What does Tribe teach about wilderness?
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 wilderness starts with a reframe. When Amanda Lack brought the message on Matthew 4, she opened by asking the room whether the wilderness is good or bad, and the mixed answers were the point. The world tends to read wilderness as a place of neglect or abandonment. The biblical picture, she said, is something different: an uncomfortable place of testing, but also a place where God shows up. The ground rule she set before anything else was this: "Being uncomfortable is not the same thing as being abandoned."
Amanda traced the wilderness through scripture, from the Israelites' forty years of wandering to Elijah fleeing Jezebel to Moses spending forty years as a shepherd before the Exodus, and argued that the sheer frequency of wilderness in scripture tells us it is something people genuinely need to know how to handle. She drew close attention to the sequence surrounding Matthew 4, where Jesus was baptized, led directly into the wilderness, and then immediately launched his ministry. That order, she said, is not coincidental. The wilderness was not an interruption between his baptism and his work but a deliberate part of what connected them. As she put it, "Wilderness is not a place of punishment, but a place of preparation."
Pastor Brian's teaching on Sukkot pressed into the same ground from a different angle. Looking at the Israelites' time in the desert, he said that God got Israel out of Egypt, but the wilderness had a longer purpose: "God got Israel out of Egypt, but the time in the wilderness was intended for Israel to get Egypt out of their hearts." God used the wilderness to remove distractions, to reveal what was already in their hearts, and then to receive them as his own anyway. Sukkot, Brian taught, replays that pattern every year on purpose, inviting people to voluntarily step out of comfort so the heart can be recalibrated toward what actually matters.
Taught from Matthew 4:1-11 · Deuteronomy 8:2-5 · 1 Kings 19 · Leviticus 23:42-43 · Psalm 34:18
“Being uncomfortable is not the same thing as being abandoned.”
From Uncomfortable Is Not the Same as Abandoned
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 10:13
13 No temptation has taken you except what is common to man. God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able, but will with the temptation also make the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- August 19, 2024 Uncomfortable Is Not the Same as Abandoned Amanda Lack opens Matthew 4 with Tribe church in Jackson Hole, walking through Jesus in the wilderness and what his example means for the hard seasons we all face.
- August 18, 2024 Jesus In The Wilderness Amanda Lack walks through Jesus in the wilderness, looking at his three temptations and what they teach us about identity, trust, and how to endure hard seasons.
- September 26, 2022 Sukkot Series Week 2： Remember His Goodness Brian Hunter explores the Feast of Sukkot, showing how a week in temporary shelters strips away comfort, recalibrates the heart, and draws us back to God's faithfulness.