What does Tribe teach about feeling forsaken?
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 feeling forsaken starts with a tension that Pastor Brian held up from Isaiah 62, specifically verses three and four in the NLT. The same verse describes Jerusalem as both forsaken and desolate and, at the same time, as the Lord's delight and his bride. Brian was careful to say those are not two stages where one replaces the other. They are genuinely parallel realities existing at the same moment, and the question he put to the room was a practical one: which reality will you choose to live inside?
To press that further, Brian moved to Zechariah 3, where the high priest Jeshua stands before the angel of the Lord wearing filthy clothes while an accuser brings charges against him. The filthy clothes are not a misrepresentation, Brian said. They are an accurate picture of Jeshua's condition. He noted that people tend to manage that kind of awareness by comparing themselves to someone in a worse state, and he used a story from his family's time in Mongolia to make the point: after fifty-four days without a shower, walking into a clean hotel in Ulaanbaatar made the contrast undeniable. The standard of comparison is everything. Placed next to genuine cleanliness, we see our own condition clearly, and placed next to God's declaration over us, the accuser's case loses its hold.
The thread running through the whole message is that God's delight in his people is not earned by their performance and cannot be cancelled by their failure. Brian put it plainly: "My sin doesn't change my righteous nature anymore than my goodness changed my sin nature." The identity God has spoken over his people stands regardless of what the filthy clothes look like in a given season, and the invitation is to open your mouth toward him from inside that declared reality rather than waiting until you feel clean enough to do so.
Taught from Isaiah 62 · Zechariah 3:1-6 · Isaiah 50:8-9 · Romans 8:33-34 · Psalm 150
“My sin doesn't change my righteous nature anymore than my goodness changed my sin nature.”
From Choose Your Own Reality
The passage taught · Deuteronomy 9:4-6
4 Don’t say in your heart, after Yahweh your God has thrust them out from before you, saying, “For my righteousness Yahweh has brought me in to possess this land”; because Yahweh drives them out before you because of the wickedness of these nations.
5 Not for your righteousness, or for the uprightness of your heart, do you go in to possess their land; but for the wickedness of these nations Yahweh your God does drive them out from before you, and that he may establish the word which Yahweh swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
6 Know therefore, that Yahweh your God doesn’t give you this good land to possess for your righteousness; for you are a stiff-necked people.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- November 6, 2023 Choose Your Own Reality Brian Hunter walks Tribe through Isaiah 62, showing two parallel realities we live in: God's delight in us versus the enemy's accusations, and how we choose between them.