What does Tribe teach about grave clothes?
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 grave clothes starts with a single detail from John 11: when Lazarus walked out of the tomb, he was still wrapped in the burial linens, and Jesus had to tell the crowd to unwrap him and let him go. Brian Connolly built an entire message around that moment, grounding it in the observation that grave clothes were put on Lazarus after he died, not before, because they would have been completely out of place on a living person. Brian says, "Only dead people belong in grave clothes." That is the foundation everything else rests on.
The teaching moves from there to what happens when a person invites Jesus into their heart. Drawing from 2 Corinthians 5:17, Brian said that person becomes a new creation, spiritually alive in Christ, and receives a new identity to go with that new life. But he was careful not to make it sound automatic across the board. The mind, he said from Romans 12:2, does not get instantly rewritten at salvation the way the heart does. Neural pathways and old patterns have to be renewed, and that is ongoing work. The practical answer he pointed to was in Romans 6, where Paul tells believers to consider themselves dead to sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus. That word, consider, the deliberate act of speaking truth over yourself rather than agreeing with old shame, was the hinge the application turned on.
The enemy, and the world, do not stop just because someone has been raised to new life. Brian says, "This world constantly tries to put those old grave clothes back on us," and those grave clothes sound like familiar voices: you are a failure, you have gone too far this time, you are damaged goods. The teaching at Tribe is that those labels only make sense on dead people. Anyone who has invited Jesus in is not dead anymore, and the grave clothes do not belong.
Taught from John 11:11-44 · 2 Corinthians 5:17 · Romans 6:6-11 · Romans 12:2 · Revelation 19:8
“Only dead people belong in grave clothes.”
From Unwrapped: Finding Freedom Outside the Tomb
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 5:17
17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- April 29, 2024 Unwrapped: Finding Freedom Outside the Tomb A Wyoming pastor walks through John 11, asking why alive people keep wearing grave clothes, and inviting the congregation to step out of old patterns and shame.
- April 28, 2024 Unwrapped: Finding Freedom Outside of the Tomb A pastor and congregation in Jackson Hole explore John 11 and ask why so many Christians who have been made new still walk around wrapped in the grave clothes of guilt and shame.