By Leah MarieAnn Klett, Assistant Editor Monday, January 19, 2026

For much of his career, Trip Lee has written from the margins of strength.

Long before worship music entered his creative vocabulary, the 38-year-old Dallas-born rapper, pastor and author was already grappling with a body that refused to cooperate with his calling.

Since college, Lee has lived with chronic illness, a reality that has shaped not only how he moves through the world, but how he understands God, faith and the language believers use to speak to Him.

It’s that deep understanding of physical weakness, paired with a spiritual conviction, that shaped For Your Glory, releasing Feb. 13. The album marks Lee’s first explicitly worship-centered project and the inaugural release under BRAG Worship, a new collective launching in early 2026. 

“It’s very hard for me to write songs about the goodness of God without acknowledging the difficulty of life,” Lee, a husband and father of three, told The Christian Post. “It almost feels like it would be fake any other way.”

For nearly two decades, Lee has been a defining voice in Christian hip-hop, releasing eight albums, authoring two books and serving in pastoral ministry in Atlanta and Dallas. Though his work has always been theologically grounded, for Lee, worship music — especially music written for congregational singing — was a different responsibility altogether.

“There’s something very special about hip-hop,” Lee said. “One of the things I’ve loved about it is that there are a lot of words. For somebody like me who wants to say a lot of things, who wants to talk about big things, that’s been a gift.”

But over time, he found himself drawn to a different kind of simplicity; songs with fewer words that congregations could sing together, reflective of the Early Church. 

“There’s also something special about simpler songs that Christians can all sing together,” he said. “As somebody who loves Jesus and loves His Church, I’ve been deeply impacted by great worship songs that draw my heart to Jesus, songs I can sing with other Christians, where we can all sing to Him together.”

That longing, combined with what Lee sees as a cultural hunger for meaning and substance, helped shape For Your Glory.

“I think people are searching for hope,” he said. “We keep looking to things that disappoint us, people let us down, circumstances let us down. One of the things I love about worship music is that it can draw our hearts, together, to this glorious God.”

What makes Lee’s worship project distinctive, however, is his refusal to gloss over pain. Where much contemporary Christian music leans relentlessly upbeat, For Your Glory insists on telling the whole story.

“I think people think Christian music has to be really, really happy all the time, like it’s an escape from the difficulties of life,” Lee said. “But God doesn’t want us to look to Him as an escape from those difficulties. He wants to remind us that yes, those difficulties are there, but His glory is even bigger.”

Over the years, he said, the songs listeners respond to most are rarely the celebratory anthems but the ones that sit in sorrow and lament.

“Ninety-five percent of the time when someone tells me, ‘This song changed my life’ or ‘This song kept me from killing myself,’ it’s always the songs where I’m talking about the difficulty of life,” he said. “It’s the song their mom listened to while she was dying in the hospital. It’s the song that gave them hope in illness.”

“People think we either have to say ‘God is good’ or ‘life is hard,’” he said. “And I’m saying no, life is hard and God is good.”

The Bible, he noted, gives believers an entire songbook that refuses to separate the two. Lee emphasized that when worship only acknowledges joy, believers in pain feel pressured to perform rather than pray.

“When you open the Psalms, they’re full of lament,” he said. “There’s so much of that in Scripture, and I think that should be reflected in the songs we sing together.”

“I want people who are having a hard week when they sing songs on Sunday to not feel like they have to fake it,” he said. “I don’t want them to feel like they have to put their suffering out of their mind in order to praise God.”

Otherwise, he said, the consequences can be spiritually devastating.

“If we only sing happy songs, it starts to feel like everything is awesome all the time,” he said. “And when things don’t go well, people feel like God lied to them. But God hasn’t lied. He said, ‘Yes, it’s hard, and I’m really good, even in the midst of it.’”

Lee’s own illness has stripped away any illusion of self-sufficiency. For years, the pastor and artist has battled chronic fatigue syndrome, an incurable disease that causes prolonged exhaustion.

“As somebody who is sick, my body often fails me,” he said. “I don’t have the luxury of living under the illusion that I’m doing things in my own strength. … Sometimes I feel like I limp to the finish line. And then when God uses it, it’s so clear to me: this is His strength, His glory and not mine.”

That theology animates BRAG Worship, a name rooted in Lee’s 2011 song “Brag On My Lord,” which gradually evolved into a larger vision. In a genre “known for boasting,” Lee said, he wanted to reclaim that posture for God.

“When Scripture talks about boasting, it’s really talking about what your hope is in,” he said. “What you fall back on at the end of the day. And Scripture says that shouldn’t be our strength or wisdom, it should be the Lord Himself.”

In worship, Lee believes, that boasting becomes communal.

“When we sing songs about God together, we’re making much of Him together,” he said.

That communal emphasis shaped For Your Glory, which features collaborators including Naomi Raine, DOE and Jonathan Traylor. Though Lee wrote the core of each song, he said they weren't finished until others lent their voices.

“The song wasn’t fully written until they sang it,” he said. “It was another reminder of what happens when people come together to praise God. We bring our different perspectives, our different experiences, and the song becomes richer.”

Lee’s pastoral instincts extend beyond music into broader conversations about the Church. He shared how, especially in recent years, he sees a growing desire among young believers for depth over spectacle, substance over production.

“I think what I'm seeing [now] is that people are not interested in the experience without the substance,” Lee said. “They're like, ‘Well, if I'm going to go to a church on Sunday, I don't want to just go somewhere where I just see an amazing show and I see smoke and lights. I want to actually have an encounter with God. I want to learn something about what God has to say about the world around me.”

“We’re not going to be able to entertain better than the world entertains,” he added. “What people really need is the Gospel delivered in a way they can hear and respond to. … When I preach a sermon, people probably aren’t reciting my fourth point in the car on the way to work,” he said. “But music sticks. It becomes the soundtrack to our following Jesus.”

Scripture itself frames singing as a form of spiritual formation and discipleship, he noted. Lee shared how, recently, he saw that theology come alive during a small worship night in Atlanta, where attendees sang songs from the project for the first time.

“One of the ways we teach and admonish each other is through psalms, hymns and spiritual songs,” he said. “If we separate music from discipleship, we’ve misunderstood how the Bible talks about worship.”

“I started crying,” he continued. “It felt like such a privilege, forming words that God would put in the mouths of His people.”

That, ultimately, is the hope behind BRAG Worship: not to dominate the worship landscape, but to add one more voice to it, all for the glory of God and the good of the Church. 

“If worship isn’t a genre, but an acknowledgment of how great God is,” Lee said, “then there should be as many cultural expressions of it as there are cultures.”

For Your Glory releases Feb. 13.

News Source : https://www.christianpost.com/news/trip-lee-first-worship-project-shaped-by-chronic-illness.html