The Cost and the Joy

Today's Scripture

On our final day, three passages that hold the cost and the joy in the same hands.

Philippians 3:7-8 — "But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord."

Hebrews 12:1-2 — "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God."

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."

The Big Idea

For fourteen days Bonhoeffer has talked about cost: come and die, take up the cross, leave the nets, love your enemies, lose your life. If we stop there, we have misread him completely. The cost and the joy are not rivals; they are the same transaction seen from two sides. The man in Jesus' parable sells everything in his joy — because he has seen the treasure. So did Bonhoeffer. So can you.

Reflection

The math of the treasure

Jesus' shortest parable might be his most subversive. A day laborer's plow thuds against something in a rented field. He digs, looks, covers it fast, and his heart starts pounding. Matthew 13:44 — "Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field." Read the accounting carefully. He loses everything: house, tools, savings, security. And the parable does not call him a martyr. It says in his joy. Nobody at the auction pitied him, and nobody needed to. He knew what was in the field.

That is the entire Christian life in one sentence, and Paul does the same math with his own biography. He had everything his world counted as gain — pedigree, education, reputation. Philippians 3:7-8 — "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord... I count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ." "Counted" is bookkeeping language: Paul has gone through his ledger line by line, moved every asset into the loss column, written Christ in the gain column — and called it the bargain of his life. This is not the voice of grim duty. It is the voice of a man who found the treasure and never got over it.

Jim Elliot, a young missionary who would be killed at twenty-eight taking the gospel to an unreached tribe in Ecuador, wrote the formula in his journal years before he paid it:

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." — Jim Elliot, journal entry, 1949

You cannot keep your comfort, your image, or your life — they are leaking assets, all of them. Christ cannot be lost. The exchange is not even close.

Far too easily pleased

But wait — hasn't this whole plan been about renouncing desire? Leave the nets, deny yourself, sell everything? No. Look closer: Jesus never tells us to stop wanting. He tells us to stop wanting so little. C.S. Lewis saw it exactly:

"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

The problem with cheap grace — where this plan began — is not that it is too pleasant. It is that it settles for mud pies: a Christianity of comfort that never tastes the sea. Costly grace costs everything precisely because it delivers everything. Psalm 16:11 — "in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore." Jesus told his disciples, on the night he was betrayed, why he had taught them all of it: John 15:11 — "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full."

Bonhoeffer — the sternest voice many of us have ever read — agrees in three words that surprise people who only know his reputation:

"Discipleship means joy." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Not discipleship then joy, as if joy waits at the finish line. Discipleship means joy — the treasure is in the following itself, because the following is with Jesus.

Look back over the fourteen days through this lens and the whole plan rearranges itself. Costly grace (Days 1–4) is the grace that actually changes you — the cheap kind never could. The Sermon on the Mount (Days 5–9) is not a burden but a description of the freest people on earth: unanxious, unperforming, able to love enemies. The cross and the community (Days 10–12) are where Christ is most present, not least. Every "cost" was a door with treasure behind it.

The morning at Flossenbürg

Does this hold at the very end, when the cost is total? We have a witness. On April 8, 1945 — the Sunday after Easter — Bonhoeffer led a small worship service for fellow prisoners in a schoolhouse where they were being held. He preached on the verse "with his stripes we are healed," prayed, and had barely finished when two guards opened the door: "Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready to come with us." Everyone in the room knew what those words meant. Turning to Payne Best, a British officer beside him, Bonhoeffer left his last recorded sentence:

"This is the end — for me the beginning of life." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, April 9, 1945

The camp doctor at Flossenbürg, who did not know who Bonhoeffer was, later wrote that he saw the pastor kneeling in prayer before the gallows, and that in fifty years of medical work he had "hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God." The world's measurements break down completely here. By every standard of success, Bonhoeffer died a failure — the plot crushed, his book out of print, his fiancée widowed before her wedding, dead at thirty-nine, weeks before liberation. He had already answered that ledger:

"The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success as its standard." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

The cross overturned the scoreboard forever. Measured by success, Good Friday was the worst failure in history — and it saved the world. That is why the Bible's promise to sufferers is not "things will work out" but something far stronger: Revelation 2:10 — "Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life." Paul, awaiting his own execution, did the final accounting with no regret: 2 Timothy 4:7-8 — "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness."

For the joy set before him

So where does fourteen days of Bonhoeffer finally land? Not on your willpower. On a person. Listen to how he closes the book itself:

"This is the end of the Nachfolge — to be conformed to the image of Christ. This is the goal — to be formed in Christ's likeness, in his image. Christ's image, to which we are to be conformed, is the Incarnate, Crucified, and Glorified One." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Nachfolge is the book's German title; it simply means "following." And the destination of all the following is family resemblance: Romans 8:29 — "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son." Notice the last word in Bonhoeffer's sequence: Incarnate, Crucified, Glorified. The road runs through the cross, but it does not end there. It never has.

And here is the gospel that makes the whole costly journey possible: someone ran this race before you, and he ran it for you. Hebrews 12:2 — "looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame." What was the joy set before him? The Father's pleasure — and, astonishingly, you. You were part of the treasure for which he sold everything. The parable of the field is first of all about Jesus: he found us buried in our sin and counted us worth the cross. Tim Keller compresses this into the sentence that holds cheap grace and costly grace together at last:

"The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

Grace is free because Christ paid; it is costly because it claims your whole life. There is no contradiction — only a treasure and a glad sale. From his cell, the summer after the failed plot, Bonhoeffer described what was left when everything else was gone:

"It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith... In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

That is the invitation as this plan ends — not to grit your teeth, but to fall into arms that have already proven they will hold you. 1 Peter 1:8 — "Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory." The cost is real. The joy is greater. The field is for sale, and you know what's in it.

Going Deeper

Do an honest accounting tonight, in two columns. Left: what following Jesus has actually cost you — name real things, even small ones. Right: what you have gained in him that you would not trade back. Then pray through Philippians 3:8 with your own lists in view: "I count these as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." If the right column feels thin, don't fake it — ask him to show you the treasure. That prayer is one he loves to answer.