What does Tribe teach about darkness and light?
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 darkness and light starts with Isaiah's prophecy in Isaiah 9:1-2, where hundreds of years before Jesus arrived, a great light was promised to people living in deep darkness. Brian traced that image carefully, letting the congregation sit with the strangeness of it: the very people walking in darkness are the ones who see the light. He held the wonder of that without resolving it too quickly.
Brian pulled the darkness image back further to the plague in Exodus 10, where a darkness so thick it could be felt left people paralyzed. They stopped moving. They withdrew. He suggested that is exactly what deep darkness does, and that it is what is happening now in the broader culture and in individual hearts, as trust erodes, geopolitical pressure builds, and confusion makes disengagement feel easier than action. He was honest that preachers have been saying the world is getting darker for a long time, but his point was that the current moment is a genuine intensification, and that the right response is not retreat. Brian says, "The tendency when darkness rolls over the land is to cause people to become immobilized. They retreat. They withdraw. They disengage."
The teaching moved to John 8:12, where Jesus said plainly that following him means you will have the light that leads to life, and from there to Matthew 5 and the church's own call to be light to the people around them. Brian noted a quiet detail in John 8: even when the light is present, walking in darkness remains a choice. His point was that the darkness does not win by overpowering the light. It wins by getting people to stop shining. Brian says, "As this present age gets darker and darker, all it does is cause the illumination of the beauty of Emmanuel, God with us, to shine all the brighter."
Taught from Isaiah 9:1-2 · John 8:12 · Exodus 10:21-23 · Matthew 5:14-16 · Isaiah 60:1-3
“As this present age gets darker and darker, all it does is cause the illumination of the beauty of Emmanuel, God with us, to shine all the brighter.”
From A Great Light in the Land of Deep Darkness
The passage taught · Exodus 10:21-23
21 Yahweh said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward the sky, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be felt.”
22 Moses stretched out his hand toward the sky, and there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt for three days.
23 They didn’t see one another, and nobody rose from his place for three days; but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- December 18, 2023 A Great Light in the Land of Deep Darkness A Wyoming pastor traces the "light of the world" from Isaiah's prophecy through the Exodus plagues to Jesus, asking what that light demands of us now.