What does Tribe teach about spiritual discipline?
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 spiritual discipline starts with the conviction that burying God's word deep in your heart is not optional background noise for the Christian life. In a message from Proverbs 4:20-22, Brian worked through the Hebrew meanings of the text and showed that every word in that passage is active and demanding. Listening to God's word means the kind of focused, full-body attention a prey animal gives to an unfamiliar sound. Keeping it means stretching it out completely, the way you wrestle a fitted sheet across a king-size mattress, not leaving it folded up and unused. The word the text translates as 'penetrate' carries the image of a watchtower standing at the corner of a field, positioned on high ground to guard what comes in and goes out. When God's word is planted at that kind of high ground in your heart, Brian said, it can crack like a whip to drive the enemy back.
The same message made clear that this discipline is not merely intellectual. The Hebrew language behind 'bring life' is agricultural, meaning green, thriving, springtime abundance. God's word planted and tended in the heart is meant to produce an actual harvest, and that harvest touches every single part of a person's life. The Pharisees stand as the cautionary tale: people who handled the text constantly but never let it go deep enough to do its work.
The discipline of killing sin belongs in the same conversation. In an April 2024 message called 'Devoted to Destruction,' Justin Waters drew the parallel between Israel's repeated failure to drive out the Canaanites and the way believers today negotiate with the flesh instead of putting it to death. He was honest about his own experience of that failure, and he put it plainly: 'It's cost me way more to coddle and pamper my flesh than it has to crucify it.' The pattern he described is familiar. You show up, you serve, you say the right things, and still something is being protected and hidden rather than surrendered. The call at Tribe is to take both sides of this seriously: root yourself in the word, and deal ruthlessly with what pulls you away from God.
Taught from Proverbs 4:20-22 · Proverbs 4:23 · Romans 8:12-13 · Galatians 5:16-17 · Psalm 1
The passage taught · 2 Peter 1:3
3 seeing that his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and virtue;
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- May 25, 2025 Rooted In The Word A Wyoming pastor and congregation dig into Proverbs 4:20-22, exploring what it means to guard your heart by burying Scripture deep enough to change your life.
- April 15, 2024 Devoted to Destruction A guest speaker leads Tribe church through Deuteronomy, Galatians and Romans, calling believers to stop coddling sin and ruthlessly cut out whatever pulls them from God.
Mentioned along the way
- March 13, 2023 Turn The Cat Around- Week 4 A Wyoming pastor uses the Old Testament story of Naaman to explore what it means to have a teachable spirit and when to let correction slide right off.