What does Tribe teach about beliefs?
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 beliefs starts with a straightforward question: where are you actually hanging your trust? Jay brought this home through Numbers 14, where the Israelites had already seen God work miracle after miracle and still fell apart the moment the spies' report felt too hard. The people let fear become contagious, looked at their circumstances instead of God, and nearly stoned the two men who were telling them the truth. Jay's point was that the struggle is not new, and that what you believe in any given moment is shaped almost entirely by what you are looking at.
The teaching used the image of a hat rack to make this concrete. Your beliefs are your hat, and wherever you hang it is what you are trusting. Jay named three hooks: circumstances, other people, and God. Circumstances are passive, he said, you just go along with the mood of the room, the news feed, the crowd. Trusting people is better because it takes some agency, but every person will eventually let you down. Only the Jesus hook holds. He told the story of being a short thirteen-year-old getting his hat taken in PE, too busy chasing it around to realize he did not have to play the game at all, and used it to show how easy it is to feel like a victim of your surroundings and forget you actually have a choice about what you believe. As Jay put it, "The enemy gets to us by taking our hat. That's how they steal our heart away."
The practical move Jay called for was recovering your own beliefs from whatever is currently pushing them around, whether that is social media, the news, or the people nearest to you. He grounded this in Colossians 3:2, setting your mind on things above rather than on the things of earth. And he was direct that the standard for this is not perfection. "If the criteria for us to be saved is having all of our hats on the perfect hooks, I don't think any of us are gonna make it." The goal is not a flawless belief system but an honest reckoning with where your hat actually is right now, and a decision to pick it up and put it somewhere that holds.
Taught from Numbers 14:1-12 · Colossians 3:2 · Proverbs 3:5-6 · John 14:6 · Ephesians 2:8-10
“The enemy gets to us by taking our hat. That's how they steal our heart away.”
From How to Hang Your Hat
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 13:5
5 Examine your own selves, whether you are in the faith. Test your own selves. Or don’t you know as to your own selves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you are disqualified.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- July 15, 2024 How to Hang Your Hat Jay walks Tribe through Numbers 14 to show how trusting circumstances or people instead of God leaves you chasing your hat, never finding a place to hang it.