Lecrae is an American Christian rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor. He was raised in a challenging environment during his youth, and faced various personal struggles at the age of 19. After attending a Bible study, he embraced Christ, the decision that transformed his life and career. In 2004, he founded Reach Records, an independent record label, and released his debut album, Real Talk, and has since released several acclaimed albums. He s the president and co-founder of Reach Life Ministries, a non-profit organization aimed at equipping Christian leaders with culturally relevant tools and resources.
00:00:35.000Lecrae is an American, Christian, rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor.
00:00:41.000He was raised in Houston, Texas by his single mom in a challenging environment during his youth.
00:00:49.000Lecrae was influenced by hip-hop culture and faced various personal struggles at the age of 19 after attending a Bible study.
00:00:55.000He embraced Christ, the decision that transformed his life and career.
00:00:59.000In 2004, he founded Reach Records, an independent record label, and released his debut album, Real Talk, and has since released several acclaimed albums.
00:01:06.000He's won a bunch of awards, Dove Awards, Grammy Awards.
00:01:09.000He's the president and co-founder of Reach Life Ministries, a non-profit organization aimed at equipping Christian leaders with culturally relevant tools and resources.
00:01:16.000In addition to that, he's a New York Times best-selling author, entrepreneur, social activist.
00:01:21.000He is Lecrae, and I'm honored to be joined by Lecrae today.
00:01:26.000Lecrae, all right, mate, thanks for joining us.
00:01:52.000Man, I've been reading some things lately that have really challenged me.
00:01:56.000I'm reading, like, I'm going to talk to you about that in a minute.
00:02:12.000I'm reading a little bit at the moment of Thomas Merton, the Catholic mystic, and what I'm getting from him is how absolute our position as Christians must be.
00:02:23.000And then just yesterday, I was reading the British writer Chesterton, On St. Francis of Assisi.
00:02:35.000Following Christ and surrendering to him is so close to a...
00:02:41.000It's such a transformative experience, and it's so outside of the material world, or at least outside of the cultural restraints that I would have organised my life around previously.
00:02:52.000And I speak as a person that's had a bunch of addiction issues, the obvious ones, drugs, slightly less obvious, sex, less obvious still but significant, fame, money.
00:03:03.000Everything has been sort of, you know, I've been very devout and very dedicated before I was Christian, and I'm dedicated and devout now.
00:03:11.000So you must be a lot more experienced than I am dealing with things that I'm just now questioning.
00:03:19.000For example, to start us off, you started by expressing gratitude.
00:03:25.000And I see the significance of gratitude in ensuring that I don't give personal credit to myself for, inverted commas, my own achievements.
00:03:34.000I wonder how you continue to navigate the space and power that you have without falling to or for either flesh or worldliness or even...
00:03:49.000The kind of stuff that goes on in my head, which I'll probably call the devil these days.
00:03:53.000I wonder how you continue to navigate them challenges.
00:03:58.000Yeah, I mean, the funny part about it is I think there's this misnomer or this idea that once you become a Christian, all of a sudden you now are invincible to these challenges that you used to wrestle with in the past.
00:04:18.000And for me, Very similar to you, very licentious background, very dark, promiscuous drugs, so on and so forth.
00:04:29.000Those are the things that you're trying to run so far away from.
00:04:37.000I think in the process of changing my mental maps, right, when I became a Christian, I feel like the first phase was awakening.
00:04:44.000You're like, oh, wow, I did not know there was a God.
00:04:47.000I did not know Jesus died for my sins.
00:04:49.000Then after awakening becomes growth where you're trying to develop, you're changing your mental maps, you're digesting as many books as you can, as many sermons as you can, podcasts as you can.
00:04:58.000And then the third wave is productivity where you're trying to get involved and what can I do to serve?
00:05:06.000During that process, it's a lot simpler to abstain from a lot of the fleshly kind of things because you're in this process of growth and development.
00:05:19.000It's really after that stage three where it hit me the most.
00:05:24.000Stage three is where many Christians cap out.
00:05:29.000They haven't dealt with any severe crisis in their journey with Christ to be able to have to pull on any Different types of resources.
00:05:38.000And so that's really where the struggle had come for me is in that after I was productive and I was learning, now I'm in this process and this place of how do I navigate hardships?
00:05:51.000And then it becomes a lot easier to lean on the old modes of reliance, which is the flesh, which is pride.
00:05:58.000And so long answer to your question is what I've seen to be the best thing is To work through a constant pursuit of humility.
00:06:10.000It's not like something that you just wake up and, oh, I'm humble today.
00:06:14.000Every day I wake up, arrogance and pride are at my throat.
00:06:18.000And so it's been a constant battle to be in front of the Father and to be in front of Jesus to say, okay, I need to kill my flesh and fight.
00:06:29.000Old molds of reliance is the kind of...
00:06:33.000Spontaneous sentence that reminds me what you do for a living and demonstrates your gift in real time.
00:06:42.000And I love what you said about crisis.
00:06:46.000I come to faith late, I guess late in life.
00:06:49.000I don't know how long I'm going to live for.
00:07:04.000I've come to him in crisis like a kind of a rift, a separating, a breaking down.
00:07:12.000And I've been through so many of those things.
00:07:13.000I'm sort of surprised that I'm not wiser because I've been shown so many times, don't worship flesh, don't worship your ego, don't set yourself up as the sort of false god at the middle of your universe and then subtly make sacrifices to that false god the whole time.
00:07:30.000I've been shown it so many times, I'm a slow learner.
00:07:37.000One is I know that you've had challenges in your early life.
00:07:41.000Some people are commenting, constant pursuit of humility, Ashela in the chat saying that's a beautiful phrase as well.
00:07:48.000I can imagine that you've dealt with crisis in your early life, just from what I know about you, but what about since coming to economic, cultural prominence and success, what does crisis look like in those conditions, if I may ask?
00:08:37.000In unfortunate circumstances, she gives birth to me out of, you know, a young pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy, and now we're struggling.
00:08:48.000And so there's this sense that I need to have financial security in order to avoid these cycles that I've existed in in the past.
00:09:03.000Money became a source of security, a sense of like, oh, this is going to make sure that I'm safe and I'm good.
00:09:12.000I don't think I had the temptations that I think a lot of celebrities or people who come into wealth have in terms of, I want to flaunt it and I want to be flamboyant and buy lavish things so that you can see that I matter.
00:09:30.000I was more like the person in the scriptures who stored up all this grain in case, you know, to make myself feel like now I'm safe.
00:09:41.000And I think what God has had to do is strip that off of me and to allow me to remember that the money is not my sense of security.
00:09:48.000God is my security and he uses money as a tool in order to do things.
00:09:53.000But at the end of the day, I've got to be relying on my daily bread.
00:09:56.000It was never a sense of like, let me buy the flashy cars, let me do all these things.
00:10:00.000It was more so, I'm safe now because I have money, which would make me make bad decisions because of the false pretense that I was safe.
00:10:13.000It's pretty subtle and insidious that something that by rational and cultural Criteria would be regarded as sensible and appropriate as a Christian is a kind of false idolatry.
00:10:29.000I identify that by making that security a type of God, it's a transgression against Christ and the perfect peace that he grants through his salvation ain't dependent on what we achieve.
00:10:44.000And that, just for me, seems like a hard...
00:10:47.000Like, alright, I'll just take enough manna for today.
00:10:50.000I know that more manna's coming tomorrow.
00:10:54.000I'll be very tempted to load the tabernacle up with a lot of manna, see if I could sell manna on the side, get a little cut, cut that manna with non-manna.
00:11:04.000Yeah, give my friends, I get the manna first, then give my friends, bro, this manna don't taste right.
00:11:24.000Before we go into it, your last answer inspired a lot of questions in me, Lecrae.
00:11:29.000Before we get into looking at, because this is something I'm really fascinated in, because when you tell your family story like that, it seems like me as an English person, impossible to divorce the situation and circumstances.
00:11:44.000You described from things, obviously, like everyone knows, about the culture and nature and history of the United States, and then the kind of argument about what aspects of that argument and culture do we allow, inverted commas, the culture itself to resolve, and what do we give to Jesus?
00:12:01.000Now, I know the answer is we give everything to Jesus, but I reckon that there's probably a good conversation to have about that.
00:12:07.000Can you lead us in communion, Lecrae, please?
00:12:15.000As we recall the night of the Passover where Moses told all of the people of Israel that they were to sacrifice a lamb in order for their safety,
00:12:34.000we see that this was something that was done throughout time where Jesus himself sat with the disciples and they were Probably assuming they were just in another Passover meal process, but then he referred to himself as the lamb, and he said that his body was going to be broken for our salvation.
00:12:58.000Not an actual spotless lamb, but he was the spotless lamb, and he said that his blood is what would save us.
00:13:06.000And so we let us, you know, Break the bread of his body and eat of him, his flesh, and let us drink of his blood.
00:13:19.000Father God, we thank you for your goodness and your mercy.
00:13:22.000Thank you for sending Jesus to be our atoning sacrifice.
00:13:27.000and we eat in light of the brokenness of his flesh.
00:13:32.000Father, we thank you for the blood that covers a multitude of sins.
00:13:41.000and we drink in light of the blood that was spilled.
00:14:00.000If you feel called, as you do and obviously are, to represent Jesus here in ways that previously he hasn't been represented, presumably because some of the values that you say you wake up with at your throat, the pride, the arrogance in the genre of certain aspects and maybe the predominant.
00:14:21.000Genres within hip-hop celebrate that pride and arrogance for reasons that culturally make a great deal of sense, given what, say, James Baldwin, that great African-American teacher, said, what kind of culture would have to create the category of Negro to cast its own shadow onto?
00:14:40.000What does that tell you about culture?
00:14:42.000Now, I know that for a minute you were involved in Black Lives Matter, and there's no question that there Are racial and cultural questions in the great nation of America that need to be asked and answered correctly?
00:14:58.000How do we navigate something that seems from an outsider like me?
00:15:04.000As obvious as how generational poverty of your family, your grandmother there, having all them kids, your mother, unwanted pregnancy.
00:15:12.000It seems difficult to extricate those kind of challenges from the history of black people in the United States of America, given it's only probably five or six generations ago that there was either slavery or Jim Crow or some iteration.
00:15:26.000How do we not seek to resolve those problems through...
00:15:33.000What do great leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King offer us?
00:15:38.000And how does America wrestle with those questions now through culture and inquiry without breaching the kind of Christian values that we know have to be ultimate in our lives?
00:15:51.000Just a little question to consider after communion, Lecrae.
00:15:59.000One, I want to clarify beforehand, I was always a supporter of the sentiment that Black Lives Matter.
00:16:08.000I was never a supporter of the organization.
00:16:10.000So the sentiment I agreed with, I do think Black Lives Matter, and I think brown lives matter, and I think every life that God has created under the sun matters.
00:16:22.000At that particular moment in time, it was as if Black lives were not being considered.
00:18:10.000If we've already taken these Black people from Africa and they're slaves, then we've got these Irish people over here and they're slaves.
00:18:18.000If they all start escaping, how do we delineate?
00:18:20.000Well, let's just say, let's make the caste system one of color so that now we're just dealing with, if you're of this hue, you are lesser than.
00:18:29.000And that was a lot easier to deal with.
00:18:31.000It was pragmatic, and I'm not saying, I'm simplifying it, oversimplifying it, but it was pragmatic.
00:18:38.000I think when you fast-forward the tape to today, you're just seeing the effects of that.
00:19:47.000It's like that Christianity encompasses values.
00:19:52.000That transcend those kind of limitations, although those limitations are real in a way and have always been there.
00:19:59.000And you said should, could, or may be honoured.
00:20:04.000We could honour and enjoy that about one another.
00:20:06.000And it is interesting when you talk about the individual trauma versus cultural trauma, because one of the things I get when I'm looking at the culture, Lecrae, is that people that are advocating on the left A redress and reckoning around the consequences of imperialism,
00:20:26.000colonialism, which I can, as a British person, appreciate and understand, are proposing solutions that create more division and problems rather than the available solution of compassion and kindness that actually is solution-oriented.
00:20:48.000Solutions around, say, what they would call diversity are likely to bring about future conflict and division rather than solution, consolidation, and bringing about his kingdom.
00:20:59.000It's almost like, ironically, these things don't go far enough.
00:21:03.000They think that they're being really radical, but they're actually not going far enough because if you pursue the idea of compassion and kindness, then we're all one human family, then we do have an obligation to love one another, and it's complicated.
00:21:20.000Me, as a white, working-class English person, my cultural problems aren't...
00:21:30.000Gosh, it's a terrible word to use, really.
00:21:33.000Glamorised, or perhaps narrativised in the same way, because I don't want to suggest that slavery weren't a real and dreadful, dreadful thing.
00:21:39.000But colonisation, I've always thought this as an English person, because it's sort of based a little bit on something the British writer George Orwell said, Lecrae.
00:21:47.000He said, when he was asked some question about the British working class, he said the British working class is in India.
00:21:53.000Because Britain had colonised India by that time.
00:21:56.000But once a culture has dominated its own, inverted commas, native or indigenous population, it does move on to imperialism, colonisation, conquering other territories, accruing other territories, absolute and total dominion.
00:22:10.000And I think that we are living in a time of such radical spiritual warfare that we can't afford to remain trapped in historic trauma, cultural or ethnic trauma, Or individual trauma.
00:22:25.000We just need such resolute principles in him.
00:23:30.000I talked to Dallas Jenkins the other day, creator of The Chosen, and I said to him, I bet you get that thing where people tell you, you should do this, you should do that.
00:23:39.000And I'm like, but you don't need to listen to none of that because the Lord has put you in this position.
00:23:44.000Same with you, because I'm about to do it a little bit with you.
00:23:46.000you're the person that the lord chose to be in this position to set up all these initiatives to have all of this success to have this spotlight so almost anyone saying to you why don't you do it this way it's sort of annoying i think when people do that tell you like why don't you like they want to sort of mess with the faders on your mix well i would say like do you not sometimes feel that That what's happening is so urgent that we've got to really get into preparation.
00:24:16.000There's some revival going on, don't you think?
00:24:18.000Do you feel that we're being called to do things in a very early, first-century Christian way?
00:24:24.000And how do you wrestle with that, with, I don't know, wanting to stay calm and tranquil and almost not get too narcissistic about your own importance?
00:24:34.000Yeah, I think that's a great question.
00:25:12.000It could be 2,000 more years from now.
00:25:14.000But I do think that we work in such a way that demonstrates that we're not in control of that time.
00:25:22.000I don't want to pretend like I can stop the clock whenever I want to and give myself some time before the Lord comes back.
00:25:30.000I want to operate as if I believe this is a reality.
00:25:33.000At the same time, You know, the scripture says, do not be overly righteous.
00:25:39.000And I think in being overly righteous, we can tend to believe that we can fix all of the ills of society in our lifetime.
00:25:48.000And, you know, sometimes we get overly righteous and say, an example is like, oh, I'm so sick of what's happening in Southeast Asia and people are being exploited.
00:26:04.000You know, they're making these shoes for nothing.
00:26:22.000Maybe I can adjust what I purchase if that bothers me in this capacity, but I don't want to be overly righteous and condemn myself because I haven't stopped.
00:26:32.000The exploitation of child workers in Southeast Asia.
00:26:35.000I want to, hey, what part can I play in the grand narrative of everything?
00:27:08.000A sailboat, there's work required, but you're raising a sail.
00:27:13.000You're anticipating the spirit to blow you where you need to go and not just trying to do all of the work in your own strength, in your own power.
00:27:21.000And the fourth stage, I would say, in the journey with the Lord.
00:27:27.000It's being an apprentice of Jesus and allowing the Spirit to do the inner work, the deeper stuff in you.
00:27:33.000Why is this my first place of running when I get in a jam?
00:27:41.000I had to ask myself even recently, Jesus tells the disciples that when he appears and then he descends from heaven and he walks with them for a few days and he's like, I'm sending someone.
00:28:55.000Because in a way, the alternative is like that aspect of Satan that is I want a kingdom set apart by myself comes out when I try to establish the parameters and conditions for even goals that I might declare are done in his name.
00:29:43.000When you come to the Lord, mate, would you tell me, please, a bit about that testimony and whether or not you ever felt that there would be an exclusion, a contradiction, though I see more and more every day that there is paradox throughout.
00:30:02.000It's sort of almost built on the tension of paradox I'm somehow starting to understand or see or feel.
00:30:09.000Anyway, I wonder, did you ever feel that there was something contradictory between hip-hop and some of the tropes and attitudes within hip-hop?
00:30:19.000Although I recognise that, like any art form, it's...
00:30:22.000It has many, many ways of being expressed and sort of sub-genres within it.
00:30:29.000And did you ever feel that coming to the Lord might be, because I can tell you this, from a cultural position that's not got the baggage that is implied in my question, me coming to the Lord, I don't want to be told what to do.
00:30:43.000I don't want to bow down before some man, like man, even if that man is also God.
00:30:48.000I think that's the thing, like the biggest problem I had, is that I want to be God.
00:32:45.000And the issue I had to come to grips with when I had an encounter with the living God is that someone may be able to argue intellectually with me, but this existential experience, this encounter with Jesus is not something that I, it's otherworldly.
00:33:05.000It's outside of time, space, and dimension.
00:33:08.000And I can walk you down the plank intellectually up to a point.
00:33:13.000But you're going to have to exercise faith.
00:33:15.000And honestly, to me, it takes more faith to not believe in light of everything that we see in creation.
00:33:21.000So the contradictory part for me was long before I became a Christian.
00:34:57.000I'll tell you about a lion, even though this is not helpful for us as a culture.
00:35:01.000If people are hungry to hear about lions, let me tell them the story of murder and death and all these particular things, which at one point in time was actual reporting from the community, but then it was exploited and made into a capitalistic way to survive.
00:35:24.000The rappers are at fault for articulating this thing to get themselves out of a bad condition, sure.
00:35:31.000But also the labels are at fault for endorsing it, for sponsoring it, for putting money behind it, right?
00:35:36.000Like, why are this major company, why are you investing millions of dollars into little so-and-so who wants to talk about killing the community all day long?
00:35:47.000I think that people would push back if someone made songs about, you know, taking advantage of children, but yet and still drug use.
00:36:04.000Oh man, that's some good analysis and good cultural history of hip-hop music there.
00:36:09.000Makes me think sometimes that there are CIA ops where the same way as you would infiltrate a community with crack, you might infiltrate a community with cultural art forms that are self-punishing and punitive.