What does Tribe teach about lazarus?

At Tribe, the teaching on Lazarus starts with one moment at the end of John 11: Jesus telling the crowd to unwrap Lazarus and let him go. Brian used that detail as the foundation for everything else. Grave clothes were put on Lazarus after he died, not before, because they would have been completely out of place on a living person. Brian says, "Only dead people belong in grave clothes." The question he kept pressing was why someone who has already been called to life would still be wearing them.

The answer Brian kept returning to is that resurrection happens in the heart and spirit first, and the mind follows more slowly. When a person invites Jesus in, they become a new creation as Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 5:17, but the mind, with all its old neural pathways and patterns, has to be renewed over time, as Romans 12:2 says. That gap between the new heart and the still-being-renewed mind is exactly where the trouble comes in. Brian says, "This world constantly tries to put those old grave clothes back on us." The shame, the sense of being a failure or damaged goods, the drift back into old ruts, he named all of those as grave clothes, and said they only make sense on a dead person.

The practical answer he pointed to was in Romans 6, where Paul tells believers to consider themselves dead to sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus. Brian kept coming back to that word, consider, as a deliberate act of speaking the truth over yourself rather than agreeing with what the enemy says. He also noted that Lazarus could not unwrap himself; the people standing there had to do it. That picture of the community helping someone walk free, along with the practice of looking at yourself from the posture of being raised with Christ, was where the teaching landed.

Taught from John 11:11-44 · 2 Corinthians 5:17 · Romans 6:6-11 · Romans 12:2 · Revelation 19:8