What does Tribe teach about sabbath rules?
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 Sabbath rules starts with two scenes from Matthew 12: Jesus' disciples picking grain in a field on the Sabbath, and Jesus healing a man with a withered hand in a synagogue on the same day. Brian walked the congregation through both stories not to dismiss rules but to show that the Pharisees had built a religious wineskin with no capacity left to hold what Jesus was pouring out. Their only move was to demand he conform to the container rather than let the container be remade. The disciples, Brian pointed out, were good Jewish men who knew the same Torah the Pharisees knew, yet they walked freely because they were actually with Jesus and trusting him, not just managing a system of regulations.
Brian pressed on why the Pharisees responded the way they did. Their constructed identity, their authority, their social standing were all being confronted directly by Jesus' words and actions. Rather than receive that confrontation as an invitation, they experienced it as a threat to everything they had built. He compared it to a mansion made of twigs, painful to admit it is worthless, easier to get rid of the person exposing it. Verse 14, where the Pharisees immediately begin plotting to kill him, landed with weight in the room. Brian noted that Jesus did not soften any of this. He walked straight into their synagogue, healed the man mid-argument, and finished making his point before he was done.
The broader teaching Tribe has been carrying through this season is that time spent with Jesus produces freedom, and that freedom will always look like lawbreaking to a wineskin that has no room left to stretch. Brian connected that to the accusation described in Revelation 12, saying the same spirit behind the Pharisees is still at work, telling people who are beginning to walk in freedom that they have no right to it and pulling them back into guilt and shame. The point the passage keeps pressing is not that the Sabbath or the law did not matter, but that the disciples were tasting something real because they were close to Jesus, while the Pharisees could only see what was happening from the outside.
Taught from Matthew 12:1-14 · Revelation 12:10-11 · 2 Corinthians 2:14-15 · Galatians 2:20 · James 4:2-7
“Two men enter, one man leave, because somebody will die. Either you will die, or you will put him on the cross and he will die.”
From Two Men Enter, One Man Leave
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 2:14-15
14 Now thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and reveals through us the sweet aroma of his knowledge in every place.
15 For we are a sweet aroma of Christ to God, in those who are saved, and in those who perish;
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- February 3, 2025 Two Men Enter, One Man Leave A Wyoming congregation wrestles with why the Pharisees wanted Jesus dead, what that reveals about pride and surrender, and what it means to taste rather than just see God's goodness.
- January 20, 2025 Breaking the Law Brian Hunter walks through Matthew 12 to show how time with Jesus stretches our capacity for freedom and breaks the grip of religious rules that have no life in them.
- January 19, 2025 Breaking The Law Brian Hunter walks through Matthew 12 to show how time with Jesus breaks the grip of religious legalism and leads to real, transformed freedom.