What does Tribe teach about giving up?
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 giving up starts with a hard look at what Paul actually says in 1 Corinthians 9 and 10. Brian points out that most people stop reading after the familiar verses about disciplining the body, but Paul keeps going, and what he says next carries the real weight. He walks through Israel in the wilderness and counts five times that Paul says 'all of them': all of them were guided, all of them walked through the sea, all of them ate the same food and drank from the same rock. Then the count changes. Most of them did not make it through. Brian's argument is that equal access to God is not the same as crossing the finish line, and as he puts it, "Just because you got the bib number doesn't guarantee that you'll ever cross the finish line."
The teaching draws a careful line between the love of God, which nothing can take away, and a person's own endurance in staying committed to him. Brian pushes back on the idea that a prayer said at some point in the past settles everything permanently, no matter how a person lives afterward. A congregation member brought in 2 Peter 2:21, which Brian repeated aloud: it would have been better never to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it and turned away. The things that knock people off course, he named plainly: exhaustion, distraction, discouragement, and the lie that you have messed up too badly to continue.
Hebrews 12 is where the teaching lands its closing weight, with its call to strip off every weight and run with endurance the race God has set before us. The comfort of the Lord, Brian says, does not look like God shortening the course or moving the finish line closer. It looks like him supernaturally infusing tired people with enough strength to run one more mile. And Brian says that strength becomes available the moment someone stops running on their own and asks for it. The Proverbs reminder underneath all of it is that the righteous person falls seven times and gets back up.
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.
- August 11, 2024 Training The Faith A sermon from a Jackson Hole church on what it truly means to run the Christian life with endurance, drawing from 1 Corinthians 9-10 and Hebrews 12.