What does Tribe teach about fire refining?
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 fire refining starts with a simple but important distinction. The promise in Isaiah 43 is not that fire will be avoided, but that God is present in it and that you will come through it. Brian pointed out that the passage says 'when you walk through the fire,' not 'if,' and that the word 'walk' matters too. Nobody walks through fire naturally. You panic, you run. That the text says 'walk' points toward something like surrender and trust rather than instinct and self-rescue.
That image of walking carried through the whole message. Joy connected it to Psalm 23, where the valley of the shadow of death is also walked through, not sprinted through and not camped in. The story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego pressed the point further: they had to go into the furnace before they encountered the fourth man. God does not always pull people out of hard circumstances. Sometimes it is only inside the fire that He shows up in a way He could not be seen before.
Brian also taught from 1 Corinthians 3, where Paul describes every person as building something with their life, using either lasting materials like gold, silver, and jewels, or cheap ones like wood, hay, and straw. Fire on judgment day tests the work and reveals what it was actually made of. Brian put it in concrete terms with a story about a welding job on a ranch, where an old foreman slammed a freshly welded piece on the ground ten times, not out of cruelty, but to prove whether the weld would hold. The testing, Brian said, is a favor. The fire does not care about good intentions. It only reveals what is real.
Taught from Isaiah 43:1-4 · 1 Corinthians 3:1-15 · Psalm 23:4 · Revelation 3:15-18
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 3:1-15
1 Brothers, I couldn’t speak to you as to spiritual, but as to fleshly, as to babies in Christ.
2 I fed you with milk, not with meat; for you weren’t yet ready. Indeed, not even now are you ready,
3 for you are still fleshly. For insofar as there is jealousy, strife, and factions among you, aren’t you fleshly, and don’t you walk in the ways of men?
4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” aren’t you fleshly?
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- January 12, 2025 The Fourth Man in the Fire A Wyoming pastor and congregation explore what it means to walk through fire, drawing on Isaiah 43 and 1 Corinthians 3 to ask what we are truly building our lives out of.