What does Tribe teach about encountering jesus?
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 encountering Jesus starts with an honest look at what keeps people from recognizing him in the first place. In a January 2024 message drawn from Luke 24, Pastor Brian walked through the story of two disciples leaving Jerusalem for Emmaus, days after the resurrection, still describing Jesus in past tense. They called him a mighty teacher, a prophet, someone they had hoped was the Messiah. Every verb was past tense. Their grief had locked their picture of Jesus at the tomb, and they were walking away from the very city where extraordinary things were still unfolding. Brian's word for that pattern was pointed: don't miss what is because you are stuck in the what was.
What makes the Emmaus account so striking, Brian said, is what Jesus actually does on that road. He walks alongside them without being recognized, asks questions he already knows the answers to, and then acts as if he will keep walking past them. The teaching held that Jesus was looking for hunger. He does not force his way in. When the disciples begged him to stay, he went home with them, broke bread, and their eyes were opened. Brian described this as a coy quality in Jesus, deliberately disrupting a familiar human pattern. Brian says, "He had to disrupt that pattern, their tendency to move towards comfort." The retreat toward Emmaus looked a lot like Peter heading back to his fishing boat after the resurrection, the instinct to return to whatever requires the least from us when hope runs dry.
The invitation Brian put in front of the room at the start of 2024 was to let go of rehearsing the past and pay attention to what Jesus is doing right now. He prayed that all of 2023 would be released as ashes and that people would be free to receive what God had for them in the present. Encountering Jesus, the teaching suggested, is less about manufacturing a spiritual experience and more about staying alert, staying hungry, and actually inviting him to stay.
Taught from Luke 24:13-31 · Matthew 27:51-54 · John 2:19-22 · 2 Kings 6 · Psalm 11:3
“Don't miss what is because you are stuck in the what was.”
From Leave the Past Behind You
The passage taught · 2 Kings 6
1 The sons of the prophets said to Elisha, “See now, the place where we live and meet with you is too small for us.
2 Please let us go to the Jordan, and each man take a beam from there, and let us make us a place there, where we may live.” He answered, “Go!”
3 One said, “Please be pleased to go with your servants.” He answered, “I will go.”
4 So he went with them. When they came to the Jordan, they cut down wood.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- January 8, 2024 Leave the Past Behind You Brian Hunter walks through Luke 24 and the road to Emmaus, asking one question: are you so stuck in what was that you are missing what Jesus is doing right now?