Love Does Cost a Thing | A Sermon on Costly Grace
A Sermon by the Reverend Crystal Hardin for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 7, 2025.
Luke 14:25-33
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
That’s the first sentence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book The Cost of Discipleship. It is stark. Unrelenting. It doesn’t ask for our spare change or our polite assent. It asks for everything. When Christ calls, he calls us to die.
This is a theme in scripture, particularly in Luke’s Gospel, a theme we come back to again and again: Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26). .
This is not the Jesus so many of us so often imagine—a Jesus of soft platitudes and comfortable assurances. This is a Jesus who walks toward the cross, who walks toward the cost of love.
Because, friends, as it turns out, J.Lo was wrong when she sang “my love don’t cost a thing.” Our culture swings between sentimentality and cynicism—either love is as free and effortless as a pop song or it’s one more thing to market.
Mother Teresa had a different word: “Love, to be real, must cost. It must hurt. It must empty us of self.”
The Gospel agrees. The cross is not a cheap accessory. It is a way of life marked by renunciation. Not renunciation for its own sake, not dour asceticism, but the costly choice to love God and neighbor even when it strips us bare and leaves us at our most vulnerable -dying to all but life in God. It is in vulnerability that God meets us.
Bonhoeffer warned against what he called “cheap grace”—grace as a principle, grace as a system, grace as the reassurance that everything is fine without ever asking us to change. Bonhoeffer would know. He wrote the following words from Nazi Germany:
“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
“Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field… it is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”
Cheap grace says: love without sacrifice, discipleship without risk, forgiveness without repentance.
Costly grace says: take up the cross. Love until it hurts. Renounce what binds you so you can be bound to Christ.
There is a film that embodies this costly grace in unforgettable images: Of Gods and Men.
It tells the true story of Trappist monks in Algeria in the 1990s, caught in a wave of terrorist violence. They had the option to leave. Their order would have gladly brought them to safety. But they chose to stay with their Muslim neighbors, people they loved, people they served.
As the danger grew, they prayed, they wrestled, they feared. And then, one evening, they gathered for what became their final meal together. There is no dialogue in the scene. Just the swell of Swan Lake as the camera lingers on their faces—lined with fear, softened with tenderness, shining with the peace of those who know they have chosen love over safety.
Their renunciation was not a love of death. It was a love of life so strong that it gave itself away. Their supper became sacrament: a witness that Christ’s love is stronger than violence, stronger than fear, stronger than death.
Their choice was costly, but it was grace.
In our Gospel, Jesus gives us two images: a builder and a king. Both must sit down and count the cost before acting.
Why these two? Because they represent two very different sides of human striving.
The builder is an ordinary person—someone setting out to construct a tower. This is everyday life: work, planning, sweat, saving, labor. The builder represents the cost of discipleship in the ordinary, the local, the domestic. Do we have the resources to begin what we may not be able to finish? Are we willing to see the project through when enthusiasm runs out?
The king, by contrast, stands for power, ambition, and risk on a grand scale. Kings make decisions that affect whole nations, sending thousands to battle. Here Jesus shifts from the ordinary to the extraordinary. He’s reminding us that the stakes of discipleship are cosmic, not just personal. Will we trust our own strength, or will we yield and seek terms of peace?
By placing the builder and the king side by side, Jesus shows that no matter where we stand the call is the same. We must count the cost. Discipleship requires intention, calculation, renunciation. Enthusiasm is not enough; resources are not enough; power is not enough. Only the cross is enough.
The monks in Algeria counted the cost. So did Bonhoeffer, who returned to Germany when he could have stayed safe in America. So did Jesus, setting his face to Jerusalem.
The cost is very real. But so too is the love.
Because, in God’s economy, what feels like loss is actually gain. That’s the paradox.
But, in all seriousness, the world teaches us to use grace like a calculator—to plug in the right inputs, the right prayers, the right moral behavior, so that the answer comes out in our favor. We treat grace like a problem-solving device: will it fix my pain? Will it give me success? Will it tidy up my life’s equations?
But that is not grace.
Grace is not a tool for solving problems. It is not one variable among many. Grace is the sum of the only equation that matters.
It’s not “if I do this, then God will do that.”
But “God has already done this, therefore everything is changed, and I cannot help but act in response.”
The paradox is that what looks like subtraction becomes addition. What looks like loss becomes fullness. What looks like dying becomes life.
When we renounce, we receive. When we lay down, we are lifted up. When we die with Christ, we rise with Christ.
Are we meant then to be martyrs for the faith? Well, to be honest, I truly hope not. But we are all called to renounce something for the sake of the Gospel. It is for each of us to discern our place in this world as Christians.
It could be comfort we renounce: choosing to step into another’s suffering rather than look away.
It could be pride: choosing forgiveness when resentment feels easier.
It could be judgment: choosing curiosity over condemnation.
It could be security: choosing generosity when saving every penny feels much safer.
Most of the time, I think, it’s the illusion of control: choosing instead trust when the day is dark and the path ahead is uncertain.
Every act of love costs us something. And that is exactly the point. Love that costs nothing is not love at all.
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Bonhoeffer knew what that meant in his bones. The monks knew what that meant in their silence. Jesus knew what that meant when he spoke of crosses and renunciation on the way to Jerusalem.
The call is the same for us. Not to seek death. Not to despise life. But:
To live in such a way that nothing is held back from love.
To die to cheap grace, cheap love, cheap faith.
To rise into the costly grace that alone forgives, alone frees, alone saves.
Because love does cost a thing. It will take our comfort. It will stretch our patience. It will press on our pride.
But here’s the promise: what it takes, it returns a hundredfold.
What feels like subtraction becomes abundance.
What feels like loss becomes freedom.
What feels like dying becomes life.
This is the strange arithmetic of grace.
So we must count the cost, answer the call, and step into the costly love of Jesus, knowing that it is, in the end, the only cost worth paying—because it is also the only life worth living.
Amen.
