What does Tribe teach about addiction recovery?
Drawn from the message 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 addiction recovery is grounded in the image of two cups and the choice every person eventually faces between escape and endurance. Brian preached from the garden of Gethsemane alongside the accounts of Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross, holding all three passages together to make one point: suffering is not something God inflicts to punish, but something he uses to press out of us what he already knows is there. The word behind suffering, he explained, carries the picture of grapes or olives being crushed under pressure, and the name Gethsemane itself means pressing and crushing. For anyone stuck in the cycle of escaping pain through substances or other means, this reframes what they are walking through. Brian says, "He delights not in your suffering, but he delights in your surrender and in your obedience."
Drinking from the cup of suffering, as Brian described it, looks like concrete, unglamorous things: discipline, delayed gratification, staying in prayer for things that have not come yet, pressing into hard relationships, refusing to take matters into your own hands, and getting back up after a fall. Recovery fits squarely inside that list. He was also careful to say that Jesus did not make this choice easily, and that the humanity on display in Gethsemane matters, because a God untouched by what we face is not a God we can relate to. Before Brian preached, people in the room shared their own testimonies of moments when God broke through, including one man who described a dramatic deliverance just two and a half months earlier.
On the question of whether suffering that comes from your own choices counts the same way, Brian worked through it directly with the congregation in real time rather than stepping around it. The message also points to an internal threshold that has to be crossed: Brian says, "As long as it stays in our thinker, we remain unchanged." Spiritual transformation, and by extension recovery, requires something more than mental agreement. Brian noted that spiritual maturity is not measured in years of church attendance or a worn Bible, but in how much a person has actually drunk from that cup. This was the first half of a two-part message, with the second cup still to come.
Taught from Matthew 26:36-41 · Matthew 27:32-36 · Mark 15:21-24 · 2 Corinthians 12:5-7 · Revelation 12:11
“Spiritual maturity is not measured in age.”
From Drinking Deep: Choosing Endurance Over Escape
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 12:5-7
5 On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except in my weaknesses.
6 For if I would desire to boast, I will not be foolish; for I will speak the truth. But I refrain, so that no man may think more of me than that which he sees in me, or hears from me.
7 By reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations, that I should not be exalted excessively, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, that I should not be exalted excessively.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- September 23, 2024 Drinking Deep: Choosing Endurance Over Escape A Wyoming pastor walks through Matthew 26 and Mark 15 to explore why choosing the cup of suffering over escape is the path to spiritual maturity.