What does Tribe teach about identity in god?
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 identity in God starts with the conviction that God speaks directly to who He made you to be, not to who you think you are or who others say you are. Pastor Brian drew that out of the story of Gideon in Judges 6, a man hiding in a winepress, threshing wheat in a place wheat was never meant to be threshed, who did not know his own identity. When the angel of the Lord showed up, He addressed Gideon as a mighty man of valor, not as the least person in the weakest clan. Brian says, "God will always, always, always, always speak to who he created you to be." That word does not wait for you to get your bearings or feel worthy of it.
The Judges 6 message also pressed on what blocks people from receiving that identity. Gideon came to the encounter bitter and without the full picture, and his first response to God was a why question. Brian pointed out that bitterness and ignorance of who we are tend to travel together, and that God is under no obligation to satisfy every why question before He moves. The anchor is not our understanding of our circumstances. It is who God says we are.
The wilderness message from Matthew 4 carried the same thread from a different angle. The sequence matters: Jesus received the Father's public declaration of His identity at His baptism, went directly into the wilderness, and came out into His ministry. The wilderness was not an interruption of that identity but part of how it was tested and confirmed. Being in a hard or uncomfortable season does not mean God has forgotten what He said about you.
Taught from Judges 6:1-27 · Joshua 24:16-24 · Matthew 4:1-11 · Matthew 3, final verses · Luke 10:19
“Being uncomfortable is not the same thing as being abandoned.”
From Uncomfortable Is Not the Same as Abandoned
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 10:13
13 No temptation has taken you except what is common to man. God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able, but will with the temptation also make the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- August 19, 2024 Uncomfortable Is Not the Same as Abandoned Amanda Lack opens Matthew 4 with Tribe church in Jackson Hole, walking through Jesus in the wilderness and what his example means for the hard seasons we all face.
- February 27, 2023 Turn The Cat Around Week 2 Gideon hid in a winepress doing the wrong job in the wrong place. Pastor Brian Hunter looks at what happens when God calls you something you don't believe you are.