Lecrae has a brand new album out today called Rebel. The title track is inspired by a sermon given at Mars Hill Church by Pastor Mark. You can download it for free here. The Reach records guys have been part of several Resurgence and Mars Hill events, they have a heart to live missional lives for Jesus, and are reaching the hip hop culture.

3 Questions with Lecrae

What was your inspiration for your new album—"Rebel"?

The inspiration for the album was largely realizing my own need for a biblical worldview. As I would navigate through arts, economics, politics, media, and culture as a whole I'd wrestle with a dichotomy between sacred and secular all the time. I'd either embrace aspects of secularism or the other extreme be very separatist in my views. I began read and listen to stuff by D.A. Carson, Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller, and Francis Schaeffer, and taking another look at Genesis, Daniel, and Romans and I found a better grid to see the world through.

Over time I've worked to see Urban culture through a biblical lens and it's really helped. So I wanted to share with the listener the need to take a stand for Christ in culture yet still be a blessing and cultivator for the culture.

What songs are you most excited about?

I'm really excited about "Change". The song deals with the endless search for "happiness" on earth. The futility of chasing power, pleasure, and possessions.

Also "Don't Waste Your Life". Very self explanatory. Dr. John Piper's ministry has greatly influenced myself and my crew so we crafted a hip hop song unpacking the life not used for God's glory.

Umm lastly I'd say "Got Paper". In urban culture especially hip hop culture, prosperity is constantly paraded as a badge of authentic masculinity, worth, and power. The prosperity gospel is also prevalent, so I wanted to address that in a song as well.

What ideas do you hope that people will come away with after listening to "Rebel"?

I really hope we can stir people toward going against the sinful stream of ideals, values, and lifestyles. I want the christian to be challenged in seeing that the fall of humanity has not thwarted God's intention for us. But since we are now corrupted by sin, we need to renew our mind. We still reflect God's image only now through a murkier lens, so it's important we learn to rebel by taking a stand for Jesus, and yet rebel by being a blessing to the unsaved and sinful culture. Non-believing listeners I pray will be attracted to the quality of the music and creativity, and prayerfully be challenged to look at God's holiness, repent, and turn to Jesus.

Get the Album on iTunes.

"In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful." 2 Samuel 11:1-2

Neglected Responsibility

In this passage we see that David has neglected his responsibility to go out to battle, has sent others to fight, stays home, sleeps until evening, finally gets up, and starts looking at a naked woman that is not his wife! Most of us know where the story goes from here, the plot and the resulting pain to himself and others is all too familiar to us as we look around at our families, churches and the broader culture in which we live.

The only real difference between David and too many of us in our modern age is that we do not have to stand at a distance on a rooftop, squinting to try and get a better view of the naked woman’s body. It gets streamed directly into our offices, bedrooms, and laptops in high definition. Thanks to advances in recent technology, it is even available on our cell phones to be seen on demand at any moment or location. So thousands of years later, we men are still suffering from the same progression of events as David did in 2nd Samuel.

The problem starts earlier in the story

While it would be easy to blame our situation on the ubiquity of pornography in this age of technology, I believe the problem starts earlier in the story. Long before David stares at Bathsheeba, long before he has Uriah killed, long before all the terrible consequences have played out in David’s life and that of his family, something much more sinister had taken place. Somewhere along the way he lost sight of the mission that he had been given by God himself. He was the king of Israel and he was supposed to be at war fighting the forces of evil and expanding the kingdom! Yet he chose to stay home.

The lie: you're not here to fight

Unfortunately, most men in the church today have made the same decision. Even worse, many churches today actually tell men that they are not here to fight. And so we stay home and our stories become eerily similar to that of David. But the truth is that just like David, we have a mission from God to fight! We have a mission from God to continue the work of rescuing his people from captivity, we have an enemy who opposes us that is described as “a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour’, and at stake are the very souls of people for eternity! There is no greater struggle that we could be involved in.

We are here to fight!

When Paul tells Timothy to “fight the good fight”, he does not say “live like you are in a fight”. It is not a metaphor that Paul is using; he is telling Timothy something very real and very specific. We are here to fight, and we are to fight “good”!

God will win.

Our lives share another very important element with the story of David's failure, God was winning even though David chose to stay home! It says that Israel “destroyed the sons of Ammon and besieged Rabbah”. With or without David, God was winning. It is the same today; with or without us, God is winning. So where is God active and winning battles today?

One area that stands out is Mixed Martial Arts (Ultimate Fighting). I do not believe it is coincidental that while the church is struggling to attract young men, God is raising up men who are committed to him in the one area that everyone agrees young men (actually men of all ages) are drawn to. Fighting. Fighters such as Matt Lindland, Trevor Prangley, Ken Shamrock, Matt Horwich, Matt and Mark Hughes, Pat Miletich, and many more of the most popular people in the sport are all committed Christian men who have chosen to speak openly about their faith in Jesus Christ.

What I will be doing with this blog.

This means that most men in the church today need to get off their blessed assurance and follow God into battle! To that end, I will be using this blog in the future to help train men in the biblical fight principles that Paul outlines in his epistles and we will be using real fighters and real fighting to help illustrate these. But first, I want to talk about the young men in this country who are conspicuously absent from our churches and how we can follow God into the battle for these men's souls.

Pastor Tim Interviews Lecrae from Mars Hill Church on Vimeo.

It's cool to see people reaching their culture for Jesus in whatever way they can. You can tell that Lacrae is passionate about seeing Jesus worshiped and lives changed. When I went to see him perform live, I felt slightly uncomfortable jumping up and down with the rest of the crowd, but, when I looked around me and saw hundreds of people praising Jesus and they were preaching the Gospel in a way the whole crowd grasped—I was amazed.

Who are the people around you that need Jesus?
What does it look like to be a comic book geek for Jesus? A Nascar Dad for Jesus? A YMCA volunteer for Jesus?

More:
Doxologist: Acoustic Jam / Hip-Hop Jam

On February 25-27, 2008 Resurgence hosted our National Conference titled Text & Context at Mars Hill Church's Ballard Campus. In this eleventh session from the Conference, watch as Jeff Vanderstelt lays out a biblical vision for missions, ecclesiology and preaching the gospel to as many people as possible.

Stephen Hawking wants to explain everything. The astro-physicist, best known for his work with black holes, longs to build a scientific theory called the Unified Field Theory. If ever fully constructed, this theory would encompass the entire universe and pull together all of the knowledge of science and humanity. This, of course, is not a new attempt. In fact, this is what philosophers have been trying to do for ages--to create a theory or system which explains and unifies everything. But scientists and philosophers alike have become only more frustrated in their quest for such an over-arching explanation. If one traces the flow of philosophy, it might even be said that the philosophers have given up on this quest and, after centuries of defeat, have taken up a different set of questions. Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and other scientists who have tried their hand at this have been no more successful. When I heard Stephen Hawking speak in 2000 about his search, what I heard was a man in despair.

We have previously seen that Jesus came to establish God's reign in this world through his life, death and resurrection. He teaches us this important truth in the Gospels, especially in the stories of the Gospels that we call the parables. We will look a little further into this truth as our story continues to unfold.

THE TIME FOR DECISION IS RIGHT NOW

Jesus' stories urged people to recognize that the time of crisis was upon them. (This was true in several ways, especially given the political and social context of his time and the fall of Jerusalem that would come in A.D.70.) The signs of the times are not difficult to grasp. People can see that a forceful wind, a coming weather pattern, and a budding fig tree, all point to something urgent and obvious. Why is it that his reign is not grasped by those who should pay attention to the numerous signs? To live as if things will always be the same is to not prepare for the night burglar. It is to collect great wealth and believe that such possessions will protect me in the day of death.

On February 25-27, 2008 Resurgence hosted our National Conference titled Text & Context at Mars Hill Church's Ballard Campus. In this eleventh session from the Conference, listen as Jeff Vanderstelt lays out a biblical vision for missions, ecclesiology and preaching the gospel to as many people as possible.

On September 17 and 18 Mars Hill Church hosted the Resurgence Fall Conference title: Continuous Worship. In this, the fourth of four main sessions, listen as Pastor Tim Smith walks us through how it looks to live lives of worship that focus on Jesus and seek to redeem the culture around us.

On September 17 and 18 Mars Hill Church hosted the Resurgence Fall Conference title: Continuous Worship. In this, the fourth of four main sessions, watch as Pastor Tim Smith walks us through how it looks to live lives of worship that focus on Jesus and seek to redeem the culture around us.

In the first installment of this series of articles we saw that the central question posed by the ministry of Jesus had to do with the reign of God. Jesus came to make that which was wrong right, to bring the victory of Yahweh. He began a redemptive process, through his death and resurrection, which will culminate in the final manifestation of his kingdom at the end of this age. We are living in the already part of this kingdom. The not yet, or the final expansion and expression of that kingdom, is still to come. This should fuel optimism in an age of Western moral confusion and growing pessimism. The story is not over. The final chapter will yet be written and it will be glorious when it is.

The theme of the kingdom, and thus of God's reign on earth, specifically works itself out in story form in the New Testament. This happens in a number of literary genres but it is most clear in the parables that Jesus tells in the synoptic Gospels. I believe that these stories should form our core vision of the reign of God and therefore they should powerfully inform how we understand what Jesus is doing in this present age.