What does Tribe teach about endurance?
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 endurance starts with two cups. Brian walks the congregation through the gospel accounts of Gethsemane and Golgotha and shows that Jesus faced the same crossroads every person eventually faces: which cup will you drink from. The first cup is the cup of suffering, which Brian describes not as punishment or the result of poor choices, but as God's tool for pressing out of us what he already knows is there. He draws on the Greek word behind 'suffering,' which carries the image of grapes being crushed to produce wine, and points out that Gethsemane itself means pressing and crushing. Jesus went to the garden of crushing, prayed through his anguish, and chose the cup anyway. That choice, Brian says, is the pattern we are called to follow.
The second cup is the one offered to Jesus at Golgotha, wine mixed with myrrh, a narcotic that would have dulled his pain and helped him check out from what was happening. Brian brings in Roman historical sources showing that this same solution was kept in buckets at city-gate latrines for sanitation purposes. The cup of escape, he says, always looks like something you deserve and something you can circle back around from, but Brian says plainly that 'that cup of escape is really poo poo water.' It is not what it appears to be. People in the room, he says, know from their own lives what it feels like to choose that cup and end up sick from it.
The teaching from 1 Corinthians 9 and 10 presses the same point from a different angle. Brian notes that all of Israel had the same access to the same God and the same miraculous provision, and most of them still did not make it through. Getting a bib number does not guarantee you cross the finish line. Spiritual maturity, he argues, is not measured by years in church or how worn your Bible is, but by how much a person has actually drunk from the cup of suffering. The comfort God offers is not a shorter distance or a closer finish line. It is him supernaturally infusing tired people with enough strength to run one more mile, available the moment someone stops running on their own and asks for it.
Taught from Matthew 26:36-39 · Mark 15:21-24 · James 1:2-4 · 1 Peter 5:10 · 1 Corinthians 9:24-27
“That cup of escape is really poo poo water.”
From Choosing Endurance Over Escape
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 30, 2024 Choosing Endurance Over Escape Brian Hunter looks at two cups in the crucifixion story and asks which one we keep reaching for when life gets hard, and why it matters.
- 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.
- September 23, 2024 Drinking Deep: Choosing Endurance Over Escape A Wyoming pastor walks through Matthew 26 and Mark 15 to explore why choosing the cup of suffering over escape is the path to spiritual maturity.
- September 22, 2024 Drinking Deep: Choosing Endurance over Escape A Wyoming pastor explores what it means to choose suffering over escape, drawing from Jesus in Gethsemane to show how endurance shapes spiritual maturity.
- August 11, 2024 Training The Faith A sermon from a Jackson Hole church on what it truly means to run the Christian life with endurance, drawing from 1 Corinthians 9-10 and Hebrews 12.