What does Tribe teach about living sacrifice?
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 living sacrifice is rooted in a close reading of the Olah offering in Leviticus 1. Brian Hunter has walked the congregation through this ancient free will burnt offering and drawn a direct line to Paul's call in Romans 12:1 to present our bodies as living sacrifices. What made the Olah different from other offerings was total cost: the animal had to come from the worshiper's own herd, had to be without blemish, and every part of it, head, entrails, legs, everything, went onto the altar and was consumed by fire. Nothing came home. Brian says, "He held nothing back from you," and that completeness is the model the teaching holds up.
One detail the congregation kept returning to was the moment the worshiper placed a hand on the animal's head before it was killed. That gesture was not casual. It was intimate, even frightening, a real act of choosing rather than something coerced or reflexive. The teaching connected it to why Leviticus 1:8 calls for the head to go on the altar first: the head is the seat of will and desire, and when that goes first, everything else follows more easily. Brian also noted that surrender of this kind is not the absence of difficulty but often the path through it. As he put it, "If everything is figured out, if we don't ever have to do anything hard, we don't really need the Lord."
The teaching is not presented as a one-time transaction but as an orientation of the whole life. The discussion in both messages circled back to the difference between an offering that actually costs something and the kind of reflexive, half-hearted gesture that has no real surrender behind it. The woman with the alabaster jar in John 12, dismissed by Judas as wasteful, stood as an image of what genuine giving looks like when measured against the One who gave everything first.
Taught from Leviticus 1:1-9 · Romans 12:1 · John 12 · Luke 17:17-19 · 1 Samuel 1
“He held nothing back from you.”
From The Olah Offering
The passage taught · 1 Samuel 1
1 Now there was a certain man of Ramathaim Zophim, of the hill country of Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephraimite.
2 He had two wives. The name of one was Hannah, and the name of other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.
3 This man went up out of his city from year to year to worship and to sacrifice to Yahweh of Armies in Shiloh. The two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, priests to Yahweh, were there.
4 When the day came that Elkanah sacrificed, he gave to Peninnah his wife, and to all her sons and her daughters, portions;
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- March 31, 2025 The Olah Offering A Wyoming church works through Leviticus, exploring what it means to hold nothing back from God and offer your whole life as a living sacrifice.
- March 30, 2025 The Ola Offering A Wyoming pastor walks through Leviticus 1 and the Olah offering, a burnt sacrifice consumed completely, and asks what it looks like to give God everything.