What does Tribe teach about fear?
Drawn from the messages 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 fear starts not with a technique for overcoming it but with an honest look at what worship actually is and what it does. Brian Hunter draws a distinction between thanksgiving, praise, and worship, and notes that true worship, the response to encountering the presence of God himself, tends to produce something that looks less like celebration and more like awe and falling down. That kind of encounter, Brian says, is what Scripture shows again and again, from Moses at the burning bush to Saul on the road to Damascus. The implication is that fear, in the ordinary anxious sense, gets reoriented when a person is standing in the presence of the one who made them.
Brian frames worship as having real, practical uses in moments of fear and pressure. Working from 1 Samuel 16, he points to David playing the harp when a tormenting spirit troubled Saul, and the spirit leaving. He calls this the combat function of worship, the idea that pressing into worship can work like a weapon against whatever is dogging a person. A woman in the congregation put flesh on that by describing being in Israel on October 7, when she and her husband began singing a worship song about being surrounded and peace came over them even as reports of what was happening were coming in around them.
The wider point Brian makes is that every person worships something because God built that mechanism into human beings. When that devotion is aimed at anything less than God, fear fills the gaps that only his presence can close. Brian says, "In his presence is fullness of joy. There can be no darkness in his presence." That is the ground Tribe returns to: not a promise that fear disappears on demand, but that the presence of God is the place where it loses its grip.
Taught from 1 Samuel 16:14-23 · 1 Samuel 30:1-8 · Psalm 91 · Psalm 150 · 2 Samuel 6:14
“Everybody does it. Few people know that they do it.”
From Three Uses of Worship
The passage taught · 1 Samuel 16:14-23
14 Now Yahweh’s Spirit departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from Yahweh troubled him.
15 Saul’s servants said to him, “See now, an evil spirit from God troubles you.
16 Let our lord now command your servants who are in front of you to seek out a man who is a skillful player on the harp. Then when the evil spirit from God is on you, he will play with his hand, and you will be well.”
17 Saul said to his servants, “Provide me now a man who can play well, and bring him to me.”
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- June 9, 2025 Three Uses of Worship Brian Hunter walks through Psalm 150 and three reasons to worship God through song: as a weapon in combat, a tool for recalibration, and a response to celebration.
- June 8, 2025 Worship in the Key of C A Wyoming pastor explores worship as more than singing, walking through Scripture to show how praise can be used for combat, calibration, and celebration.