What does Tribe teach about shame?
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 shame starts with the conviction that shame is not a mark God puts on a person. Brian Hunter has drawn a clear line between the way the enemy works and the way God does. The enemy's strategy is external, working through confusion, lies, and intimidation to deface the image of God in a person. Brian used the image of graffiti being sprayed over something carefully made, and Sid from Toy Story as a picture of something that takes what a maker created and mutilates it into something unrecognizable. That is what shame does: it comes from outside and tries to scratch out what God wrote. Brian puts it plainly: "You are God's unique poem. The stated goal of the enemy is to scribble and scratch that out."
God's answer to shame is not a louder external label but an internal one. Ephesians 1:13-14 describes the Holy Spirit as the seal placed inside a believer, the deposit that identifies a person as belonging to God. Brian compared this to a parent sewing a name tag into the hidden lining of a child's jacket: deliberate, permanent, and not meant to be flaunted. The Spirit engraves God's name on the heart so that even failure and rebellion cannot finally erase it. That is the ground shame cannot hold.
The teaching from 1 John 3:1-3 presses the same point from another angle. The Father has lavished love on believers and called them his children, and the passage is almost insistent about it, as if God is saying do not doubt this. Where shame tells a person that outside voices get to define them, Brian's charge to the room was direct: "Don't let the world try to paint over his name on your heart." The world cannot recognize who a person truly is for the same reason the passage gives: it does not know God. But God knows, and his name is already written there.
Taught from Ephesians 1:3-14 · 1 John 3:1-3 · Isaiah 49:16 · Zephaniah 3:17
“Anybody or any person or any force that doesn't encourage you to be you very well could be a force of the enemy.”
From Sealed and Branded
The passage taught · Ephesians 1:3-14
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ;
4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and without defect before him in love;
5 having predestined us for adoption as children through Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his desire,
6 to the praise of the glory of his grace, by which he freely gave us favor in the Beloved,
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- July 28, 2025 Sealed and Branded Brian Hunter walks Tribe through Ephesians 1:13-14, exploring what it means to be sealed by the Holy Spirit and why that identity matters more than any label the world puts on you.
- July 21, 2025 What Great Love Brian Hunter asks a simple question: if someone looked at the sole of your heart's boot, whose name would they find written there?