What does Tribe teach about shame and guilt?
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 shame and guilt starts with a single image from John 11: Lazarus walking out of the tomb still wrapped in grave clothes. Brian used that moment to ask a pointed question. If Jesus has already called you to life, why are you still wearing what belongs on a dead person? As Brian puts it, "Only dead people belong in grave clothes." The whole sermon turned on that hinge. Shame, condemnation, the feeling of being a failure or damaged goods, the voice that says you have gone too far this time or that God will not love you anymore. Brian called all of that grave clothes. They only make sense on someone who is dead, and everyone who has invited Jesus in is not dead anymore.
Brian was careful not to make this feel like a simple switch that gets flipped. He drew from 2 Corinthians 5:17 to say that the new creation happens in the spirit and the heart, but he was honest that the mind does not automatically follow. Romans 12:2 says the mind has to be renewed, and Brian treated that as ongoing work, not a one-time event. Old neural pathways and old patterns do not get instantly rewritten at salvation. That is exactly why guilt and shame can keep pulling at someone who is genuinely new in Christ, and why the fight is real.
The answer Brian kept coming back to was in Romans 6, where Paul calls believers to consider themselves dead to sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus. That word, consider, was the practical foothold he pointed to: the deliberate act of speaking truth over yourself, refusing to agree with what shame is saying, and taking those thoughts captive. He also noted that "Jesus stood outside of the tomb of your heart and called you to life," and that the same Jesus who told the crowd to unwrap Lazarus is still at work loosening what the world and the enemy try to put back on people who are already alive. Brian reminded the room that "this world constantly tries to put those old grave clothes back on us," and that recognizing that pressure for what it is, a lie dressed up in familiar clothes, is where the freedom in Romans 6 actually becomes livable.
Taught from John 11:11-44 · Romans 6:6-11 · 2 Corinthians 5:17 · Romans 12:2 · Romans 6:14
“Only dead people belong in grave clothes.”
From Unwrapped: Finding Freedom Outside the Tomb
The passage taught · 2 Corinthians 5:17
17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- April 29, 2024 Unwrapped: Finding Freedom Outside the Tomb A Wyoming pastor walks through John 11, asking why alive people keep wearing grave clothes, and inviting the congregation to step out of old patterns and shame.
- April 28, 2024 Unwrapped: Finding Freedom Outside of the Tomb A pastor and congregation in Jackson Hole explore John 11 and ask why so many Christians who have been made new still walk around wrapped in the grave clothes of guilt and shame.