What does Tribe teach about old vs new covenant?
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 the old and new covenant starts with a question Jesus was actually asked. Brian opened the series by sitting with the moment in Matthew 9 and Luke 5 where John's disciples challenge Jesus about fasting, and Jesus answers by talking about wineskins. Rather than skip past that apparent mismatch, Brian asked the room to stay with it. The new wine, as the teaching landed, represents Jesus coming to fulfill the law and establish a new covenant, a new way of being made right with God that does not depend on keeping the requirements of the law. Brian noted that for anyone already following Jesus this is simply the water they swim in, but for someone locked inside a formulaic, law-keeping tradition, this teaching was so disruptive it got both Jesus and Paul killed.
The second session moved the focus to what the wineskin itself represents. Working through the story of Nicodemus in John 3, the congregation arrived at a definition Brian settled on: the wineskin represents a person's capacity to receive and adapt to a new work of the Holy Spirit in their life. The new wine in that passage is the idea of being born again, a category Nicodemus had no container for. Brian pointed out that Jesus never offered to pour a little new wine into an old wineskin. He pointed Nicodemus toward needing something new entirely, patiently but plainly.
Brian pressed that further by listing things that can reveal a brittle wineskin, among them rejecting the active work of the Holy Spirit today or having no room for the warrior imagery of Jesus in Revelation and the Psalms. The point was not to argue each of those positions in full but to ask whether a person's spirit is in a condition to receive what God is doing. The old covenant and the new are not presented at Tribe as distant theological categories. They are framed as a live question about whether someone is open to what the Holy Spirit is actually pouring out.
Taught from Matthew 9:14-17 · Luke 5:33-39 · John 3:1-21 · Romans 3:21-23 · Romans 8:1-2
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
- November 17, 2024 New Wine Deeper Explained A Tribe Church sermon on Jesus's teaching about new wine and wineskins, exploring what it means to stay open to the Holy Spirit's work in your life.
- November 10, 2024 What Does The New Wine Represent Brian Hunter walks through Jesus's words on new wine and old wineskins, asking what it looks like when God moves in new ways and whether we are ready to receive it.