What does Tribe teach about dying to self?
Drawn from the messages 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 dying to self starts with a question Brian Hunter brought to the room: why did the Pharisees, after watching Jesus heal a man's withered hand, walk away and begin plotting to kill him? The congregation worked through it together, and the answers kept circling back to the same root. The Pharisees had built their entire understanding of relationship with God around the Mosaic Law, and Jesus was a direct threat to that. Someone in the room connected it to Romans 8:7, that the mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God and cannot submit to his law, and Brian read it aloud as the anchor for everything that followed. The Pharisees are not a cautionary tale about people long ago. They are a picture of what happens inside any of us when our will and God's will enter the room together and we refuse to let ours be the one that does not walk out.
Brian frames the whole series around that collision. Using Galatians 2:20 as the destination, he holds up Paul's words about the old self being crucified with Christ as the place the teaching is moving toward. To show what it cost to get there, he moves the congregation into Leviticus 1, the detailed instructions for burnt offerings, and lets the weight of those procedures sit. The burnt offering required an unblemished animal, a specific sequence of cutting, washing, and burning. Something had to be brought to the altar. Something had to die. Brian says, "For a life giving relationship with God, something has to die." That is not a metaphor the series applies gently. It is the central claim.
The teaching also speaks to how the Holy Spirit works in a person who is willing to let that death happen. Brian says, "Conviction from the Holy Spirit whispers to your heart about one thing he wants to talk about. One thing." The inverse of that willingness shows up in the Pharisees, and Brian puts it plainly: when a person keeps choosing their own way over God's, they are, in his words, plotting to murder Jesus. The series holds Galatians as the interpretive lens and Leviticus as the territory, and both point the same direction: the life that comes out of an encounter with God is not the same life that walked in.
Taught from Galatians 2:20 · Galatians 2:15-21 · Romans 8:7 · Leviticus 1:1-17 · Exodus 40:34-38
“For a life giving relationship with God, something has to die.”
From Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves
The passage taught · Exodus 33:7-11
7 Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far away from the camp, and he called it “The Tent of Meeting.” Everyone who sought Yahweh went out to the Tent of Meeting, which was outside the camp.
8 When Moses went out to the Tent, all the people rose up, and stood, everyone at their tent door, and watched Moses, until he had gone into the Tent.
9 When Moses entered into the Tent, the pillar of cloud descended, stood at the door of the Tent, and spoke with Moses.
10 All the people saw the pillar of cloud stand at the door of the Tent, and all the people rose up and worshiped, everyone at their tent door.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- February 17, 2025 Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves Brian Hunter opens a new series in Leviticus and Galatians, exploring what it really costs to live in relationship with God and why something always has to die.
- February 16, 2025 The Series: Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves A Jackson Hole pastor opens a series on Leviticus and Galatians, exploring why something must die for a life-giving relationship with God to begin.