What does Tribe teach about trusting god hard times?
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 trusting God in hard times starts with a single word buried in Genesis 37: 'meanwhile.' Brian walked the congregation through the story of Joseph being thrown into a pit and sold into slavery by his own brothers, and pointed out that while everyone inside that story was drawing the worst possible conclusions, God was already moving. Jacob was certain his son was dead. The brothers thought they had solved their problem. None of them could see what was actually happening. That gap between what people could see and what God was doing is where the teaching plants its flag.
Pastor Brian named that gap 'the God of the meanwhile.' He drew on Psalm 139, reading from the Passion Translation, where God is described as going into the future to prepare the way and following behind to spare us from the harm of our past. The picture he built is of a God who is never absent from the circumstances that look, from the ground level, like they are falling apart. Brian says, 'Meanwhile, God was up to something.' That is the posture the teaching calls people toward: not a denial of how bad things look, but a settled confidence that God is active in the very moment that feels most abandoned.
The harder edge of the teaching is also there. Brian acknowledged that this kind of trust is not easy to sustain, noting that 'few of us are willing to endure the pit or the prison where it is most magnified.' But he also said that God is the one place where that trust is actually warranted, putting it plainly: 'We can assume the best about God. There's no one else we can really do that with, even our family.' The story of Joseph is not offered as a tidy lesson but as honest evidence that God's work in a life can be invisible for a long time before it becomes undeniable.
Taught from Genesis 37 · Genesis 39:21 · Psalms 139:5-6
“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.
- September 8, 2024 God of the Meanwhile A pastor and congregation in Jackson Hole work through the story of Joseph to explore how God is quietly at work even when circumstances look hopeless.