What does Tribe teach about avoiding problems?
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 avoiding problems starts with an honest challenge to the instinct itself. In a two-week conversation titled 'Choosing Endurance Over Escape,' Brian walked through the final hours of Jesus' life and pressed on a detail most people read right past: in Mark 15, Jesus is offered wine mixed with myrrh at the crucifixion and refuses it. Brian spent real time explaining Roman sanitation practice and what that solution almost certainly was in its original context, making the point that what looks like relief, what the enemy presents as something you deserve or can easily recover from, is genuinely foul at its core. The cup of escape, he told the room, is not what it appears to be.
Brian drew a contrast between two cups. The cup of suffering is not punishment, and it is not the natural fallout of a bad decision. It is the cup of discipline, of being conformed into the likeness of Jesus without knowing all the steps. He referenced Charles Spurgeon, who called adversity 'our true friend' and 'the prophecy of coming joy,' and said that what gets produced through suffering simply cannot be produced any other way. The cup of escape, by contrast, promises relief and circles back to nothing but sickness. People in the room, Brian said, know from their own lives what it costs to reach for that cup.
The Gethsemane account sits at the center of this teaching. Jesus asked for the cup to pass and still chose to drink it rather than escape it. That choice, Brian argued, is the model. Avoiding the hard thing is not a neutral decision, and the enemy is skilled at making avoidance feel reasonable, even deserved. The congregation at Tribe spent significant time in both the garden and the crucifixion accounts together, which is consistent with how this church tends to treat difficulty: not as something to manage around, but as something to move through with eyes open.
Taught from Mark 15:21-24 · Matthew 26:36-39 · Matthew 27:32-35 · James 1:2-4 · 1 Peter 5:10
The passage taught · 1 Peter 5:10
10 But may the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- September 29, 2024 Drinking Deep: The Cup of Endurance Brian Hunter walks through two cups Jesus faced at the cross and asks which one we keep reaching for when life gets hard.