What does Tribe teach about delayed gratification?
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 delayed gratification is rooted in a much larger conversation about suffering and spiritual maturity. Brian worked through the accounts of Jesus in Gethsemane and on the road to Golgotha to show that the choice to drink from the cup of suffering is not something to dread or dodge, but something a person can actually train for. The idea is that God uses pressure, the kind that costs something and takes time, as one of his primary tools for growing people into genuine maturity.
Brian was careful to draw real distinctions. The suffering he was describing is not the consequence of poor choices, and it is not punishment. It is the kind of pressure that produces something, the way grapes are crushed to make wine. He pointed out that Gethsemane itself means pressing and crushing, so when Jesus went there to pray through his anguish before choosing the cup anyway, the location was saying something. Delayed gratification fits inside that same framework: staying in prayer for things that have not happened yet, trusting God for timing in areas like marriage or having children, pressing into hard relationships, and getting back up after falling down are all described as real, concrete ways a person drinks from that cup in ordinary life.
The teaching also pressed on the difference between knowing something in the mind and actually living it. Brian described it as an 18-inch drop from the thinker to the knower, and his argument was that if the idea of endurance stays only as a concept, nothing actually changes. Delayed gratification, in this framing, is not passive waiting. It is an active choice to stay engaged, to trust God's timing, and to let the pressure do its work.
Taught from Matthew 26:36-41 · Matthew 27:32-35 · Mark 10:29-31 · Mark 15:21-24 · Philippians 2:13
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 22, 2024 Drinking Deep: Choosing Endurance over Escape A Wyoming pastor explores what it means to choose suffering over escape, drawing from Jesus in Gethsemane to show how endurance shapes spiritual maturity.