In the Gospels, we don’t often read of Jesus calling on people to “believe” in Him or to “receive” Him. What we do find, however, is Jesus regularly calling on people to “follow” Him. This means that being a Christian is not just about what we think, as essential as that is. It’s also about how our thinking transforms our actions. That’s what James 2:14-17 means, where we read that faith without works is dead. There is a cost to discipleship, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote so famously in his 1937 book by that title, as he warned about “cheap grace.”
We find the concept present in numerous scripture passages, and then reflected upon in countless sermons on those verses.