Trip Lee’s second book is called Rise: Get Up and Live in God’s Great Story. To summarize the message into a single sentence, this is a book encouraging Christians to live for God at a young age. In the book’s introduction, he says, “And you can define ‘young’ however you wish.” Though this book is directed towards people in their teens and 20s, it is a book that “older” people can read also.
If you have read his first book, The Good Life, and have not yet read Rise, you should know that Rise is not meant to be The Good Life part two. He talks about many of the same topics in the new book, but Rise is directed towards Christians rather than a general audience.
I cannot say that I am an unbiased reviewer. I am a big fan of Trip Lee who listens to songs from his new album, Rise, every day. He is also my favorite author, so you won’t hear me speaking with much criticism about the book. I have read The Good Life three times and shared it with over twenty people, so I had high expectations for his second book.
It was a good read. Unlike his last book, this didn’t turn my life around in a 180, but there are many great points in this book that I can apply to my daily life. One thing I love about Trip’s writing is that it is conversational. When I read this book, it felt like he is having an individual conversation with me at a table rather than being a lecture teacher in front of a large classroom. It is easy to read, and I like how he uses specific anecdotes and examples to discuss and introduce his points.
The chapter that really got me is called “Time Is Money” where he discussed how we should think of and use our time. He said, “Everything we have belongs to God, including our time. We should invest in well, putting it where He tells us to instead of robbing Him and chasing what we think will satisfy us in the moment.” He made me think critically about how I manage and spend my time, a topic very relevant to me as a college student trying to balance many time-consuming tasks everyday.
Some other impactful chapters for me were “Are You One Of Those Christians?,” “Everything Is Sacred,” and “A Disease Worth Spreading.” In the first of the aforementioned chapters, he says that we should fall out of love with being cool. Living in a dorm, I enjoy spending time with the people around me, but sometimes it causes me to try to be cool and I end up not doing a good job of loving my neighbors. He says, “Cool is fickle, and we can’t live for it.” Reading about this encouraged me to say no to things that aren’t good for my relationship with God. In “Everything Is Sacred,” he says that everything we do is an opportunity to glorify God, and he asks what picture of God does the way you act show to those around you. In “A Disease Worth Spreading,” he talks about speaking to other about Jesus, something challenging for me. He says that loving people is very important and that we need to tell people with vocal words about Jesus. It may be awkward, but at the end of the chapter, he says, “Because if Jesus has shown you compassion, it’s impossible not to spread it to others. Have you been exposed?”
I would highly recommend Rise: Get Up and Live in God’s Great Story to any Christian. It has the power to renew the faith of a reader. If you have the opportunity to, I would highly recommend that you see Trip Lee in concert on the Rise Tour. I really wanted to have read the book and tell him what I thought of it when I went to the Rise Tour in Charlotte, so the night before, I stayed up until 1 AM reading the second half of the book. At the event, he takes breaks in between songs to discuss the messages of his book; I noticed that much of what he says was directly quoted from the book. To me it was very impactful hearing him talk about the message of this book in person after having read it.
