t just pardon you. It kills the old you and raises up a new one. You can’t receive real grace and be unchanged by it any more than you can walk through fire and stay dry.

Cheap grace is the heresy that says you can have the benefits of the gospel without the demands of discipleship. And it is absolutely everywhere in comfortable Western Christianity.

The Specific Costs Jesus Named

Jesus was not vague about what following him would cost. He itemized it. He gave examples. He told people to count the cost before signing up, because he wasn’t interested in recruits who’d quit when things got hard.

Luke 14:25-33 contains one of the most jarring discipleship passages in the Gospels. Jesus is being followed by large crowds — which you might expect him to encourage. Instead, he turns and issues a warning:

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”

He then gives two parables — a man building a tower who should count the cost first, and a king going to war who should assess his forces before engaging. The point of both is the same: don’t start what you’re not prepared to finish. Don’t sign up for discipleship if you’re not willing to pay the price.

The word “hate” in verse 26 is a Semitic idiom for prioritization — it means to love less by comparison, to place lower on the hierarchy of loyalty. Jesus is not calling us to emotional hostility toward our families. He is saying that our loyalty to him must be so supreme that every other loyalty — even the deepest ones — looks like hatred by contrast. No relationship, no comfort, no security, no reputation is to rank above our allegiance to him.

He ends the passage with a statement that lands like a hammer: Luke 14:33 — “So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” Not “consider renouncing.” Not “be open to renouncing.” Renounce all that he has. The claim of Christ over the disciple’s life is total. It covers everything.

The rich young ruler in Mark 10:17-22 is a case study in what happens when the cost lands on the one thing you’re not willing to give. He runs to Jesus, kneels before him, asks about eternal life — he is sincere, eager, morally serious. Jesus tells him: sell everything, give it to the poor, come follow me. And the man goes away grieved, because he had great wealth. He wanted the kingdom. He just wanted his wealth more.

Jesus let him go. He didn’t negotiate. He didn’t lower the price. That detail matters more than we usually notice.

What Comfort Does to Faith

Comfort is not evil. God gives good gifts, and rest and provision and stability are among them. The problem is not comfort itself — the problem is what sustained, uninterrupted comfort does to the soul over time.

Historically, the church has been most spiritually vital under pressure. The early church in Acts was a persecuted minority with no political power, no property, no legal protection — and it turned the Roman Empire upside down within three centuries. The church in China exploded in the twentieth century under brutal communist suppression while the mainline churches in comfortable Western Europe quietly emptied out. The church in sub-Saharan Africa is growing at a rate that staggers demographers while North American congregations argue about what to do with their aging buildings.

This is not coincidence. Pressure clarifies. Persecution separates the genuine from the nominal. When following Jesus costs you something real — your job, your social standing, your safety, your relationships — you find out quickly whether you actually believe what you say you believe. And those who do tend to hold it more fiercely, live it more fully, and transmit it more powerfully to the next generation.

Comfort, by contrast, allows people to carry a Christian identity without being genuinely formed by Christian faith. You can attend church, use the vocabulary, raise your kids in the right programs, and never be confronted by anything that actually costs you something. The faith stays comfortable and therefore stays shallow. And shallow faith does not survive contact with real suffering, real temptation, or real opposition.

The prophet Amos aimed this at ancient Israel with devastating precision. Amos 6:1 opens: “Woe to those who are at ease in Zion.” They were comfortable, prosperous, culturally stable — and spiritually dead. They had all the forms of religion without any of its substance. God called it what it was: complacency dressed up as faithfulness.

The Discipline of Voluntary Hardship

The saints of the church throughout history understood something that comfortable Christianity has largely forgotten: if you don’t voluntarily take on some hardship for the sake of your soul, your soul will soften whether you want it to or not.

This is the logic behind the spiritual disciplines of fasting, solitude, simplicity, and self-denial. They are not punishments. They are not attempts to earn God’s favor. They are intentional practices that keep the flesh from running the show — that remind the body and the will who is actually in charge.

Paul uses the athlete metaphor with deliberate forcefulness in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”

That last line should arrest every preacher and every believer. Paul — the apostle, the church-planter, the one who wrote half the New Testament — is worried about disqualification. Not because he doubts his salvation, but because he understands that the flesh, left undisciplined, will eventually override even the strongest intentions. He beats his body. He makes it his slave. He does this intentionally and consistently, because the race requires it.

Fasting is perhaps the clearest example of voluntary hardship as spiritual discipline. When you choose not to eat — not because food is evil, but because you’re deliberately choosing God’s presence over physical comfort for a defined period — you are training your will. You are practicing saying no to yourself. You are building the spiritual muscle that you will need when the real tests come.

Richard Foster, in Celebration of Discipline, argued that the classical disciplines are the means by which God works transformation in us — not by effort alone, but by placing ourselves in a position where God can act. Comfort insulates you from that positioning. It keeps you in the padded room where transformation is unnecessary and therefore doesn’t happen.

The Cost of Speaking the Truth

One of the most specific and increasingly costly forms of discipleship in comfortable times is simply telling the truth — about sin, about the gospel, about what God says on matters the culture has decided are settled.

The pressure to stay silent is real and it is growing. Say what the Bible says about human sexuality, and you risk your career, your friendships, and your social standing. Speak about the exclusive claims of Christ in a pluralistic setting, and you will be called intolerant. Challenge the therapeutic gospel that says God’s primary job is to make you happy, and you’ll be accused of being harsh. Hold to historic Christian ethics in a progressive workplace, and you may find yourself quietly pushed out.

This is not the martyrdom of the early church. Nobody is throwing you to lions. But it is real social pressure, and it has a real effect on what people are willing to say out loud — even in their own congregations.

Jesus spoke to this with characteristic directness in Matthew 10:32-33: “So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.” Acknowledging and denying are not limited to dramatic moments of persecution. They happen in ordinary conversations — at work, at family dinners, on social media, in the awkward pause after someone says something you know is wrong.

Comfortable Christianity has largely made peace with strategic silence. We have become experts at not saying the thing that needs to be said, at changing the subject when the gospel would be offensive, at softening our convictions until they are indistinguishable from the surrounding culture’s preferences. We call this wisdom or tact. Jesus calls it denial.

The cost of speaking is real. But the cost of silence is higher.

Money, Generosity, and the Impossible Lordship of Wealth

Jesus talked about money more than almost any other subject. Not because money is inherently evil, but because it is one of the most powerful competitors for the lordship that belongs to God alone.

Matthew 6:24 — “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” The word translated “money” is mammon — a term that personifies wealth as a rival deity, a god that demands total loyalty and rewards its worshipers with a particular kind of bondage disguised as freedom.

The genius of mammon is that it doesn’t announce itself as a rival to God. It just quietly reorganizes your priorities until financial security has become your deepest form of trust, accumulation has become your deepest form of hope, and comfort has become your deepest form of rest. And then you sit in church on Sunday and sing about trusting God — and mean it, insofar as you mean it in the areas where you’re not really trusting mammon instead.

Genuine discipleship in comfortable times requires a reckoning with money that most comfortable Christians are not having. Not because poverty is holy or prosperity is sinful — the Bible doesn’t teach either — but because the default setting of a comfortable life is to accumulate, protect, and enjoy, and the default setting of the kingdom is radical, joyful, trust-expressing generosity.

2 Corinthians 9:6-7 gives us Paul’s vision of Christian giving: “Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” Cheerful, bountiful, decided-in-the-heart giving. Not the grudging ten percent that feels like a tax. Giving that flows from genuine faith that God is more trustworthy than a savings account.

The question to sit with is not “am I tithing?” It’s “does my financial life reflect the values of the kingdom, or the values of the culture I’m swimming in?” For most comfortable Western Christians, the honest answer is uncomfortable.

The Comfortable Church and Its Discontents

The crisis of comfortable Christianity is not just individual — it is institutional. Churches in comfortable settings face their own version of the cost-counting problem.

Comfortable churches are often tempted to build their identity around what they offer rather than what they demand. Come for the music. Come for the programs. Come for the community. Come because we make Christianity accessible and enjoyable and not too disruptive to the rest of your life. The implicit promise is that you can have the benefits of belonging to God’s people without the costly demands of being genuinely formed by God’s word.

The result, as sociologist Christian Smith documented in his research on American religion, is what he called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” — a watered-down folk religion in which God exists, wants you to be good and happy, is available when you need him, and otherwise stays out of your way. This is not Christianity. But it is what a large percentage of people who call themselves Christians actually believe.

The corrective is not to make church deliberately unpleasant. It is to recover the New Testament vision of a community that takes discipleship seriously — that expects its members to be genuinely formed by the word, to practice mutual accountability, to serve sacrificially, to give generously, and to make the costly choices that authentic faith requires. A church that asks something real of its people will attract fewer casual attenders and produce more genuine disciples. That trade is always worth making.

The church does not exist to make people comfortable in their sins. It exists to make people holy in their lives — and that process is rarely comfortable, always worth it, and exactly what Jesus promised it would be.

Suffering as the Curriculum

Here is one of the stranger promises of the New Testament: suffering is not a detour from discipleship. It is part of the curriculum.

Romans 5:3-5 — “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

The chain of formation is worth tracing: suffering → endurance → character → hope. Suffering is not the end of the chain. It is the beginning. It is the raw material from which God produces the character qualities that comfortable circumstances cannot produce.

You cannot manufacture endurance without something to endure. You cannot develop patience in the absence of things that test it. You cannot grow in compassion for the suffering if you have never suffered. Comfortable times rob you of the very experiences through which God does his deepest formation work — unless you either voluntarily embrace hardship through discipline, or allow the ordinary difficulties of life (relational, physical, vocational, spiritual) to do their formative work rather than numbing them with comfort.

Peter adds the eschatological frame in 1 Peter 4:12-13: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share in Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.” Don’t be surprised. Don’t treat suffering as an anomaly, an injustice, a sign that God has abandoned you. It is a sharing in Christ’s own suffering. And it connects you to his glory in a way that comfort never could.

The Costly Life Is the Full Life

Here is the great reversal that comfortable Christianity misses entirely: the costly life of discipleship is not the impoverished life. It is the full life. The abundant life. The life Jesus came to give.

John 10:10 — “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” The abundant life Jesus promises is not the comfortable life. It is the life that is fully alive — alive to God, to others, to purpose, to meaning, to the deep satisfaction that comes from giving yourself to something worth dying for.

Every veteran who has served knows something of this. The deployments were hard. The sacrifice was real. People got hurt. People died. And yet there is almost universally a sense — even among those who paid the highest prices — that those were some of the most alive times of their lives. Because they were doing something real, with real stakes, alongside real people, for something that mattered.

Comfortable Christianity offers none of that. It offers the absence of hardship, which is not the same thing as the presence of life. What it produces is the spiritual equivalent of a sedentary life — technically alive, but without the vitality and strength that come from being genuinely challenged and genuinely tested.

Bonhoeffer’s costly grace, by contrast, is costly precisely because it is real. It is the grace that actually transforms. It is the grace that produces genuine faith, genuine love, genuine endurance, genuine hope. And the life it produces is worth whatever it costs to enter it.

Matthew 13:44 — “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” Notice the joy. He sells everything — joyfully — because he has found something worth more than everything he’s selling. The cost of discipleship is real. So is the treasure. And those who have actually found the treasure don’t talk about the cost the way people who haven’t found it do.

Key Scriptures: Luke 14:33 · Romans 6:1-2 · 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 · Matthew 6:24 · Amos 6:1 · Romans 5:3-5 · John 10:10 · Matthew 13:44