“God met me where I was at—baggy jeans and earrings.”
With those words, the celebrated hip-hop artist Lecrae Moore begins his story. Growing
up without a father, he experienced a childhood of abuse and neglect. He filled
his life with drugs, theft, alcohol, sex, and gang activity. He was so wild
that his friends nicknamed him “Crazy Crae.” He was a poster child for every
stereotype of urban subculture.
What it took to bring him to Christianity was someone who
was not afraid of that subculture—who knew that the real problem for Lecrae was
not his culture but his sin and brokenness. A white man named Joe loved the
black teenager enough to enter into his culture and speak his language. Today
Lecrae is the president and co-founder of Reach Records, and is the winner of
several Dove Awards and a Grammy Award. His album Anomaly was the first album
ever to top both the Gospel Albums and the Billboard 200 chart.
In a conference presentation, Lecrae said a key turning
point in his life was when he grasped what comes after conversion—when he
understood that “Christianity is not just religious truth, it is Total Truth.” In
other words, the real transformation came when he realized that Christians are
called to roll up their sleeves and work out the implications of a biblical
worldview for justice and politics, for science and scholarship, for art and
music—and all the rest of life.
“We’ve limited Christianity to salvation and
sanctification,” he said. But “Christianity is the truth about everything. If
you say you have a Christian worldview, that means you see the world through
that lens—not just how people get saved and what to stay away from.”
Lecrae’s message is that we do not need to be afraid of
cultural differences because Christianity has the resources to speak to every
culture. Quoting from my book Total Truth, Lecrae says the reason Christians
hold back from being salt and light in the world is that they are trapped in
the sacred/secular divide. “We live fractured and fragmented lives. Church and
family rarely speak to our work and public life. We navigate between two
separate worlds.”
“Most religions tell you not only how to be right with
God but how to interpret the world we live in,” Lecrae explains. “Historically,
Christians have been good at the first function, ‘saving souls,’ but not at
helping people interpret the world around them. We limit spirituality to
salvation and sanctification.”
Salvation is the crucial first step in the Christian life,
of course. “But
how do we deal with politics, science, economics, bioethics, TV, music, and
art? Typically, we leave people to their own devices. We usually don’t operate
out of a biblical worldview.” Instead, “we tend to have bifocals, half seeing
things as spiritual and half seeing things as secular.”
Where did the sacred/secular split come from? Not from the
Bible. It came from the Greeks. And the reason is that they thought matter was
eternal. “A
great divide was born when the Greek philosophers argued that matter was pre-existing
and eternal—that matter contained the ability to resist the Creator,”
Lecrae explains. “As
Christians, we refute that claim with the doctrine that only God is
pre-existing and eternal, ex nihilo. He is the source of all creation.”
The implication is that no part of creation is inherently bad or evil.
“Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is
received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim. 4:4).
Most evil consists of “a perversion of good things,” Lecrae
explains. “God
gave us the ingenuity and tools to make a butcher knife, so we can use it to
murder or serve food to the homeless.”
How can we heal the sacred/secular split, which marginalizes
and disempowers Christians? “How do we break free of this split that robs the gospel
of its power to redeem every aspect of our lives?” Lecrae asks. The
answer is to understand that “Christianity is saving truth and it’s sanctifying truth,
but we believe that it’s Total Truth. It is the truth about every aspect of
life from economics to masculinity to marriage. God has the right view on all
of these things.”
This is not just pious talk for Lecrae. He has worked hard
to understand how the principle of total truth applies to his own work. In
contrast to some Christians, who might be prone to write off hip-hop music as
evil, he is determined to cultivate the genre’s creativity and artistry. Lecrae
once told me that discovering total truth has enriched his art—that it
“liberated” him to address all areas of life in his lyrics. Christian music is
music that addresses any subject area from a biblical perspective.
Christians are called to be ambassadors for Christ (2 Cor.
5:20)—and that means we need to prepare ourselves as thoroughly as any
professional working in international relations. When I lived in the
Washington, DC, area, I often met graduate students preparing to be ambassadors
and diplomats, and I discovered that they were very familiar with the concept
of worldview—not because they were reading Christian books on the subject but
because it was the focus of their secular graduate studies. Their courses
taught that the critical factor in engaging a foreign culture is not learning
the language but the worldview.
“Most people are intimidated by worldviews that they don’t
understand,” Lecrae says. To overcome our fears, we need to be
driven by compassion for those who are suffering under the tyranny of false
idols. In a rap titled “Truth,” Lecrae talks about people in the grip of “idols
in their heart.” His music aims to release people from the power of false gods
by counterposing the power of truth.
In recent years Lecrae has spearheaded the Unashamed
movement, which takes its lead from Romans 1:16. The hip-hop artists associated
with Lecrae and Reach Records even call themselves the “116 clique.” (Lecrae
has the number 116 tattooed on his right arm.) The Unashamed movement aims to
inspire people to live out biblical truth with confidence in every area of
life.
No area is off limits. No area is too “scary” because you
might lose your grip on your Christian convictions. Let me end with a final
quote from Lecrae: “What we need to realize is that Christianity is total
truth not just religious truth. Because it is total truth, it is relevant and
applicable to all areas of life.”
The five strategic principles in Finding Truth can help you
live an unashamed life, whether at work, at school, or with your family and
friends. They will provide you with the tools to recognize what’s right and
what’s wrong with any worldview—and then to craft a biblically informed
perspective that is both true and humane.
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