What does Tribe teach about faith in hardship?
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 faith in hardship starts with a simple but challenging observation: God has a pattern of showing up inside inconvenient moments rather than around them. Pastor Brian drew this out from Exodus 3, where Moses is doing ordinary shepherd's work when the burning bush appears. The bush was not blocking his path. Moses had a choice to walk past it, and the text says he turned aside. The encounter only opened because he stepped toward the disruption rather than away from it. That picture set the frame for everything else: the invitation to encounter God is often hiding inside something that looks like a problem.
Brian was careful, though, not to let that teaching collapse into the idea that God engineers every painful thing. He drew a clear line for the congregation. Not every hard thing carries God's fingerprints as its cause. God did not give Clay cancer, and treating divine inconvenience as the same category as suffering caused by sickness or abuse would be a serious mistake. The question the teaching presses is not whether God caused the hard thing, but whether there is an opportunity to turn aside inside it. Story after story from Scripture landed in the same place: Jonah, the bleeding woman, Peter at the nets, John on Patmos, Lydia opening her home. The encounter was always present, but it was hidden inside what looked like a disruption.
One thread Brian returned to was the cost of staying comfortable. Reflecting on the new wine passage in Luke, he noted that Brian says, "no one who drinks the old wine seems to want the inconvenience of new wine." The familiar and settled always feels safer than whatever God might be doing in the uncomfortable moment. The call the teaching makes is not to go looking for suffering, but to resist the reflex of plowing through or avoiding the hard thing, and instead to stop, notice, and ask what God might be doing right there.
Taught from Exodus 3:1-6 · Luke 5:33-39 · Song of Solomon 5:2-3 · Song of Solomon 3:4
“I love to surprise my children in the midst of inconvenience.”
From Encounter in the Inconvenience
The passage taught · Exodus 3:1-6
1 Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness, and came to God’s mountain, to Horeb.
2 Yahweh’s angel appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the middle of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
3 Moses said, “I will go now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.”
4 When Yahweh saw that he came over to see, God called to him out of the middle of the bush, and said, “Moses! Moses!” He said, “Here I am.”
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- October 16, 2023 Encounter in the Inconvenience A Wyoming congregation shares stories of how God meets people in life's most inconvenient moments, drawing on Moses, Job, and one another's testimonies.