God's Masterpiece

This was a gathering of the whole Tribe fam under one roof, a bar called the Saloon, rather than the usual two-service Sunday at the TMC. Pastor Brian worked through the closing stretch of the series "A Full Reward," grounding the conversation in 2 John 1:8, before turning to the death of Charlie Kirk and what it means for people trying to live out their faith. The service closed with communion shared together as a family.

What was said

The anchor verse for the series is 2 John 1:8, which tells believers to watch out, stay diligent, so they receive their full reward. Brian pointed out that if a full reward is possible, so is a partial one or none at all. The word "receive" in that verse carries the sense of a worker collecting a wage, not a surprise gift. The Protestant church, he said, has done important work pushing back on the idea that salvation can be earned, but in doing so has largely missed a significant biblical theme: that reward is real, it is earned by works, and it is distinct from salvation. The phrase he kept returning to was this: you do not work to be saved, you work because you are saved.

That work, though, is not something a person invents for themselves. Brian drew from Psalm 139:16 and Ephesians to make the case that God has already written out a specific calling for each person, a book with their name on the spine. Reward at the judgment seat of Christ, which Brian described not as a courtroom but as a winner's podium, is proportional to how closely a person's life lined up with what God had already planned for them. Free will means each person chooses how closely they follow that plan, and what they build with wood, hay, and straw will burn, while what they build with gold will remain.

From there Brian moved to the death of Charlie Kirk, which had been heavy on the congregation all week. He named three reasons the murder has hit people so hard. First, it challenges the core belief that Americans do not assassinate people for their opinions. Second, Kirk was killed for holding the same biblical values many in the room hold, which makes the question personal: could it happen to me? Third, for a younger generation in particular, the loss feels like losing a commanding officer or a star quarterback, and Brian wondered aloud whether it was something like what the disciples felt in the three days after the crucifixion.

Brian was direct that he tries not to use the pulpit to share his personal opinions, and he named that tension honestly. What moved him to address Kirk's death, he said, was a sense that God had put it on his heart, and that it connected to where the series had already been going. The line that pulled it together was the series' recurring theme: every moment matters when forever is your measure. Kirk, he argued, lived that way, and the attempt to cancel his voice has had the opposite effect, amplifying his message exponentially. Brian noted that throughout history attempts to silence the martyrs of the faith have followed the same pattern.

The service moved into communion, which Brian framed through the Jewish marriage proposal tradition. The cup Jesus picked up on the night of the Last Supper was the cup a young man would raise when making his vows and offering himself to a young woman. If she received the cup, she was saying yes. Jesus, Brian said, was making a covenant proposal at that table, and his words, "I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until I drink it anew with you in my kingdom," were the words of a bridegroom leaving to prepare a home and promising to return. Communion at Tribe is the congregation's ongoing yes to that proposal.

Alex, the pastor Brian served under in Oklahoma, also spoke briefly. He shared that his own heaviness through the week came partly from the same grief, having met Kirk on a couple of occasions, but more from the pastoral tension of wanting to stay a bridge to people on every side of a polarizing moment. What settled him, he said, was a thought that came while he sat in the room before the service: the battle for dominance in the world is not a contest between God and the enemy, because God spoke the enemy into existence and the outcome is not in question. The real battle is whether believers will surrender and let God fight through them. In the story of David and Goliath, he said, we want to see ourselves as David, but we are Saul. David is Jesus.