What does Tribe teach about grave clothes?
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 grave clothes starts with a single moment in John 11: Lazarus walks out of the tomb still wrapped in burial cloths, and Jesus has to tell the crowd to unwrap him and let him go. Brian used that image as the foundation for everything. Grave clothes were put on Lazarus after he died, not before, because they would have been completely out of place on a living person. That observation is where the whole conversation turned. Brian says, "Only dead people belong in grave clothes." Anyone who has invited Jesus into their heart has already been called out of the tomb, and what the grave clothes represent, the shame, the condemnation, the sense of being damaged goods or a failure, belongs to a version of that person who no longer exists.
The teaching is careful about one thing that often gets overlooked. When a person comes to Christ, the change is real and immediate in the spirit and heart, but the mind is a different story. Brian pointed to Romans 12:2 and said the mind has to be renewed, that old neural pathways and patterns do not get instantly rewritten at salvation. That is ongoing work. At the same time, Paul's instruction in Romans 6 is to consider and reckon yourself dead to sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus. The word Brian kept coming back to was consider, the deliberate act of speaking truth over yourself rather than agreeing with what the enemy says about you.
The other side of the teaching is the pressure that does not stop after salvation. Brian says, "This world constantly tries to put those old grave clothes back on us." The voices that say you have gone too far this time, that God will not love you, that you are beyond repair, those are grave clothes being handed back to someone who is already alive in Christ. The answer the teaching points to is not trying harder but recognizing what is true: Jesus stood outside the tomb, called you to life, and the old things are gone.
Taught from John 11:11-44 · Romans 6:6-11 · 2 Corinthians 5:17 · Romans 12:2 · Revelation 19:8
“Only dead people belong in grave clothes.”
From Unwrapped: Finding Freedom Outside the Tomb
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 5:17
17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- April 29, 2024 Unwrapped: Finding Freedom Outside the Tomb A Wyoming pastor walks through John 11, asking why alive people keep wearing grave clothes, and inviting the congregation to step out of old patterns and shame.
- April 28, 2024 Unwrapped: Finding Freedom Outside of the Tomb A pastor and congregation in Jackson Hole explore John 11 and ask why so many Christians who have been made new still walk around wrapped in the grave clothes of guilt and shame.