When did you last feel completely out of your depth?
Most of us spend our lives engineering around that feeling. We stick to what we're good at. We avoid the rooms where we might look incompetent. I’ve even skipped the gym because I didn't want other men to see how much I was struggling to lift.
We avoid feeling weak, yet God meets us and works powerfully in our weakness. Trip Lee's group, BRAG Worship, released its first album, which includes the song "Fortress," on which Trip sings alongside Naomi Raine. In a video on his social media, Lee described how the song's theme is an area of personal resonance.
"I have an illness that makes me weak all the time. And one of the ways I think God has used that is - when we are strong, we have the solution that we don't really need God. We got it, and so we stopped depending on him. We try to do everything in our own strength. And one of the benefits of God letting us go through stuff is He's like, 'I'm not gonna let you lie to yourself. I'm gonna let you see that you're too weak to do this and that you actually do need Me.' That's where even hard things can be a gift. I'm weak until I'm depending on God."
Knowing that Lee wrote this song while living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome gives the lyrics a different weight. He is not observing the danger of weakness from a distance. He is sharing first-hand experience from living it.
The origin of the story is not merely Lee’s life. Lee and Naomi Raine stitched together the lyrics for “Fortress” by drawing on some of the Bible's most honest confessions about human weakness and pointing us to the ways that God meets us in those places.
When "Fortress" opens with "I'm weakest when I'm strongest in my eyes," Lee and Raine draw directly from Paul's confession in 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul states that God's "power works best in weakness." Paul didn't reluctantly accept that truth. Instead, he boasted in it! He had learned this truth through a painful experience. After begging God three times to remove "a thorn" in his flesh, Paul discovered that self-sufficiency was never the point. Depending on God is what matters most!
The bridge of "Fortress" lifts John 3:30 almost word-for-word. John the Baptist said of Jesus, "He must become greater and greater, and I must become less and less." Naomi Raine sings the bridge with the same spirit as John, not defeat but relief. There's a freedom in stopping the exhausting project of making yourself the main character.
The chorus asks, "What's death to a risen King?" Paul asked the same thing at the end of 1 Corinthians 15: "O death, where is your victory?" The resurrection makes that question rhetorical. Death had its shot and it lost! The confidence in Lee's song isn't bravado. What we are hearing is someone who knows how the story ends.
The title itself points to the opening words of Psalm 46, where David wrote, "God is our refuge and strength, always ready to help." The Hebrew word for "refuge" can also be translated "fortress." This verse and the image it describes inspired Martin Luther's popular hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," five centuries ago. Trip Lee is standing in a long line of people who found that the only structure that holds is the one they didn't build!
In another video on his social media, Lee used a metaphor to describe the shift "Fortress" invites us to make. His words made a powerful impression on me.
"It's almost like if you're drowning. If you're drowning and the lifeguard jumps in, what you need to do is not keep trying to swim. You need to stay still so the lifeguard can save you. And the more we keep trying to fight and be the strong one, we're getting in the way of God's strength really showing up. And so we saw that in this song. Strength comes through weakness. It's okay to be weak because God is really strong. We wanted to give people those words to be able to sing. God can do anything, and we are feeble until our fortress arrives."
Pause for a moment and consider those words. Stay still. Let the lifeguard do what the lifeguard came to do. The drowning person who keeps thrashing makes it harder for the one who can actually save them. That is what self-sufficiency costs us. We crowd out the very help we need most.
That is the invitation "Fortress" keeps returning to. Stop trying to perform with the strength you don't have. God and His perfect strength show up when we stop pretending He doesn't need to.
Scott Savage is a pastor, author, and speaker who loves tacos, matcha, and sneakers. With more than twenty years of ministry experience, he teaches with a blend of Biblical truth, emotional awareness, and the compassion shaped by his own struggles.
Scott’s writing has impacted over six million readers through trusted platforms such as the YouVersion Bible App, Air1 Radio, and Our Daily Bread. He’s the author of Faith Behind the Song, a 40-day devotional book published by K-Love Books. Whether speaking on a stage or writing on a page, he offers a steady, empathetic voice that reassures people they are seen, loved, and not beyond God's healing reach. Forty thousand subscribers from over fifty countries are excited to read his free newsletter every Tuesday morning. You can join that list today at ScottSavageLive.com!
