What does Tribe teach about hanging your hat?

At Tribe, the teaching on hanging your hat starts with a simple image: a hat rack with many hooks. Your hat is the sum of what you actually believe, and wherever you hang it is what you are trusting. Brian built this image out over several weeks, and Jay carried it forward through Numbers 14, where the Israelites had already seen God work miracle after miracle and still could not bring themselves to trust him when the moment got hard. The point was not that the Israelites were uniquely faithless. The point was that their response was shaped entirely by what they were looking at in the moment, and that the same thing happens to people every day.

Jay named three hooks most people use: circumstances, other people, and God. Circumstances are the most passive option, he said. You just go along with the mood of the room, the way fear spread through the Israelite camp until the whole community was weeping and talking about going back to Egypt. Trusting other people is better because it takes some agency, but every person will eventually let you down. He told the story of being a short thirteen-year-old in middle school PE, where bigger kids would take his hat and play keep-away with it, and how he never once thought to ask God what to do. He was so busy chasing the hat down that he forgot he did not have to play their game at all. Jay put it plainly: "The enemy gets to us by taking our hat. That's how they steal our heart away."

Brian made the same point from a different angle when he drew the distinction between the hook of Jesus himself and the hooks that sit nearby and are easy to confuse with it: a gifted personality, a popular theology, a denomination. Those hooks break. The hook of Jesus holds. Jay put it in the most practical terms he could: "It was never about the hat. Get your hat wherever it is. Pick it up out of the dirt, stretched out, whatever it is." And on the question of whether any of us have our beliefs sorted out perfectly enough to qualify, Jay was direct: "If the criteria for us to be saved is having all of our hats on the perfect hooks, I don't think any of us are gonna make it." The teaching at Tribe on this is not about getting everything right. It is about which hook you are actually willing to trust.

Taught from Numbers 14:1-12 · Colossians 3:2 · Psalm 119:1-8 · Proverbs 3:5-6 · Matthew 7:24-25