What does Tribe teach about loving jesus?

At Tribe, the teaching on loving Jesus starts with a question Jesus himself asked Peter on the shore of Galilee: do you love me more than these? Jay Cummings opened these messages by drawing a line between claiming to love Jesus and actually loving him in a way that costs something. The John 21 passage shows Jesus finding the disciples back at their fishing boats after the resurrection, drifting toward the old life, and addressing Peter not as Peter but as Simon, the name he carried before any of this started. Jay read that as Jesus naming where Peter actually was, not where he had been called to go.

The heart of the teaching sits in the Greek behind the exchange. Jesus asks Peter twice using agape, the self-sacrificing love that is a choice, and Peter answers both times with phileo, the love of a friend. Jay described Peter as someone once boastful about what he would do for Jesus, now unable to claim more than friendship, and being honest about it. By the third question, Jesus meets Peter where he is and uses phileo as well. The three questions mirror the three denials, and the effect is not condemnation but an invitation back.

Jay was direct about who most needs to sit with this question. As he put it, "the people that really have the hardest time knowing they need transformation is people who are close to God, who walk with him, who claim to love him." Familiarity with church, with the language, with the story, can become its own kind of blindness. Loving Jesus, in the way these messages describe it, means letting that question land honestly: whether the old life, the old habits, the old identity, still holds more of a person than Jesus does.

Taught from John 21:15-19 · 1 John 1:8-9 · Psalm 139:23-24 · 2 Corinthians 5:17 · Ephesians 4:22-24