What does Tribe teach about who am i?
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 identity starts with a single claim Brian Hunter keeps returning to: only the creator has the authority to define his creation. Drawing from Isaiah 29:16, Brian puts it plainly that the clay does not get to tell the potter what it is. The same logic runs in every direction. The names the world writes over a person, not good enough, broken, damaged goods, too much, stuck, carry no real authority, because the one who made you is the only one whose label holds. Brian uses the Toy Story image of Andy's name written on the sole of every toy that belongs to him: God does not write his name on the boot of your heart until you surrender yourself into his hands, and when you do, the name written there is Yahweh, his proper name, not a generic title.
The Gideon story from Judges 6 presses this further. Gideon is hiding in a winepress, certain he is the smallest person from the weakest clan, and the angel of the Lord greets him as a mighty man of valor before he has done a single thing to earn it. Brian's point is not that Gideon's self-assessment was entirely wrong, but that God was operating from a higher level of truth, the way the law of aerodynamics overrides gravity without canceling it. Your current circumstances and your honest self-knowledge are not the last word. God's word about you is.
Brian is also direct about what is at stake when a person rejects that authority. If God made us, his creation is responsible to him, and pride does not want that accountability. The reflex is to become your own definition, to write your own name on the bottom of the shoe rather than acknowledge whose name is already there. Rooted in 1 John 3:1, the congregation is called to stop and really look at what the Father is claiming: that he has lavished love on us and called us his children, and that is what we actually are. That identity is already settled, even while what we will fully become is not yet revealed.
Taught from Judges 6:11-16 · 1 John 3:1 · Isaiah 29:16 · Ephesians 1:4-5 · 2 Corinthians 5:17
“Only the creator has the authority to define his creation.”
From Identity
The passage taught · 1 John 3:1
1 See how great a love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God! For this cause the world doesn’t know us, because it didn’t know him.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- May 18, 2026 Identity Brian Hunter walks through Judges 6 to show how God named Gideon a mighty warrior before he had done anything, and what that means for how we see ourselves.
- May 17, 2026 Mighty Man of Valor Brian Hunter walks through Judges 6 to show how God named Gideon a mighty warrior before he had done anything, and what that means for how we see ourselves.
- July 27, 2025 His Name Your Boot: Week 2 A Jackson Hole pastor leads his congregation through Ephesians 1 to explore what it means to be sealed by the Holy Spirit and to live as God's own.
- July 21, 2025 What Great Love Brian Hunter asks a simple question: if someone looked at the sole of your heart's boot, whose name would they find written there?
- July 20, 2025 His Name on Your Boot A Jackson Hole pastor walks through 1 John 3:1-3 and asks one question: whose name is written on the sole of your heart's boot?