What does Tribe teach about born champion?
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 'born champion' starts with the text of Isaiah 9 and asks the congregation to sit with what it actually says before rushing to familiar conclusions. Brian Hunter walked the room through verses one through five first, letting people name what they saw: darkness giving way to light, warriors, harvest, emancipation, the breaking of an oppressor's rod. The point was that anyone reading this passage honestly would expect a warrior messiah, a large-scale liberator who arrives with power. That expectation, Brian said, is not wrong. The world genuinely needs that kind of champion.
The tension the teaching holds is in what happens at verse six. The champion the passage promises arrives as a child, born into poverty, laid in a manger, with no ceremony and no army. Brian called this the record scratch of the Christmas story. The humility of the actual birth does not map easily onto the scale of what Isaiah describes, and he took that seriously rather than glossing over it. He invited the congregation into the same disorientation a Jewish reader would feel, and the same disorientation the original audience would have felt.
This is week two of Tribe's Advent series 'Hope is Here,' and it sits alongside the previous week's teaching that Jesus fulfilled the feast of Sukkot as a first coming that previews what his return will complete. The thread connecting both weeks is that Jesus as born champion is not the whole picture yet. The warrior liberator Isaiah describes is real, and the birth in Bethlehem is the beginning of that story, not a smaller version of it.
Taught from Isaiah 9:1-7 · Luke 2 · Matthew 2:1-11
The passage taught · Isaiah 9:1-7
1 But there shall be no more gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time, he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali; but in the latter time he has made it glorious, by the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.
2 The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who lived in the land of the shadow of death, on them the light has shined.
3 You have multiplied the nation. You have increased their joy. They rejoice before you according to the joy in harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the plunder.
4 For the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, you have broken as in the day of Midian.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- December 14, 2025 Born Champion A Jackson Hole pastor explores Isaiah 9 at Christmas, asking what it means that God answered the world's cry for a champion by sending a baby.