What does Tribe teach about lazarus?
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 Lazarus starts with one detail most people pass over: when Lazarus walked out of the tomb, he was still wrapped in grave clothes, and Jesus had to tell the crowd to unwrap him and let him go. Brian used that moment as the hinge for everything else. Grave clothes went onto Lazarus after he died, not before, because they would have been completely out of place on a living person. As Brian put it, "Only dead people belong in grave clothes." The question he kept pressing was why people who have already been made alive in Christ would still be wearing them.
The teaching draws a clear line between what happens at salvation and what still has to be worked out afterward. When a person invites Jesus into their heart, Brian taught, they become a new creation as Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 5:17, and the old life is gone. But the mind does not get instantly rewritten the way the spirit does. Romans 12:2 says the mind has to be renewed, and Brian said that is ongoing work, not a one-time event. Meanwhile, as he warned the room, "This world constantly tries to put those old grave clothes back on us." The shame, the condemnation, the sense of being damaged goods or having gone too far, those are grave clothes, and they only belong on dead people.
The answer Brian pointed to was in Romans 6, where Paul calls believers to consider themselves dead to sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus. That word, consider, was where Brian kept landing: the deliberate act of speaking the truth over yourself, refusing to agree with what the enemy says, and living from the reality that Jesus has already called you out of the tomb. "Jesus stood outside of the tomb of your heart and called you to life." The grave clothes are not your identity anymore.
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.