What does Tribe teach about how to be forgiven?
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 forgiveness starts with a diagnosis before it gets to a cure. Both Brian and Pastor Brian have returned to the same problem: every person carries what Brian describes as a pernicious bent toward rebellion, a propensity to break the moral law of the universe. The standard for standing before a holy God is not being reasonably good compared to other reasonably good people. James makes it explicit, and both messages lean on it, that breaking even one point of the law makes a person guilty of breaking all of it. That is the actual size of the problem.
The teaching then makes a sharp turn away from every solution that puts the work on the human side. Brian has walked through how Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, and the modern western religion of moral self-improvement all amount to the same thing: man sewing fig leaves, trying to earn a right standing with God through deeds, sacrifice, or striving. The Easter message at the Virginian put it plainly: "Instead of man trying to climb up to God, God became a man and came down to us." Jesus lived the sinless life no one else could, died to absorb the punishment that broken law demands, and rose because the law had no legal claim to hold a sinless man in the grave. Forgiveness is not something a person earns. It is something God came to make possible.
But Pastor Brian keeps pressing past the point most people stop at. Forgiveness and a future in heaven are not the whole offer. Because Jesus is alive, his Spirit is available to take up residence inside a person. The goal, as he put it on Easter Sunday, is not a better version of yourself. "Jesus stands ready not for you to try to live a life like Jesus does, but for you to lay down your life, so that Jesus can live his life through you."
Taught from James 2:10 · Romans 3:23 · Romans 6:23 · Genesis 3:6-9 · Galatians 2:20
The passage taught · Genesis 3:6-9
6 When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took some of its fruit, and ate; and she gave some to her husband with her, and he ate it, too.
7 Their eyes were opened, and they both knew that they were naked. They sewed fig leaves together, and made coverings for themselves.
8 They heard Yahweh God’s voice walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Yahweh God among the trees of the garden.
9 Yahweh God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- February 15, 2026 God in Search of Man Brian Hunter explores what it means that God came looking for man, starting in Genesis 3, and why every human attempt to reach God falls short.
- April 1, 2024 Easter Sunday at Tribe A Wyoming pastor uses a glove obstacle course to explain why Jesus rising from the dead is about more than forgiveness. It is an invitation to a whole new life.