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Feb. 25, 2025 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
36:24
BREAK BREAD EP. 15 - LECRAE
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*sad music*
*sad music* Thank you for joining me for Break Bread with Lecrae.
I'm Russell Brand.
Lecrae is an American, Christian, rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer and actor.
He was raised in Houston, Texas by his single mom in a challenging environment during his youth.
Lecrae was influenced by hip-hop culture 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 won a bunch of awards, Dove Awards, Grammy Awards.
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.
In addition to that, he's a New York Times best-selling author, entrepreneur, social activist.
He is Lecrae, and I'm honored to be joined by Lecrae today.
Lecrae, all right, mate, thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
What a laundry list of things.
It sounded like a lot, mate.
It sounded like a lot of achievements.
I'm just grateful.
I'm honored to even be able to use my gifts in any capacity to do what God has called me to do.
So that's, you know, it's a blessing.
Man, I've been reading some things lately that have really challenged me.
I'm reading, like, I'm going to talk to you about that in a minute.
I'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.
And then just yesterday, I was reading the British writer Chesterton, On St. Francis of Assisi.
And I was struck, Lecrae, by this.
Following Christ and surrendering to him is so close to a...
It'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.
And 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.
Everything 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.
So you must be a lot more experienced than I am dealing with things that I'm just now questioning.
For example, to start us off, you started by expressing gratitude.
And I see the significance of gratitude in ensuring that I don't give personal credit to myself for, inverted commas, my own achievements.
I wonder how you continue to navigate the space and power that you have without falling to or for either flesh or worldliness or even...
The kind of stuff that goes on in my head, which I'll probably call the devil these days.
I wonder how you continue to navigate them challenges.
Yeah, 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.
And for me, Very similar to you, very licentious background, very dark, promiscuous drugs, so on and so forth.
Those are the things that you're trying to run so far away from.
I think in the process of changing my mental maps, right, when I became a Christian, I feel like the first phase was awakening.
You're like, oh, wow, I did not know there was a God.
I did not know Jesus died for my sins.
Then 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.
And then the third wave is productivity where you're trying to get involved and what can I do to serve?
During 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.
It's really after that stage three where it hit me the most.
Stage three is where many Christians cap out.
They 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.
And 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?
And then it becomes a lot easier to lean on the old modes of reliance, which is the flesh, which is pride.
And 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.
It's not like something that you just wake up and, oh, I'm humble today.
It's a journey.
Every day I wake up, arrogance and pride are at my throat.
And 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.
Old molds of reliance is the kind of...
Spontaneous sentence that reminds me what you do for a living and demonstrates your gift in real time.
And I love what you said about crisis.
I come to faith late, I guess late in life.
I don't know how long I'm going to live for.
Eternity, apparently.
I come to life to faith recently.
And because the baptism and...
I've come to him in crisis like a kind of a rift, a separating, a breaking down.
And I've been through so many of those things.
I'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.
I've been shown it so many times, I'm a slow learner.
I wonder, I know that a few things.
One is I know that you've had challenges in your early life.
Some people are commenting, constant pursuit of humility, Ashela in the chat saying that's a beautiful phrase as well.
I 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?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I think that's, you know, the irony is, if you look at my family's background, we come from humble, near invisible circumstances.
My grandmother left home at 13 years old.
She had 12 kids.
She was dirt poor.
She didn't know how to use a washing machine.
Then she has my mother.
My mother, she can't afford to take care of my mother, so my mother's sent to live with family members.
My mother grows up.
In unfortunate circumstances, she gives birth to me out of, you know, a young pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy, and now we're struggling.
And 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.
Money became a source of security, a sense of like, oh, this is going to make sure that I'm safe and I'm good.
I 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.
I 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.
And 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.
God is my security and he uses money as a tool in order to do things.
But at the end of the day, I've got to be relying on my daily bread.
It was never a sense of like, let me buy the flashy cars, let me do all these things.
It 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.
It'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.
I 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.
And that, just for me, seems like a hard...
Like, alright, I'll just take enough manna for today.
I know that more manna's coming tomorrow.
I'm cool.
I'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.
Yeah, give my friends, I get the manna first, then give my friends, bro, this manna don't taste right.
I'm getting a nosebleed.
I don't know why that is.
I had the same manner you guys got Thank you Thank you.
That means I must have changed, man.
Before we go into it, your last answer inspired a lot of questions in me, Lecrae.
Before 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.
You 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?
Now, I know the answer is we give everything to Jesus, but I reckon that there's probably a good conversation to have about that.
Can you lead us in communion, Lecrae, please?
Absolutely.
As 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,
we 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.
Not an actual spotless lamb, but he was the spotless lamb, and he said that his blood is what would save us.
And 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.
Father God, we thank you for your goodness and your mercy.
Thank you for sending Jesus to be our atoning sacrifice.
and we eat in light of the brokenness of his flesh.
Father, we thank you for the blood that covers a multitude of sins.
and we drink in light of the blood that was spilled.
We thank you in Christ's name.
Amen.
Amen.
If 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.
Genres 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?
What does that tell you about culture?
Now, 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?
How do we navigate something that seems from an outsider like me?
As obvious as how generational poverty of your family, your grandmother there, having all them kids, your mother, unwanted pregnancy.
It 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.
How do we not seek to resolve those problems through...
The culture and through the politics.
What do great leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King offer us?
And 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?
Just a little question to consider after communion, Lecrae.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was a good question.
One, I want to clarify beforehand, I was always a supporter of the sentiment that Black Lives Matter.
I was never a supporter of the organization.
So 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.
At that particular moment in time, it was as if Black lives were not being considered.
And so I agreed with the sentiment.
But the organization, I had significant challenges and struggles with.
So that's a delineation.
But to answer your question, you know, I think that there's always a tension when you're talking about ethnicity in America.
There's always this tension, but it's not even a tension that is birthed in America.
Even if you go into the scriptures, there's ethnic tension between the Samaritans, between the Jews and the Gentiles.
And so that ethnic tension and the necessity or the desire to exalt one's ethnicity over the other is an age-old issue.
I think that, you know, God is not opposed to ethnicities.
Otherwise, he would not have said, oh, the Jews are going to be my chosen people in this era of time.
And then, you know, grafting in Gentiles and just it didn't have to be that way.
He could have just made us like this, you know, homogenous group of people with no ethnicities.
But he did it.
So I think it's something that we should honor and respect.
I don't think it gives us credence to see one as greater than the other.
And I think what's happened in America historically is that we've created a caste system based on color.
So it wasn't about my color is better than your color.
It was about, well, how do we delineate between Who should be a slave?
Who shouldn't be a slave?
If 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.
If they all start escaping, how do we delineate?
Well, 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.
And that was a lot easier to deal with.
It was pragmatic, and I'm not saying, I'm simplifying it, oversimplifying it, but it was pragmatic.
I think when you fast-forward the tape to today, you're just seeing the effects of that.
It's like a trickle-down effect.
Any decision we make, there's consequences and realities.
I live in Atlanta, Georgia.
It was burned down.
Because it was burned down, we live with the consequences of the way they rebuilt it.
I hate the roads and the hills, but that's the consequence of the rebuild.
So where we are today, I think as Christians, we've got to say, okay, how does the Lord want us to see each other?
How does he want us to treat each other in light of this?
And how can we consider one another?
Consider what may be the implications of historic trauma or tragedies and how that affects us today.
It's not to say, You know, I'm trying to make you feel guilty or you're better than me or I'm better than you.
It's just to say, hey, man, you've been through some trauma.
Russell's been through trauma.
Do I consider that when I'm addressing Russell?
Or do I just say, oh, man, you're a human.
I'm a human.
Who cares if you were addicted to drugs before?
That has no bearing on your life today.
I don't think that's wise and I don't think that's compassionate or kind.
All right.
It's like that Christianity encompasses values.
That transcend those kind of limitations, although those limitations are real in a way and have always been there.
And you said should, could, or may be honoured.
We could honour and enjoy that about one another.
And 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,
colonialism, 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.
A lot of the...
Solutions 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.
It's almost like, ironically, these things don't go far enough.
They 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.
You're right.
I am defined by individual trauma.
Me, as a white, working-class English person, my cultural problems aren't...
Gosh, it's a terrible word to use, really.
Glamorised, or perhaps narrativised in the same way, because I don't want to suggest that slavery weren't a real and dreadful, dreadful thing.
But 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.
He said, when he was asked some question about the British working class, he said the British working class is in India.
Because Britain had colonised India by that time.
But 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.
And 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.
We just need such resolute principles in him.
And I can't see another way.
I don't think there is another way.
Like any Christian, I've gone from...
That's a good...
Well, no, my type of Christian.
That's a good idea.
That's intelligent.
That's a good symbol.
Oh, man, it happened.
It actually happened.
Whether it's reading acts or things that happen in the privacy of my own mind or just the impossibility of it.
Not happening.
I've been submerged and overwhelmed.
When you said them three stages, I reckon I've been through awakening.
I reckon that's taken a long time.
Growth, I'm doing all that reading that you described now.
And productivity, I'm probably trying to rush too much into...
Productivity.
Let's get into productivity now.
We've got no time to waste.
And I would use scripture to back that up as well.
I'd go, look at Acts.
They weren't messing around.
They weren't like, I'm just going to go to university for three years.
They're out there baptising people front and centre.
Do you ever feel like your own Christianity?
Wherever aspects of your own...
I'll just offer this final clarification.
I've been talking for a while.
I 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.
And I'm like, but you don't need to listen to none of that because the Lord has put you in this position.
Same with you, because I'm about to do it a little bit with you.
you'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.
There's some revival going on, don't you think?
Do you feel that we're being called to do things in a very early, first-century Christian way?
And 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?
Yeah, I think that's a great question.
I think that's the tension.
That's that.
So on one hand of the spectrum, you've got Paul writing to the Thessalonians, and it was as if they believed tomorrow Christ would return.
And so there was a sense of urgency from the moment he left to 2,000 years later, here we are.
So I think that's an aspect that...
We're to believe because we don't know the day or the hour.
It could be tomorrow.
It could be 2,000 more years from now.
But I do think that we work in such a way that demonstrates that we're not in control of that time.
I 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.
I want to operate as if I believe this is a reality.
At the same time, You know, the scripture says, do not be overly righteous.
And I think in being overly righteous, we can tend to believe that we can fix all of the ills of society in our lifetime.
And, 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.
You know, they're making these shoes for nothing.
And what can I do about it?
Well, am I going to be able to change the entire country like just me today?
Probably not.
Maybe 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.
The exploitation of child workers in Southeast Asia.
I want to, hey, what part can I play in the grand narrative of everything?
Excuse me.
And then I think for me, the last stage of productivity is where generally Christians cap out.
You've overworked yourself.
You've grinded.
You're a speedboat.
And you're running out of gas.
And God never intended us for us to be speedboats.
We're supposed to be sailboats.
A sailboat, there's work required, but you're raising a sail.
You'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.
And the fourth stage, I would say, in the journey with the Lord.
It's being an apprentice of Jesus and allowing the Spirit to do the inner work, the deeper stuff in you.
Why is this my first place of running when I get in a jam?
Why is it not trusting in God?
I 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.
Better.
I'm sending you a greater helper.
And yet and still, I'm like, no, I want Jesus here.
I'd rather have Jesus than the helper that he gave me more than the helper.
And it's like, oh, Lord, I want what I... Why is that?
What is that in me that needs to be worked out?
And those are the questions, the deeper questions that I have to ask myself.
So, I mean, I guess to answer your question, I think...
We get over...
We're by nature self-righteous.
We're by nature people who like to control the narrative, who control things.
If I can do it, it'll fix it.
It'll do this.
And the much harder thing to do is to be dependent on God.
The much harder thing to do is allow Him to shape your character and mold you.
And as you're doing the work, not that you sit back, but to say, I may not be able to change the entirety of this circumstance, but God...
By your power, by your spirit, I'm going to play my part.
And who knows what that will contribute to.
Oh, yeah, I like that.
Because 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.
And obviously, all of us know.
In the name of the Lord, pretty dark things have been done.
So the best thing for me to do is, yeah, to move away from speedboat and my own fuel supply and towards sailboat.
Then I know, is the boat moving and what direction is it moving in?
But that's so at odds, isn't it, with the cultural directions that we're receiving that are so...
Absolutely.
Dedicated to personal autonomy.
When 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.
It's sort of almost built on the tension of paradox I'm somehow starting to understand or see or feel.
Anyway, I wonder, did you ever feel that there was something contradictory between hip-hop and some of the tropes and attitudes within hip-hop?
Although I recognise that, like any art form, it's...
It has many, many ways of being expressed and sort of sub-genres within it.
And how was it you come to the Lord?
And 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.
I don't want to bow down before some man, like man, even if that man is also God.
I think that's the thing, like the biggest problem I had, is that I want to be God.
I don't want to be told what to.
But to be God is terrifying.
You're just there on the edge of the universe with nothing and no one to turn to or have recourse to.
So I wonder how you came to the Lord and whether or not any of them conditions, i.e.
moving into hip-hop for part of your mission and ministry, and doubts about surrender to Him were troubling for you.
Yeah, I grew up with a mother.
Extremely religious, but in a very legalistic environment.
So she was taught she wasn't allowed to wear pants.
She couldn't listen to certain types of music.
She couldn't wear makeup.
She couldn't go to sporting events, movies.
And it oppressed her so much that she rebelled and did not raise me in any form of religious environment ever.
We may have gone to service like...
For special occasions, but it wasn't a part of my life.
She raised me to be a free thinker.
Gave me philosophy books and all types of different things.
Christianity was the furthest thing from my mind as a young man.
It seemed simplistic and it seemed almost remedial and stupid, if I'm being honest.
It was like, this is the dumb people's religion.
I see you can relate.
So, for me, I came to the faith as a skeptic.
I was like, answer this.
Do you have an answer for this?
Do you have an answer for this?
What about this?
And it was so intellectual that, for me, the struggle was, how does this, like, it does not make sense intellectually.
It wasn't lining up.
And 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.
It's outside of time, space, and dimension.
And I can walk you down the plank intellectually up to a point.
But you're going to have to exercise faith.
And honestly, to me, it takes more faith to not believe in light of everything that we see in creation.
So the contradictory part for me was long before I became a Christian.
It was always contradictory.
Once I became a Christian, I was so blown away with these new realities.
I was burdened to see people in the street and other hip-hop artists know what I knew.
I was like, how do I get them to see what I've seen?
And I didn't know.
I didn't think it was a bad thing to use the skill set.
I thought I was a skateboarder or a BMX biker.
And I was like, I'm going to use this for Jesus some kind of way.
How do I use this to help them see Jesus more?
Because that's all that I knew to do was to articulate.
And plus, hip-hop was, at the time, it was used to...
Push a lot of other agendas and worldviews.
So there was a lot of Islamic views in hip-hop.
There was like 5%.
They were all kind of like prison cults and cult theologies that were interweaved in there.
So for me, it was like, oh, okay, well, I'll just do what they're doing with my faith.
And so, yeah, obviously, hip-hop is rebellious.
And I think it's understandably so to a degree, but it's...
Also, a place where the sin inside of us can be highlighted and exalted because it makes money.
It's capitalism at the end of the day.
It's like, well, let me tell you terrible stories and heinous things because you're on a safari in the ghettos of America.
And what do you want to see?
You want to see a lion?
I'll tell you about a lion, even though this is not helpful for us as a culture.
If 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.
And it's not all the rapper's fault.
The rappers are at fault for articulating this thing to get themselves out of a bad condition, sure.
But also the labels are at fault for endorsing it, for sponsoring it, for putting money behind it, right?
Like, 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?
I think that people would push back if someone made songs about, you know, taking advantage of children, but yet and still drug use.
And gunplay is acceptable.
I don't get it.
Oh man, that's some good analysis and good cultural history of hip-hop music there.
Makes 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.
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