What does Tribe teach about lukewarm faith?
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 lukewarm faith starts with the image Jesus gives in Revelation 3, speaking to the church in Laodicea. Brian Hunter has returned to that passage more than once because Jesus is not gentle there. He tells the church plainly that their neither-hot-nor-cold condition is worse than outright coldness, and he names the cost: they think they are fine, but they are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. What keeps that diagnosis from being simply crushing is that Jesus does not stop there. He immediately offers a remedy, something the church could never afford on its own. Brian has described that gap between honest diagnosis and costly cure as the heart of what the letters in Revelation 1 through 3 are actually about.
The teaching connects lukewarm faith to the materials a person builds with. Drawing from 1 Corinthians 3, Brian describes every life as a construction project. Gold, silver, and jewels on one side; wood, hay, and straw on the other. The difference is not visible while the building is going up. It only becomes clear when fire passes through. He told a story about Cowboy Greg welding a broken part back together on a winter cattle-feeding morning, and an old ranch foreman taking the finished piece and slamming it on the ground ten times. That was not cruelty. It was the only honest test of whether the weld held. Brian said our lives get tested the same way, and the fire is no respecter of good intentions. A lukewarm faith, built with cheap materials, does not hold.
Brian has also pressed the urgency forward in time, not just toward a final judgment. He has shared that the leadership team has carried a sense for over a year that following Jesus will become more simple to discern but more costly to actually do. The point of addressing lukewarm faith now, he said, is to build a history of obedience at the basement-bargain price level, before the cost rises. The invitation he keeps returning to is not just future accountability but a present one: asking Jesus, whose eyes in Revelation burn like fire, to examine the life being built right now.
Taught from Revelation 3:15-18 · 1 Corinthians 3:1-15 · Isaiah 43:1-4 · Revelation 1:12-20 · Matthew 25
“It is in the fire of tribulation that there is an opportunity to encounter Jesus.”
From Tested by Fire
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 3:1-15
1 Brothers, I couldn’t speak to you as to spiritual, but as to fleshly, as to babies in Christ.
2 I fed you with milk, not with meat; for you weren’t yet ready. Indeed, not even now are you ready,
3 for you are still fleshly. For insofar as there is jealousy, strife, and factions among you, aren’t you fleshly, and don’t you walk in the ways of men?
4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” aren’t you fleshly?
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- January 13, 2025 Tested by Fire A sermon on walking through fire without being consumed, drawing on Isaiah 43, 1 Corinthians 3, and the California wildfires to ask what we are building our lives with.
- January 12, 2025 The Fourth Man in the Fire A Wyoming pastor and congregation explore what it means to walk through fire, drawing on Isaiah 43 and 1 Corinthians 3 to ask what we are truly building our lives out of.
- April 17, 2023 TTCA WEEK 7 Wrap Up Brian Hunter walks through Jesus' letters to seven churches in Revelation, asking what it looks like when a congregation finally turns and faces the right direction.