What does Tribe teach about addiction recovery?
Drawn from the message where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on addiction recovery is rooted in a larger conversation about suffering and the choice between endurance and escape. Brian preached from the garden of Gethsemane and the accounts of Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross, holding them together under a single image: two cups. The first cup is the cup of suffering, and every person, including those caught in addiction, eventually reaches a crossroads where they have to choose whether to drink from it or reach for something easier. Brian was careful to point out that Jesus did not make this choice without cost, and that the humanity on display in Gethsemane matters precisely because a God untouched by what we face is not a God we can actually lean on.
Brian drew on what the Greek word behind suffering carries, the idea of pressing under pressure the way grapes or olives are pressed so that what is inside comes out. He connected this to the very name Gethsemane, which he said means pressing and crushing. The point is not that God presses people to punish them. As Brian put it, God "delights not in your suffering, but He delights in your surrender and in your obedience." That frame matters for anyone in recovery: the hard season is not God's rejection, it is God drawing out what He already knows is there.
The practical shape of drinking from the cup of suffering, Brian said, includes things like delayed gratification, staying in prayer for things that have not happened yet, refusing to take matters into your own hands, and getting back up after a fall. He also said that genuine change requires more than thinking things through. Brian says, "as long as it stays in our thinker, we remain unchanged." And he was direct that spiritual maturity is not a matter of years in church or a worn Bible. The measure is how much a person has been willing to drink from this cup.
Taught from Matthew 26:36-41 · Matthew 27:32-36 · Mark 10:29-31 · Mark 15:21-24 · 2 Corinthians 12:5-7
“Spiritual maturity is not measured in age.”
From Drinking Deep: Choosing Endurance Over Escape
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 12:5-7
5 On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except in my weaknesses.
6 For if I would desire to boast, I will not be foolish; for I will speak the truth. But I refrain, so that no man may think more of me than that which he sees in me, or hears from me.
7 By reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations, that I should not be exalted excessively, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, that I should not be exalted excessively.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- September 23, 2024 Drinking Deep: Choosing Endurance Over Escape A Wyoming pastor walks through Matthew 26 and Mark 15 to explore why choosing the cup of suffering over escape is the path to spiritual maturity.