"Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks' wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church's inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?
Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins. The Church which holds the correct doctrine of grace has, it is supposed, ipso facto a part in that grace. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God.
Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship
Cheap grace is to esteem what God has done as something cheap and easy. It says, "Since grace abounds let us go on sinning." (Romans 6:1), it does not confess the severity of our sin, and the costliness with which God paid with the life of His own Son. It is grace as "doctrine", rather than as Gospel. It is grace as an idea, rather than grace as forgiveness. For forgiveness is not the ground upon which we say, "I can do anything", but the ground upon which to say, "Lord have mercy on me, a sinner." Grace is the superabundance of God freely giving to the empty hands of a wretched beggar, it is not the entitlement of a beggar to act as though he is princely with fists full of glory.
Yes, grace is grace, and so is free. But it is free to us because it is paid for by the infinitely costly value of Christ's own blood and broken flesh. It is not free because it is not costly, it is free because the One who is gracious is good, and because He is good He has paid the cost gladly. We must never esteem the value of this grace as cheap, it is never cheap though it is free.
For this grace has purchased you, you belong to God; for all of us who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into His death, and if we have died with Him we have died to sin, and must reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God. Not because grace is not grace and we must earn merit by our works; but because this is the reality into which we have been purchased and brought into. We have been brought into the immensity of God's unlimited kindness and goodness, having received every good and every perfect gift from the Father, in Christ His Son, our Lord, by the power and the strength and the unity of the Spirit.
There is, therefore, every reason now to regard our lives forfeit for the sake of Christ who loves us. That to live is Christ and to die is gain.
"I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." - Galatians 2:20
Because of grace we know who we are now in Christ, and therefore our lives are to be displayed, crucified, before the world, as disciples of He who gave Himself freely for all.
-CryptoLutheran
