What does Tribe teach about spiritual discipline?
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 spiritual discipline starts with the conviction that God's word is not optional background noise for the Christian life. In a message on Proverbs 4:20-22, Brian worked through the Hebrew behind familiar words to show that God intends his word to be received with full-body, focused attention, spread out completely in the heart rather than left folded up. The word the translators render as 'penetrate' carries the image of a watchtower standing at the corner of a field on high ground, guarding what comes in and what goes out. Brian drew on a detail shared by someone in the room who had seen women on watchtowers in Somalia, snapping whips to drive birds from the crops, and said that image captures what happens when God's word is planted deep: it can crack like a whip to keep the enemy out. The agricultural language of 'bring life' points to something green and thriving, a harvest that touches every single aspect of a person's life.
The flip side of that teaching is what happens when discipline breaks down and sin is left unchallenged. In a message called 'Devoted to Destruction,' Justin Waters drew a line from Moses' command in Deuteronomy 7 to the repeated compromises of the judges, and then straight into the practical fight against sin in a believer's life. The Israelites put the Canaanites to forced labor instead of driving them out, and the consequences were exactly what God had warned. Justin named that pattern honestly in his own story, admitting he had believed the lie that whatever his flesh wanted, it deserved, and that he had been showing up and serving faithfully while living a double life. He put it plainly: 'It's cost me way more to coddle and pamper my flesh than it has to crucify it.'
Taken together, what Tribe teaches is that spiritual discipline is both a feeding and a fighting. You feed by getting God's word deep enough into your heart that it stands guard there, and you fight by refusing to make peace with the things inside you that pull you away from him. As Justin put it, 'We wanna accept God's grace for the ways that we fall short from him, but we don't wanna protect those things inside of us that we harbor.'
Taught from Proverbs 4:20-22 · Proverbs 4:23 · Romans 8:12-13 · Galatians 5:16-17 · Deuteronomy 7:1-5
The passage taught · 2 Peter 1:3
3 seeing that his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and virtue;
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- May 25, 2025 Rooted In The Word A Wyoming pastor and congregation dig into Proverbs 4:20-22, exploring what it means to guard your heart by burying Scripture deep enough to change your life.
- April 15, 2024 Devoted to Destruction A guest speaker leads Tribe church through Deuteronomy, Galatians and Romans, calling believers to stop coddling sin and ruthlessly cut out whatever pulls them from God.
Mentioned along the way
- March 13, 2023 Turn The Cat Around- Week 4 A Wyoming pastor uses the Old Testament story of Naaman to explore what it means to have a teachable spirit and when to let correction slide right off.