What does Tribe teach about spending time with god?
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 spending time with God starts with a straightforward claim Joy Abad (also identified in these messages as Joy Bhatt) came back to repeatedly: "Your capacity to recognize and receive from the Holy Spirit is directly proportional to how much time you spend with Jesus." The argument is not complicated. The disciples and the Pharisees carried the same knowledge of the Torah, but only the disciples could follow Jesus into something new. The reason was proximity. They had been with him, watching him, eating with him, following him day after day, and that accumulated time was what gave them the ability to sense a new work of God and trust it rather than resist it.
Joy pressed this further by drawing on her own experience of grief and close friendship. The intimacy she had with her best friend Rachel, knowing every name, every backstory, every nuance of a life, was simply the product of years spent together. There is no shortcut to that. The same is true of knowing Jesus. Without real time logged in relationship with him, a person is left guessing when something unfamiliar comes along, whether it is actually from God or not. With that time, they begin to recognize his voice even in unexpected places.
The teaching used 2 Chronicles 20 to show what this looks like under pressure. Jehoshaphat, facing an overwhelming coalition of armies, called a fast, gathered everyone, and stood before God in prayer that leaned hard on remembered history, recounting what God had done before and holding him to those promises. The instruction he received was striking and completely unconventional: do not fight, send the worship team out first. He obeyed. Joy pointed to the Hebrew word shema, meaning listen and obey together as two sides of the same coin, to make the point that you cannot claim to have heard God if you have not acted on what he said. That kind of responsiveness, she taught, is only built through the spiritual disciplines, reading scripture, prayer, fasting, and the steady practice of being with Jesus.
Taught from Matthew 12:1-14 · 2 Chronicles 20:1-24 · Matthew 25
“Your capacity to recognize and receive from the Holy Spirit is directly proportional to how much time you spend with Jesus.”
From New Wineskins ｜ Joy Abad
The passage taught · 2 Chronicles 20:1-24
1 After this, the children of Moab, the children of Ammon, and with them some of the Ammonites, came against Jehoshaphat to battle.
2 Then some came who told Jehoshaphat, saying, “A great multitude is coming against you from beyond the sea from Syria. Behold, they are in Hazazon Tamar” (that is, En Gedi).
3 Jehoshaphat was alarmed, and set himself to seek to Yahweh. He proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah.
4 Judah gathered themselves together to seek help from Yahweh. They came out of all the cities of Judah to seek Yahweh.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- February 10, 2025 New Wineskins ｜ Joy Abad Joy Bhatt teaches Tribe Church on how time spent with Jesus shapes our ability to recognize and follow where God is moving, even when it looks unconventional.
- February 9, 2025 Being With Jesus Joy Bhatt teaches on what it means to spend time with Jesus, how that shapes our capacity to recognize God moving, and why discernment matters more than ever.