What does Tribe teach about faith in hardship?
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 faith in hardship starts with a simple but searching observation: God has a habit of showing up inside inconvenience, not around it. Pastor Brian Sauve opened this thread by being honest about the Sukkot camping trip the Tribe family had just come through, admitting that his first thought on the drive home was relief that it only happens once a year. That honesty became the ground for something bigger. Drawing on Exodus 3, he pointed out that the burning bush was not blocking Moses's path. Moses could have noted it and kept walking. The encounter waited on a choice, a decision to stop and turn aside, and it was only in that turning that God called out to him.
The congregation added story after story to that pattern: the bleeding woman pushing through a crowd, Peter throwing his nets after a failed night, John writing Revelation from exile, Lydia opening her home in a way that planted the church in Philippi. In each case the encounter was real, but it was hidden inside something that looked like a disruption. Brian says, "I love to surprise my children in the midst of inconvenience." The invitation running through the whole message was to stop plowing through hard moments or avoiding them, and instead ask whether God might be present inside them. One phrase that landed for many was the difference between hearing about God secondhand and arriving at something firsthand, the shift from knowing about an encounter to having one.
Pastor Brian was also careful to hold a clear boundary. Not every hard thing is something God arranged. He said plainly that God did not give Clay cancer, and that treating every form of suffering as a divine set-up would be a serious mistake. The question the teaching puts to someone in hardship is not whether God caused it, but whether, in the middle of it, there is still an opportunity to turn aside. He also noted, from Luke 5, that the resistance to new wine is real: Brian says, "But no one who drinks the old wine seems to want the inconvenience of new wine." The comfort of what is familiar can make the turning harder, but the teaching at Tribe is that the turning is exactly where the encounter lives.
Taught from Exodus 3:1-6 · Luke 5:33-39 · Song of Solomon 5:2-3 · Song of Solomon 3:4
“I love to surprise my children in the midst of inconvenience.”
From Encounter in the Inconvenience
The passage taught · Exodus 3:1-6
1 Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness, and came to God’s mountain, to Horeb.
2 Yahweh’s angel appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the middle of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
3 Moses said, “I will go now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.”
4 When Yahweh saw that he came over to see, God called to him out of the middle of the bush, and said, “Moses! Moses!” He said, “Here I am.”
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- October 16, 2023 Encounter in the Inconvenience A Wyoming congregation shares stories of how God meets people in life's most inconvenient moments, drawing on Moses, Job, and one another's testimonies.