What does Tribe teach about suffering?

At Tribe, the teaching on suffering starts with a single image: two cups. Brian Sauvé (the speaker across this series is identified only as Brian in the transcripts) walks the congregation through Jesus praying in Gethsemane, asking the Father to let the cup of suffering pass, and then arriving at Golgotha where soldiers offer him wine mixed with myrrh, a narcotic that would have dulled the pain, and he refuses it. That refusal is the hinge of the whole conversation. The cup of suffering is not punishment, and it is not the natural consequence of a bad choice. It is the cup of discipline, of trusting God without knowing all the steps, of being conformed into the likeness of Jesus. Brian uses the Greek behind the word for suffering to show that it carries the sense of being pressed under immense pressure, the way grapes are crushed to produce wine or olives are pressed to produce oil, and he notes that Gethsemane itself means pressing and crushing. God presses, Brian says, not to satisfy his ego, but to draw out of us what he already knows is there.

The cup of escape is the alternative, and Brian argues it is not what it appears to be. He brings in historical detail about Roman sanitation practice: latrines placed just outside city gates, with sponges on sticks soaking in wine mixed with myrrh as cleaning implements. Golgotha was just outside the city gates. What was offered to Jesus, Brian says, was most likely that same solution. The cup of escape promises relief, feels like something you deserve, and the enemy will always make it seem harmless, but Brian is direct: "That cup of escape is really poo poo water." People in the room, he says, know from their own lives what it feels like to choose escape and end up sick from it.

What Tribe teaches is that drinking from the cup of suffering is not something to endure passively but something to train for, because it is the primary tool God uses to produce spiritual maturity. Brian is clear that God is not cruel in this: "He delights not in your suffering, but he delights in your surrender and in your obedience." Spiritual maturity, he argues, is not measured by years in church or how worn a Bible is, but by how much a person has actually drunk from this cup. And that movement from concept to reality matters, because as long as it stays only in the mind, nothing changes.

Taught from Matthew 26:36-39 · Matthew 27:32-35 · Mark 15:21-24 · James 1:2-4 · 1 Peter 5:10