You Have Not Yet Resisted to Blood

Here is a sentence that will call your bluff, and it is meant to. You have been telling yourself you are at war with your sin. You have been calling it a fight, a struggle, a battle you keep losing. And then Scripture says one thing that makes you wonder whether you have actually fought at all.

"You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin" (Hebrews 12:4).

Not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood. In its first setting the phrase points at martyrdom, dying for the faith the way the men before them had, set next to Christ who endured the cross. But the principle presses down onto every smaller death too, because the same passage names the sin that so easily entangles, and the writer is telling men who thought they were fighting hard that they have not yet paid the highest price, they have not bled for this. And the question lands on you the same way it landed on them. You call it a war. Have you bled? Or have you been fighting it like a hobby, hard enough to feel like you tried, soft enough to quit the second it actually cost you something.

The hobby that looks like a war

Most men fight their sin exactly hard enough to keep their self-respect and not one degree harder. They resist until resisting gets genuinely painful, and then they stop, and they call the stopping a slip, and they go again next time and stop at the same place, the place where it starts to cost real blood.

That is not war. That is a man managing his conscience. He gets to feel like a fighter because he does resist, a little, for a while. But he has a line, and the line is comfort, and he will not cross it. He will resist the sin right up until resisting means real loss, real pain, real death to something he wants, and there he lays the weapon down, every time, and picks the sin back up, and tells himself he tried. He did not try. He tapped out the moment it started to bleed.

The writer of Hebrews is not impressed by that, and he is not going to let you be either. You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood. The war you keep saying you are in has not yet cost you what a war costs. So either it is not really a war, or you have not really been fighting it.

What resisting to blood would look like

So run it out honestly. What would it actually mean to resist this thing to the point of blood?

It would mean paying prices that hurt. Losing the friendship that is the doorway, even though it is a good friendship in every other way, and grieving that loss like the real loss it is. Telling the truth to your wife about the thing, and letting it cost you her trust for a season, because the honesty is the death and the death is the war. Cutting off the income, the comfort, the outlet, the whatever-it-is that feeds the sin, and feeling the cut as a cut. It would mean fighting past the point where you have always quit, into the place where it actually costs blood, and staying there.

You know where your line is. It is the exact place you always stop. It is where resisting turns from uncomfortable to genuinely painful, and every time, right there, you have laid it down. The whole reason you keep losing is that you have never once crossed that line. You have never resisted to blood. You have resisted to inconvenience and called it war.

Cross the line. Fight past the place it costs you something real, into the place it costs you blood, and stay there, because that is where the sin actually dies and everywhere short of it is where it survives. You are not as tired as you think. You have not been fighting nearly as hard as you have been telling yourself. You have not yet resisted to blood. Go find out what happens when you do.