What does Tribe teach about finding clarity?
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 finding clarity starts with a conviction Brian has carried into 2024: that complexity is not the enemy of clarity, it is the place where God most reliably plants it. Drawing from John 18 and Exodus 3, the teaching holds that God never allows a genuinely difficult season to arrive without also placing something clear and true inside it. The image Brian returns to is a gift bag. The tissue paper, the confusion, the fear, the noise, is always more visible than the present at the bottom. But the present is always there.
The messages press the congregation to slow down and actually inhabit the hard moments rather than escape them. Working through the arrest of Jesus in the garden, Brian showed how nearly everyone in that scene, soldiers, disciples, even Peter with a sword in his hand, was reading the situation through the wrong lens. Jesus was the only one who fully realized what was unfolding. That kind of clarity, Brian taught, comes from the lens you are using, the light you are relying on, and the ground you are standing on. It does not come from the absence of complexity.
The Exodus 3 message pushed that same idea further back into pain. Moses at the burning bush was an eighty-year-old fugitive, alone in a desert, tending someone else's sheep. Brian pointed out that the Hebrew word for bush in that passage describes a spiny thorn shrub, and that the same word appears in Deuteronomy 33 in a blessing that invokes the favor of God himself. Brian says, "God often places clarity right in the midst of great pain." The burning bush was not a reward for a life that had gone well. It was God meeting a man inside his failure and his shame. And Brian puts it plainly: "We all want the burning bush. But few of us would like to skip the pain part."
Taught from John 18:1-14 · Exodus 3:1-6 · Deuteronomy 33:13-16 · 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 · Isaiah 43:10-13
“God often places clarity right in the midst of great pain.”
From The Burning Bush: Clarity in Complexity
The passage taught · Deuteronomy 33:13-16
13 About Joseph he said, “His land is blessed by Yahweh, for the precious things of the heavens, for the dew, for the deep that couches beneath,
14 for the precious things of the fruits of the sun, for the precious things that the moon can yield,
15 for the best things of the ancient mountains, for the precious things of the everlasting hills,
16 for the precious things of the earth and its fullness, the good will of him who lived in the bush. Let this come on the head of Joseph, on the crown of the head of him who was separated from his brothers.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- March 11, 2024 The Burning Bush: Clarity in Complexity Brian Hunter explores how God places clarity inside pain, using Moses at the burning bush and the crown of thorns to show what to look for in hard times.
- March 10, 2024 The Burning Bush A Wyoming pastor explores Moses and the burning bush, connecting ancient thorns to the crown of Christ, and asking what clarity God hides inside our pain.
- February 19, 2024 The Lens, the Light, and the Landscape Brian Hunter walks through John 18 to show how the right lens, light, and footing in Jesus bring clarity when life gets complicated and overwhelming.
- February 18, 2024 The Lens, The Light, and The Landscape Brian Hunter walks through John 18 to show how the right lens, light, and footing in Jesus can bring clarity when life gets complicated and overwhelming.