What does Tribe teach about martyrs?
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 martyrs grows out of a close look at the word 'witness' in Acts 1:8. Brian pointed out that the Greek word behind 'witness' is 'martys,' the root of the English word martyr, and he stopped there long enough for that to land. A witness is not someone passing along second-hand information. A witness has a first-hand account, something they saw with their own eyes and cannot honestly deny. That is the weight Jesus placed on the disciples, and it is the weight the Holy Spirit is given to help believers carry.
Brian read from several people in church history who were executed for refusing to recant their faith, including Polycarp, who had served Jesus for 86 years and said Jesus had done him no wrong, and John Huss, who said before being burned at the stake, "What I taught with my lips, I now seal with my blood." A young woman named Perpetua said before being thrown to the lions that she could not be called anything other than what she was, a Christian. Hugh Latimer said as the flames were lit beneath him that they would that day light such a candle in England as would never be put out. Brian was careful not to hold these up as distant heroes but as people whose first-hand knowledge of Jesus made denial impossible.
That is where the Holy Spirit comes back in. Brian's point was that the baptism of the Holy Spirit puts what he called 'God's super on our natural,' giving a believer not borrowed courage but an undeniable personal encounter with Jesus. In his words, 'The Spirit doesn't make you bold. He just makes Jesus undeniable in your life.' The willingness of the martyrs was not a feat of human resolve. It was the fruit of a relationship with someone they had genuinely met.
Taught from Acts 1:8 · Acts 1:1-11 · 1 Corinthians 2:10-14 · John 14:26 · Ephesians 1:17-18
“The spirit doesn't make you bold. He just makes Jesus undeniable in your life.”
From Faithful Under Pressure
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 2:10-14
10 But to us, God revealed them through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.
11 For who among men knows the things of a man, except the spirit of the man, which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God, except God’s Spirit.
12 But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might know the things that were freely given to us by God.
13 Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- April 20, 2026 Faithful Under Pressure Brian Hunter walks through Acts 1:8 to show how the Holy Spirit transforms ordinary believers into witnesses whose encounter with Jesus cannot be silenced, even under pressure.
- April 19, 2026 Faith Under Pressure Brian Hunter walks through Acts 1:8 to show how the Holy Spirit empowers ordinary people to be faithful witnesses to a risen Jesus, no matter the pressure they face.