Trip Lee on real life and giving Jesus the glory

CT: You’ve just brought out your new album ‘Between Two Worlds’. What does it mean to be in between two worlds?

TL: I wanted to make an album that dealt with life and the things that people wrestle with. I want it to be stuff that everybody can relate to - the difficulties in life, because we live in a broken world, a fallen world. It’s really a collection of reflections about life. For me as a believer I found myself in between two worlds because I live in this world, this fallen world and I want to glorify God here and I want to point to Jesus here, I want to work here and live with my wife here but I also look forward to the recreation of this world when the Lord Jesus comes back and makes all things new. I live here but my citizenship is in Heaven.


CT: When you perform live, what do you want to convey to the audience?

TL: Before I walk onto the stage, it’s about the centrality of Jesus and just really keeping a focus on Jesus as opposed to ourselves. The more we focus on Jesus, the more we look like Jesus, the more we move towards him, the more we are productive as opposed to looking at ourselves ... self-centredness is not beneficial in any way. The more we are concerned with ourselves, the more concerned we are with looking cool, instead of keeping our eyes on Jesus and running to his cross for mercy and confessing our sins, admitting we are not good enough to earn our place with him. If we can do that then that is the first step, that is humility, recognising that we fall short and that the Lord Jesus is perfect, holy, righteous, gracious and merciful.


CT: You are trying to break through into the secular world. How are you going about that?

TL: I would like the secular world to know that the Scriptures are about the things that we wrestle with every day. The Scriptures are not ignorant. Life is really hard. We know that things don’t always go well, and that our hearts don’t naturally obey God. The Scriptures know that and talk a lot about the difficulties of life. I want people to know that the Scriptures offer a solution. We have all these problems because of the fall but we cannot come up with solutions ourselves because we are fallen, but the Lord Jesus came, he’s perfect, holy righteous. He rose from the dead. That’s the kind of person who can give us the solution to what we are wresting through and Jesus is offering us reconciliation. You just have to throw you hands up and say I trust him and he did what I couldn’t do for myself.


CT: What advice would you give to a young person?

TL: I would encourage them to look beyond the right now, especially for young people. I am young, I’m 22, but even as I talk to people who are younger than me it’s just hard to have any kind of perception beyond what you see right now. It’s hard to for me to think beyond what’s happening right now. I would encourage people to think beyond momentary satisfaction, what’s good for right now, and look at the big picture that everything was made by Jesus and for Jesus. The Lord is really calling us to turn from our sins and devote our lives to everything is about him. The more we make our lives about us then the more we waste our time. When we get older, we devote our lives to ourselves and then we wasted it. If we want to devote our lives to something significant, something that matters, then we should devote our lives to the Lord Jesus.


CT: Your favourite track on the album and why?

TL: Hard question, my favourite changes every day but I would say probably “The Invasion” and this song is the climax to the album. It kind of answers another song which is called “Invade” on the album and it says: “Lord this world is really broken and life is really hard. Somebody needs to come and save the day”. “The Invasion” is saying “Jesus is already coming to save the day”, he is calling us to turn and trust him and to look to Jesus as the hero. So that’s probably my favourite right now because it’s the climax to the album and kind of communicates the push of the album.


CT: You’ve met with a lot of English hip hop artists. How was that?

TL: It was good. I spoke to all of them and told them how encouraged I was. When you are in the USA and you are doing it with a bunch of people you are encouraged by one another but to go to another country and to see a similar group of people who love the Lord and who are serving the Lord and caring about the Gospel and thinking biblically, I was really encouraged by them and I am praying for the Lord to use them to really make Jesus known in the UK and even beyond.


CT: What does the future hold for Trip Lee?

TL: The new album is out and in the near future I will be travelling and doing shows and pointing people to Jesus and praying the Lord uses the album to do things. I have a new video coming out and beyond that, I have been married a year to a faithful, godly marriage with my wife and I’ll be praying for some little kids sometime soon. We will see if the Lord gives me grace for that. What I see right now is preparation for that, but we will see if the Lord gives me grace.