What does Tribe teach about martyrs?
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 martyrs grows out of Brian's close reading of Acts 1:8. Brian pointed out that the Greek word translated 'witness' is 'martys,' the root of the English word martyr, and he stopped there for a while. A witness, he explained, is not someone passing along second-hand information. A witness has a first-hand account, something they saw with their own eyes and cannot honestly deny. That is what the baptism of the Holy Spirit produces in a believer's life: not borrowed knowledge about Jesus, but a personal, undeniable encounter with him.
To press that point home, Brian read from a series of historical figures who were executed for refusing to recant their faith. Polycarp, believed to have been a disciple of John, said he had served Jesus for 86 years and Jesus had done him no wrong. John Huss, before being burned at the stake, said what Brian quoted directly: "What I taught with my lips, I now seal with my blood." A young woman named Perpetua said before being thrown to the lions that she could not be called anything other than what she was, a Christian. Hugh Latimer, as the flames were lit beneath him, said they would that day light such a candle in England as would never be put out. Brian was careful to say that none of these people were simply committed to a set of beliefs. They were witnesses in the original sense, people who had seen something they could not honestly deny, even under the threat of death.
The thread connecting the martyrs to the rest of the teaching is the Holy Spirit. Brian's point was that the Spirit does not manufacture courage as a personality trait. As Brian puts it, "The spirit doesn't make you bold. He just makes Jesus undeniable in your life." The willingness to seal a testimony with one's life, in Brian's telling, flows from that kind of first-hand knowing, not from sheer willpower or religious duty.
Taught from Acts 1:8 · Acts 1:1-11 · John 14:26 · 1 Corinthians 2:10-14 · Ephesians 1:17-18
“The spirit doesn't make you bold. He just makes Jesus undeniable in your life.”
From Faithful Under Pressure
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 2:10-14
10 But to us, God revealed them through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.
11 For who among men knows the things of a man, except the spirit of the man, which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God, except God’s Spirit.
12 But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might know the things that were freely given to us by God.
13 Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- April 20, 2026 Faithful Under Pressure Brian Hunter walks through Acts 1:8 to show how the Holy Spirit transforms ordinary believers into witnesses whose encounter with Jesus cannot be silenced, even under pressure.
- April 19, 2026 Faith Under Pressure Brian Hunter walks through Acts 1:8 to show how the Holy Spirit empowers ordinary people to be faithful witnesses to a risen Jesus, no matter the pressure they face.