What does Tribe teach about suffering?
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 suffering starts with a distinction Brian makes carefully: the suffering he is talking about is not punishment, not the natural consequence of bad choices, and not something God inflicts to satisfy his ego. It is what he calls the cup of suffering, the cup of discipline, of trusting God without knowing the next five steps, of being pressed the way grapes are pressed so that what is already inside you can come out. Brian points out that the word behind suffering carries that image of pressure producing something, and that the garden of Gethsemane itself means pressing and crushing. Jesus walked into the garden of crushing, prayed through real anguish, and chose the cup anyway. That humanity matters, Brian says, because a God untouched by what we face is not a God we can relate to.
The teaching puts a second cup alongside the first. At the cross, Jesus was offered wine mixed with myrrh, a narcotic that would have dulled the pain and helped him check out, and he refused it. Brian draws on Roman historical sources to describe how that same solution, wine mixed with myrrh, was used in the sanitation buckets at city latrines just outside the gates where Golgotha stood. The cup of escape looks like relief and feels like something you deserve, but Brian says, "That cup of escape is really poo poo water." The enemy, he says, will always make that cup feel reasonable and temporary, but people in the room already know from their own experience what it feels like to drink from it and end up sick.
What Brian draws from all of this is that spiritual maturity is not measured in years of church attendance or how worn a Bible is, but in how much a person has actually drunk from the cup of suffering. He quotes Charles Spurgeon's point that adversity is our true friend and that a high character is rarely produced by continued prosperity, and he ties this to James, where the testing of faith produces perseverance and perseverance produces maturity. The change has to move past the mind. Brian describes it as an eighteen-inch drop from the thinker to the knower, and says that as long as the idea stays only in the mind, nothing is actually transformed.
Taught from Matthew 26:36-39 · Mark 15:21-24 · James 1:2-4 · 1 Peter 5:10 · Matthew 27:32-35
“That cup of escape is really poo poo water.”
From Choosing Endurance Over Escape
The passage taught · 1 Peter 5:10
10 But may the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- September 30, 2024 Choosing Endurance Over Escape Brian Hunter looks at two cups in the crucifixion story and asks which one we keep reaching for when life gets hard, and why it matters.
- September 29, 2024 Drinking Deep: The Cup of Endurance Brian Hunter walks through two cups Jesus faced at the cross and asks which one we keep reaching for when life gets hard.
- September 23, 2024 Drinking Deep: Choosing Endurance Over Escape A Wyoming pastor walks through Matthew 26 and Mark 15 to explore why choosing the cup of suffering over escape is the path to spiritual maturity.
- September 22, 2024 Drinking Deep: Choosing Endurance over Escape A Wyoming pastor explores what it means to choose suffering over escape, drawing from Jesus in Gethsemane to show how endurance shapes spiritual maturity.