Consider how he endured such opposition from sinners,The difference between us and Christ, of course, is that the sinner who opposed him was someone else, for us the first and most important sinner that opposes us and that we must endure is ourself.
in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart.
In your struggle against sin
you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood.
I think it is easy to point to others as the obstacles of our holiness, when in fact we struggle within ourselves against the flesh, the world and the devil. We must resist the pull of sin in ourselves even to the point of shedding blood. I'm usually not willing to do that. I'm kinda squimish about this blood stuff.
This is related to, although not the exact same things as, those, for instance, who have a victim mentality for whom all the woes that afflict them are the result of the injustice committed by others, yet if one were to look closely one would realize that their predicament results as often as not from their own avoidable choices.
I'm not "blaming the victim" here, or trying to belittle the reality of oppression and injustice, but only pointing out that we are sometimes the victim of ourselves when we want to put the blame on someone else and that we need to clearly distinguish the two as the source of our own suffering.
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