The next time you think sin is getting the best of you and you want to turn back, remember you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. Through the Holy Spirit, never forget the saints gone by, and remember Jesus himself, who went willingly to the cross and shed his blood for your salvation.

Some aspects of biblical truth run so contrary to culture that even many in the church find them extreme. Take, for example, the author of Hebrews’ admonition to his readers about resisting sin. He had already told them that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin. In saying this, he was talking about justification, but in chapter 12, he uses a similar phrase concerning sanctification. He says, “In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood” (Heb. 12:4).
We know that standing for Christ can sometimes be difficult, and the temptation to back away presents itself when opposition and adversity come at us. The problem is that we are rarely as strong as we think, and we tend to want to shrink back under the lightest of difficulties. This tendency to timidity is why, after listing many great Saints in the Old Testament in Chapter 11, some who even gave their lives, the author tells us not to turn back even if it means our own flesh is torn apart.
The author of Hebrews says this concerning our struggle with sin. What does this mean? How do we struggle with sin?
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The Sabbath is an opportunity for us to be a blessing to others—to be in fellowship with the people of God, to encourage them, and to serve them. It’s a day of service—gathered in worship and then outside worship in fellowship with God’s people. 

The Blessings of Sabbath
If I were in a position to speak to someone who is not observing the Sabbath, I think there might be three things that I’d want to share.
The first is that the Sabbath isn’t a tradition just observed in the church; it’s something that God has given us in his word. I would want to make that case so that they wouldn’t take it on my word, but they would take it from God’s word. I want them to follow what the word of God says.

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Iron sharpens iron. Before the word is snatched away, think through what you have heard and speak about it. What challenged you? What did you learn? Be brave. Encourage honesty by opening up what you found difficult to hear or to understand. Admit your struggles. Remember that the message was preached to the church family so talk about it together.

This is what I find odd. Evangelicals invest huge amounts of capital into sermons. We spend large sums of money training people to preach and then pay them an annual salary to do it as a fulltime job. We set aside at least fifty percent of our weekly church services to sermons and we invest huge amounts of our hope in believing that preaching is one of God’s chief ways of saving and nourishing us, and his way of speaking to the nations.
Why are we so reluctant to talk about them?
It can’t be that we consider sermons unimportant. We invest so much in preaching because we believe with Peter that ‘the one who speaks, speaks the very words of God’ (1 Pet. 4:11). We stand with the Westminster Shorter Catechism when it says that ‘the Spirit of God makes… the preaching of the Word an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners, building them up in holiness and comforting them through faith unto salvation.’
Our Excuses
Some people would say that preaching is personal and that what God says to them is nobody else’s business. Some people, but not evangelicals! In the Bible, preaching was always to families, tribes or nations. Their response, whether weeping, anger, amazement or indifference, was always corporate. I can’t think of a time when people responded ‘privately’, can you?
Let’s be honest though.
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