What does Tribe teach about can you lose salvation?
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 this question starts with a close reading of what Paul actually says in 1 Corinthians 9 and 10. Brian Sauve opened with Paul's athletic analogy, where Paul warns that he disciplines his own body so he will not be disqualified, and then pressed the congregation to keep reading rather than stop there. Paul immediately turns to the story of Israel in the wilderness, noting five times that all of them had equal access to God's provision, and then shifting to say that most of them did not make it through. Brian's argument was that equal access to God is not the same as crossing the finish line. As he put it, "Just because you got the bib number doesn't guarantee that you'll ever cross the finish line."
Brian was careful to draw a distinction between the love of God, which he said nothing can take away, and salvation, which a person can choose to walk away from. He pushed back on the idea that a prayer said at camp guarantees arrival at the destination regardless of how a person lives afterward. The passage from 2 Peter 2:21 came up in that conversation, that it would have been better never to have known the right way than to have known it and turned away. The teaching at Tribe is not that God abandons people, but that people can turn away from him, and that the scriptures take that possibility seriously.
At the same time, Brian did not leave the congregation with dread. He moved to Hebrews 12 and the call to run with endurance the race God has set before each person. The comfort God offers, he said, is not a shorter course. Drawing on something Chris Bates said, Brian described it as God supernaturally infusing tired people with the strength to keep going. He named the things that knock people off course, including exhaustion, discouragement, and the lie that a person has messed up too badly to continue, and he prayed directly against those lies. Brian also noted that blisters are part of the process, saying "All blisters turn into calluses."
Taught from 1 Corinthians 10:1-5 · 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 · Hebrews 12:1 · 2 Peter 2:21 · Proverbs 24:16
“Just because you got the bib number doesn't guarantee that you'll ever cross the finish line.”
From Run With Endurance
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 10:1-5
1 Now I would not have you ignorant, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea;
2 and were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea;
3 and all ate the same spiritual food;
4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- August 12, 2024 Run With Endurance Brian Hunter preaches on endurance in the Christian life, using Paul's race analogy and Israel's wilderness failures to ask whether we will finish the race we started.