Hillsong Young And Free + Lecrae - This Is Living Lyrics

Video

This Is Living (feat. Lecrae) (Music Video) - Hillsong Young & Free

Meaning & Inspiration

Hillsong Young and Free, bolstered by Lecrae’s verse, attempts to capture the adrenaline of conversion. It’s a track that leans heavily on the optics of excitement—bursting sun, color, height, flight. As an editor, my first instinct is to cut the repetitive chorus. It serves the momentum of a live arena set, but on the page, it’s just padding.

The Power Line of this song is hidden in Lecrae’s final bar: "If I’mma live it, I’mma live it to death."

Everything else in the song is atmospheric noise—pleasant, but somewhat thin. That one line, however, bridges the gap between the sugary pop melody and the actual weight of the gospel. It’s a paradox. You don't usually equate "living" with "death," yet Paul reminds us in Galatians 2:20 that the life he lives in the body, he lives by faith in the Son of God. To truly live, in the biblical sense, requires the death of the ego.

When Hillsong sings about "no moment being wasted," it feels like the frantic ambition of youth. But when Lecrae enters the conversation, the song pivots from a high-energy anthem to a question of orientation. He asks, "Maybe I ain't really know what livin' is." That’s the most honest moment in the track. Most of our attempts at "living" are just cycles of consuming or achieving. When the song claims, "Black and white turns to color," it sounds like a filter on a smartphone—a nice aesthetic shift. But if we take the lyrics seriously, that color change shouldn't be a momentary thrill. It should be the disorienting, terrifying realization that the world you thought you knew has been re-ordered by something you didn't create.

Lecrae’s admission that this new life is "still outside my clutch" is the tension this song needs but keeps trying to run away from. We want the "open door" and the "soaring" feeling, but we rarely want to sit with the fact that faith is often a surrender of the hands.

If you strip away the polished production and the drum machines, you’re left with a very basic human anxiety: what are we doing with the time we’ve been given? Hillsong wants to answer that with a shout. Lecrae, momentarily, answers it with a confession. I’m not sure the two completely reconcile. The song wants to stay in the light, but the theology of living to death belongs in the dark, quiet corners where we actually have to decide if we believe what we're singing.

It’s easy to sing about "living now" when the lights are bright and the beat is up. It’s significantly harder to live like you're dying to yourself when the color fades back to black and white, and you’re just standing there, waiting to see if it’s true.