Dietrich Bonhoeffer: When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death-we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

From The Cost of Discipleship (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1937), 99.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us that Jesus Christ bids us to take up the cross daily and follow Him. Those who follow the Christ put away the old self, put on the new man created in Christ. They engage in the mortification of the flesh. The end of Christianity is union with Christ and that union is never a tragic loss in putting to death sinful fleshly passions but being reborn into a newness of life. It is the transformation of ourselves into the likeness of the Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a Lutheran pastor and theologian. Bonhoeffer with Martin Niemöeller and others joined in opposition against Nazi incursion into the church in Germany. He was arrested and imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for the charge of smuggling fourteen Jews into Switzerland. He was executed at the age of 39 years old. Writings smuggled out of the concentration camp posthumously published as Letters and Papers from Prison profoundly influenced many Christians. Despite there being troubling elements to Bonhoeffer’s theology, his commitment to Christian piety and opposition to the dark forces in his day is something to admire.