Tribe JH Podcast

Coleson, who leads Tribe’s young adult group, filled the pulpit while Pastor Brian was traveling in Israel. He took a familiar passage, Jesus’ letter to the church at Laodicea in Revelation 3, and worked through the historical and geographical background that often gets skipped when this text is preached. What he landed on shifted the focus away from emotional passion and toward spiritual effectiveness.

On a Sunday evening when pastor Brian was traveling, Amanda Lack brought the message. She took Ecclesiastes 3 as her anchor and walked through what it means to hold onto hope when life moves through seasons you did not choose and cannot control.

The message this evening drew a line between two passages most people would never think to connect, asking what it looks like to grasp for what we want versus receiving what God gives. The conversation moved from the garden of Eden to an ancient Jewish feast to the words of Jesus, and landed as an encouragement to anyone who has quietly chosen faithfulness over grasping. The title the preacher gave it was “The Gift or the Grasp.”

Pastor Brian opened 1 John 1:1 and let one word pull the whole evening forward: the Greek word behind “touched,” which carries the meaning of rubbing a worry stone smooth and of plucking or bowing a string. From that single word, he built a case that we were made to be in physical, tangible, resonant contact with Jesus, not to admire him from behind a museum rope.

Pastor Brian picked up where he left off the previous week, following one question he had left open: what would it take for national Israel to finally say, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord”? He worked through Jeremiah 30 and John 12 to show that the answer is both a future historical event and a present personal one.

Pastor Brian opened Matthew 23:37-39 with a group of IDF reservists in the room for the second Sunday in a row, and used Jesus’s lament over Jerusalem to work toward a personal question: where have you been treating Jesus as a secondary option rather than the cornerstone of your life?

Brian preached from Isaiah 53 on what he called the Lord’s good plan, the idea that God’s purposes can look completely different from the outside than what God is actually doing. The sermon worked through the chapter verse by verse, with members of the congregation and guests taking turns reading aloud. Brian’s central question was whether there is an area of your life right now where you are a reluctant participant in something God is trying to do.