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to be a tree



This morning I was thinking about seeds. If you plant a radish seed, you are going to get fruit in about 2 or 3 weeks. If you plant annual flowers you will have flowers for one season. But I have a magnolia tree in my front garden. It takes about 5 years for its roots to get established. But once it grows, it becomes a very large tree that can live for a few hundred years. Many churches are sewing radish and marigold seeds. They are getting quick “fruit”. And I am wondering why we don’t want our people to be trees? It takes years for trees to be “established”, but then they remain. In October we will be studying Bonhoeffer in our church. If you have ever read the cost of Discipleship you will understand he was not asking the church to grow radishes.
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. 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.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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