What does Tribe teach about religious rules?
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 religious rules starts with a pointed observation: the Pharisees and the disciples had the same Torah, stood in the same grain field, walked into the same synagogue, and watched the same healings. Five identical points of contact with Jesus, and yet one group left satisfied and the other left plotting to kill him. Brian has pressed the room on what that gap reveals. The difference was not what they knew. It was posture. The Pharisees had constructed an entire life around the law, and Jesus's words and actions confronted that construction directly. Their rules had become the only framework they had, and they were operating out of fear to protect it.
What Brian keeps returning to is that religious rule-keeping, on its own, can put a person in a more dangerous place than outright ignorance, because it creates the feeling of proximity to God without the surrender that actually closes the distance. The Pharisees could see everything Jesus was doing and had never tasted any of it. That is the core of the problem. Brian says, "You are fooling yourself if you think that you can have a neutral reaction to Jesus." Treating Jesus as a teacher worth respecting while holding the rest of yourself back is not a third option between belief and rejection. Functionally, Brian argues, it runs on the same road the Pharisees were traveling.
The teaching frames the alternative not as keeping better rules but as a different kind of trust altogether. The disciples had given up their lives to follow Jesus, and that trust, not superior law-keeping, was what set them apart. Brian read from Matthew 21:44, where Jesus says the stone will either break you or crush you, and asked the room to find a third option in that verse. The only available choice, he said, is which direction you fall. Falling on the rock and being broken on your own terms is what surrender looks like. That is what being with Jesus produces that a religious framework on its own never can.
Taught from Matthew 12:1-14 · 2 Corinthians 2:14-16 · Matthew 21:44 · 2 Corinthians 2:14-15 · Proverbs 14:12
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 2:14-15
14 Now thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and reveals through us the sweet aroma of his knowledge in every place.
15 For we are a sweet aroma of Christ to God, in those who are saved, and in those who perish;
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- February 2, 2025 Two men enter, one man leaves. A Jackson Hole congregation wrestles with why the Pharisees wanted Jesus dead, what it means to taste vs. only see God's goodness, and how grace fuels daily surrender.
- January 27, 2025 Smell Something Brian Hunter preaches on Matthew 12, asking why two groups witnessed the same Jesus and walked away so differently, and why there is no neutral response to him.