Book Review: Costly Grace

I recently has an opportunity to do a book review on Costly Grace: A Contemporary View of Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship by Jon Walker.  As you probably remember, I am a huge fan of Bonhoeffer.  After reading his biography I wanted to read The Cost of Discipleship and my husband bought it for me.  I tried to read it but it was often way above my head.  I thought to myself, it would be great if someone would rewrite this in a contemporary version so that it could be more understandable.  Lo and behold, a couple months later the publisher contacted me to see if I wanted to review a contemporary version of the Cost of Discipleship.  Yeah!!!!!  So onto the review:) 

I would not consider this book a "modern rewrite" of the The Cost of Discipleship but rather a book that uses The Cost of Discpleship as a springboard for the author to share his own thoughts.  The Cost of Discpleship was Bonhoeffer's thoughts on the Sermon on the Mount and his application to life as he saw it in his contemporary time.  Many of the situations don't apply to today, which was why I was often lost while reading it.  In Costly Grace, Walker takes the main princples and ideas of Bonhoeffer and applies them to modern day life.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and got a lot out of it.  It is one of my most underlined books to date and it gave me a lot to think about.  It was also encouraging, because I felt it enhanced and deepened my road to understanding how God's beautiful gift of grace applies to the everyday reality of our lives.  I agreed with the author on all of the principles that he shared but there were several times where I didn't draw the same conclusions as to how those principles would be applied to modern day life.  I highly recommend the book and you will probably be hearing more from it blog posts to come.

In Christ,