What does Tribe teach about counting the cost?
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 counting the cost starts with a simple but weighty conviction that Brian said the Holy Spirit placed on his heart during the Turn the Cat Around series: "The leadership of Jesus will be less complicated but more costly." That line is not abstract. It sits inside a real season in which people in the congregation made public acts of repentance, stepped away from things they had leaned on, and pushed past pride to share what God had done in them. Brian did not frame those moments as tidy victories. He held them up as evidence that individual obedience has a ripple effect in the body, and that the cost one person pays rarely stays contained to that one person.
The anchor text is 2 Timothy 4:1-5, where Paul writes to Timothy as a father to a son, pointing him toward what is coming. Brian drew the room's attention to Paul's warning that a time will come when people will not endure sound teaching but will chase teachers who tell them what they want to hear. He noted that the Greek word for time in that verse is kairos rather than kronos, a God-appointed moment rather than ordinary clock time. The implication is that counting the cost is not a timeless self-improvement question but something the church is called to reckon with in a particular moment.
Underneath all of it is the conviction that God does not want loss. Brian brought the congregation to Ezekiel, where the word of the Lord is plain: "I don't want you to die, says the Sovereign Lord. Turn back and live." The cost of following Jesus is real, but it is not arbitrary. It runs in the direction of life, and the stories from the congregation that closed the series, more than twenty people coming to faith, one man walking away from alcohol, a young man building a daily habit of Scripture, were offered as testimony that the cost paid in obedience is never wasted.
Taught from 2 Timothy 4:1-5 · 2 Timothy 4:7 · Ezekiel 18:23 · Ezekiel 18:31
“I don't want you to die, says the Sovereign Lord. Turn back and live.”
From TTCA Week 9 Wrap Up
The passage taught · 2 Timothy 4:1-5
1 I command you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at his appearing and his Kingdom:
2 preach the word; be urgent in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with all patience and teaching.
3 For the time will come when they will not listen to the sound doctrine, but, having itching ears, will heap up for themselves teachers after their own lusts;
4 and will turn away their ears from the truth, and turn away to fables.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- May 1, 2023 TTCA Week 9 Wrap Up Brian Hunter wraps up the "Turn the Cat Around" series, exploring what it costs to follow Jesus faithfully as culture drifts further from biblical truth.