What does Tribe teach about busyness and prayer?
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 busyness and prayer starts with a simple and uncomfortable observation: the difference between the disciples and the Pharisees was not knowledge, it was proximity. Both groups knew the Torah. Only one had been spending their days with Jesus, watching him, eating with him, following him. Joy Abad, who brought this message as part of the Wineskins series, put it plainly: "Your capacity to recognize and receive from the Holy Spirit is directly proportional to how much time you spend with Jesus." Busyness crowds out that time, and when that time goes, so does the capacity to sense what God is doing and trust it.
The teaching leaned hard on 2 Chronicles 20, where Jehoshaphat faces an overwhelming coalition of armies and his first move is not a strategy session but a fast and a gathered prayer. His prayer before God is full of remembered history, holding God to what he had done before, and it lands on a line that Joy held up as a model for anyone feeling overwhelmed: "We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you." That posture, stopping, gathering, and turning the eyes toward God rather than toward backup plans, is what the message named as the alternative to the anxious busyness that fills the gap when prayer is thin.
Joy also drew on the Hebrew word shema, noting that to listen and to obey are the same word, two sides of one coin. Time in prayer is not passive. Jehoshaphat heard an unconventional instruction, that the worship team would lead the army out, and he acted on it. The enemies destroyed each other before Israel raised a weapon. The teaching at Tribe is that prayer is not one item on a crowded list but the thing that makes a person capable of recognizing and responding to what the Holy Spirit is doing, and that capacity is simply built through accumulated time with Jesus.
Taught from 2 Chronicles 20:1-24 · Matthew 12:1-14
“Your capacity to recognize and receive from the Holy Spirit is directly proportional to how much time you spend with Jesus.”
From New Wineskins ｜ Joy Abad
The passage taught · 2 Chronicles 20:1-24
1 After this, the children of Moab, the children of Ammon, and with them some of the Ammonites, came against Jehoshaphat to battle.
2 Then some came who told Jehoshaphat, saying, “A great multitude is coming against you from beyond the sea from Syria. Behold, they are in Hazazon Tamar” (that is, En Gedi).
3 Jehoshaphat was alarmed, and set himself to seek to Yahweh. He proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah.
4 Judah gathered themselves together to seek help from Yahweh. They came out of all the cities of Judah to seek Yahweh.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- February 10, 2025 New Wineskins ｜ Joy Abad Joy Bhatt teaches Tribe Church on how time spent with Jesus shapes our ability to recognize and follow where God is moving, even when it looks unconventional.