What does Tribe teach about surrendering to 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 surrendering to God starts with a simple and uncomfortable observation: you cannot add Jesus to your life. Brian Walker has been direct about this across the New Wine series. As he put it, "You cannot add Jesus to your life because if you try to fit him and his ways and following him into just adding it into your life, it will wreck your life." The image he returns to is the wineskin. A new wineskin costs something, and that cost is always death, death to old mindsets, old patterns, and anything a person is currently holding onto. The rich young ruler in Mark 10 is the picture of what happens when someone senses the invitation and walks away from it anyway, sorrowful because he felt in his spirit what he was losing even as he left it behind.
The sermon on hearing God's voice from Luke 6 pushes the same idea in a different direction. Pastor Brian described surrendering as a three-part movement: coming to Jesus personally and publicly, listening in a way that is active and honest rather than passive, and then obeying, not once but continually. The Greek verb behind the obeying, he said, carries the picture of new roots shooting forth from a plant, something alive and ongoing rather than a transaction completed. When someone appears before Jesus personally, he said, they cannot run their games or hide behind a facade.
What holds all of this together, across both series, is the conviction that God is not asking for a partial yes. The path forward is full surrender, and Brian has been clear that God is both wise and economical about it: "He is wise and he is economical. He will offer you new wine, but he's not going to continue to pour new wine into your old wineskin because he knows that you just can't handle it." The cost is real, but so is what is on the other side of it.
Taught from Luke 5:33-39 · Mark 10:17-28 · Luke 6:46-49 · Matthew 9:14-17 · James 1:22-25
“If you hold so tightly to old ways that there is no room in your heart for a new move of God in your life, you are in jeopardy of even losing the sweetness of what he did in the past.”
From A Warning About New Wine
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 10:4-5
4 for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the throwing down of strongholds,
5 throwing down imaginations and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ;
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- December 9, 2024 A Warning About New Wine Brian Hunter warns that clinging to old mindsets when God pours out something new risks losing both the old and the new. A sermon on John 8 and wineskins.
- December 8, 2024 Warnings About New Wine Jesus warns that clinging to old mindsets blocks what God is doing now. This sermon explores what it costs to receive something new from him.
- November 25, 2024 New Wineskins Will Cost You Brian Hunter walks through Mark 10 to show why following Jesus costs more than adding him to your life, and what it takes to receive what God is pouring out.
- July 10, 2023 The Key That Unlocks Hearing A Wyoming pastor walks through Luke 6 and James 1 on what it truly means to hear God's voice, come to him personally, and obey what he says.
Mentioned along the way
- May 18, 2025 Victory with Dr. Laura Sanger A teaching on what it means to grow from spiritual infancy into mature sons of God, and why that maturity matters in the battle against evil.