What does Tribe teach about trials and faith?
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 trials and faith keeps coming back to a simple but hard truth: what looks like disaster from the inside is rarely the whole story. Brian Pastor Brian Walker worked through the life of Joseph to show how the same set of painful circumstances looked entirely different depending on whose eyes were seeing it. The brothers saw a problem they solved badly. Jacob saw a son who was gone and refused to be comforted. But the word Genesis uses at the hinge of that whole story is 'meanwhile,' and Brian said that word is the character of the God the Bible describes. While everyone around Joseph was drawing conclusions and covering tracks, God was quietly moving the story forward.
The teaching does not pretend that pit or prison are easy places to be. Brian is honest that few people are willing to go there, even though that is often where God's presence is most clearly seen. What it does press on is the posture we bring to those places. Brian says, "We can assume the best about God. There's no one else we can really do that with, even our family." That is not a call to positive thinking. It is a call grounded in the character of a God who, by the record of scripture, has never let a single promise fail.
That record matters, and the Pecky Day message makes it practical. Brian asked the congregation to think about every situation they had panicked over that God later resolved, and to let that history be evidence they could stand on. As he read from Joshua 23, he landed on Joshua's own word to Israel: "Deep in your hearts, you know that every promise of the Lord your God has come true, not a single one has failed." The teaching at Tribe on trials is not that the hard seasons will feel okay, but that God is already at work in the meanwhile, and that a person's own history with Him is real ammunition for the next hard thing.
Taught from Genesis 37 · Genesis 39:21 · Psalms 139:5-6 · Joshua 23:14 · Joshua 23
“Meanwhile, God was up to something.”
From God of the Meanwhile
The passage taught · Genesis 37
1 Jacob lived in the land of his father’s travels, in the land of Canaan.
2 This is the history of the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives. Joseph brought an evil report of them to their father.
3 Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a coat of many colors.
4 His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, and they hated him, and couldn’t speak peaceably to him.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- September 9, 2024 God of the Meanwhile Brian Hunter walks through Genesis 37 to show how God is quietly at work behind every painful, confusing circumstance, even when the evidence seems to say otherwise.
- November 21, 2023 Pecky Day Brian Hunter shares Pecky Day, a Hunter family tradition of remembering God's faithfulness, woven through Joshua 23 and an unlikely answer to prayer in Tulsa.