“He was saved last week at church,” a mother remarked to an acquaintance. It was the kind of thing you’d expect to hear at the place I was in last Friday – a Baptist bookstore. So matter-of-fact-ly, and yet so foreign to how I was raised.
Baptists and other evangelicals tend to put much emphasis on accepting Jesus into your heart. From the televangelists I’ve seen, the invitation to pray Jesus into your heart is given at the end of every sermon. Catholics must put some type of emphasis evenly divided on infant bapism and confirmation….confession fits in there somehow.
The there’s the church of Christ who emphasize baptism, sometimes a little too much…maybe….if only because the rest of the world tends to de-emphasize baptism. As a result, grace, until recent years, was not emphasized within the churches of Christ. It was rare to hear an eintire sermon about grace.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. …”
Ephesians 2:8

Then the question was posed in my adult Bible class yesterday. “Is grace ever cheap?”
“Cheap” can mean how something is manufactured. “Cheap” stuff comes from China and can break easily. Certainly grace wasn’t manufactured cheaply, as blood never comes easily.
“Cheap” can also mean the value of an item. People shop at Wal-mart because things are cheap. In a way, the word “Cheap,” can mean inexpensive in a negative way. As a result some people refuse to shop at Wal-mart and will pay more at a different store.
Consequently grace’s value can’t be measured, after all how much is a soul worth? Our minister offered another arbritrary question a few months ago. “If you were offered a million dollars, the only consequence being that one person would have to be lost and suffer enternal punishment.” To which I asked “How much is a soul worth?”