What does Tribe teach about endurance in faith?
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 endurance in faith starts with a question most people would rather not sit with: getting into the race is not the same thing as finishing it. When Brian taught through 1 Corinthians 9 and 10, he pointed out that Paul does not stop after the familiar warning about self-discipline. Paul keeps going, and he uses the nation of Israel in the wilderness to press the point home. Five times Paul says 'all of them,' all of them guided by the cloud, all of them walking through the sea, all of them eating and drinking from the same spiritual provision. Then the phrase changes. 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 hold two things apart. The love of God is not in question, he said, and nothing can take that away. But he was direct that a person can choose to walk away from salvation, and he pointed to 2 Peter 2:21, which a member of the congregation raised during the message, as one of the harder verses in the New Testament on that reality. He also pushed back on the idea that a prayer prayed at camp, with no continued running of the race, is a guarantee of arrival. Hebrews 12 was where he brought it home, the call to strip off every weight and run with endurance the race God has set before each person. The comfort God offers, Brian said, is not a shorter course. He credited someone named Chris Bates with naming it well: God's comfort is his supernaturally infusing tired people with the strength to keep going.
The things that knock people off course, according to this teaching, are exhaustion, distraction, discouragement, and the specific lies that say a person has messed up too badly to continue or that the race is not worth running at all. Brian prayed against those lies directly at the close of the message. The underlying encouragement is that the pain of staying in the race is not wasted. As Brian said, 'All blisters turn into calluses.'
Taught from 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 · 1 Corinthians 10:1-5 · 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.