What does Tribe teach about hanging your hat?
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 this topic starts with a simple image: a hat rack with several hooks. Your hat is the sum of what you believe, and wherever you hang it is where you are actually placing your trust. Brian introduced the image and worked through why so many people end up on hooks that cannot hold the weight, and Jay carried it further by tracing the same pattern through Numbers 14, where the Israelites had seen God work miracle after miracle and still chose to hang their trust on what they could see and feel in the moment.
Both messages name three hooks people tend to use: circumstances, other people, and God. Circumstances are the most passive of the three. You just drift with the room, the way the crowd in Numbers 14 did, letting fear become contagious. Trusting in people is better because it at least involves a choice, but every person eventually fails you. Brian drew a careful distinction between the hook of Jesus himself and nearby hooks that are easy to confuse with it, like a gifted personality or a popular theology. Jay made the same point from a different angle, noting that the enemy works by pulling your hat off that hook and getting you to chase it around until you forget you had a choice at all. Jay says, "The enemy gets to us by taking our hat. That's how they steal our heart away."
The practical move both teachers land on is recovering your own beliefs from whatever is currently pushing them around, and then deliberately placing them on the only hook that holds. Jay was clear that this is not about having everything figured out. As he put it, "If the criteria for us to be saved is having all of our hats on the perfect hooks, I don't think any of us are gonna make it." The point is not perfection. The point is which hook you keep coming back to, and whether you trust it enough to let it bear real weight.
Taught from Numbers 14:1-12 · Colossians 3:2 · Psalm 119:1-8 · Matthew 6:33 · Proverbs 3:5-6
“The enemy gets to us by taking our hat. That's how they steal our heart away.”
From How to Hang Your Hat
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 13:5
5 Examine your own selves, whether you are in the faith. Test your own selves. Or don’t you know as to your own selves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you are disqualified.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- July 15, 2024 How to Hang Your Hat Jay walks Tribe through Numbers 14 to show how trusting circumstances or people instead of God leaves you chasing your hat, never finding a place to hang it.
- June 23, 2024 Sex, Money, and the Bible Brian Hunter uses a hat-rack analogy to explore what we anchor our beliefs about the Bible, money, and sex to, and whether those anchors can actually hold the weight.