With his new CD, Free to Live, Josh Lopez has set high goals. “I wanted the record to be something with substance,” Lopez elaborates. “Hopefully, at the end of the day it will inspire people to get behind a cause. People listen to a record and say, ‘Oh, I really love that song. This is great. He’s got a great CD.’ That’s all great and we love that. But if we can make a difference in a child’s life with the record, that’s more important to me. This is what God wanted us to do with this record. Apart from encouraging people with the songs, we want to inspire people to dream big and help the children dream big.”

When the Son sets us free, The Bible tells us, we are free indeed. And that incredible spiritual truth makes every believer free to live the abundant life. But it’s awfully hard to appreciate God’s amazing liberation on an empty stomach – especially if you are a poor young child that cannot see beyond your dire circumstances. Such shockingly impoverished living conditions inspired Lopez to combine video footage from his recent Bolivia trip with Food for the Hungry, with his first single, “Mi Salvador, Mi Dios”. Lopez has a soft heart for these less fortunate ones, you see, because knows firsthand what it means to go without. “I was the hungry in Austin, TX,” Lopez explains. “My family and I were very poor. My dad always worked about three jobs, and there were six kids. There were numerous occasions where we found ourselves homeless. The organizations that do missions for the inner city and also Latin America…I really have a heart for that because I’ve been there and tasted a little bit of what it is to be a helpless child.”

“Mi Salvador, Mi Dios” ought to at least sound familiar to most Christian music fans because it is a Spanish version of Aaron Shust’s worshipful “My Savior, My God”. “In Spanish, it conveys a message that I think Latin America really, really needs to hear,” Lopez says. “It’s about the grace of God. It’s about what He’s done for us, the finished work of the cross. Not so much about all the perfect things that we do, but more about what He’s done for us on the cross.”

Of course, much of what man does in this life is far from perfect. And dealing with life’s inherent imperfections is specifically addressed with the CD’s title cut. “Before writing that song I was going through a lot of things dealing with getting past my fears,” Lopez explains. “It’s about just accepting God’s freedom that He’s already given us with the finished work of the cross and really stepping out and holding my head up high and saying, ‘Hey, I can fulfill the dream God’s placed in my heart.’”

Before he could stand tall and dedicate himself to Christian music, Lopez experienced secular success with the Latin pop group Jaquemate (Spanish for “checkmate”). This musical fame came shortly after he’d had a severe falling out with his father, one that prompted him to leave home young, and it ultimately took the insightful love of another family member to show him that there’s so much more to success than just pop stardom. “I thought that if I would get some type of success, that that would be the answer to all the hurt that I was going through,” he recalls. “I felt like I was achieving a lot, but at the end of the day I was very empty. My older sister, Ruth, came down to Puerto Rico out of the blue, and I thought she was going to be impressed with my life and say, ‘Wow, you’ve done good for yourself.’ But she looked straight into my eyes and she said, ‘Josh, you’re so miserable. You’re hurting so much.’ And it just hit me so hard because she saw past the façade. She then portrayed the message of Christ to me in a way that I had never heard it before. It had more to do with what He had done on the cross for me, and not as much as what I could do for Him.”

This pivotal encounter led to a radical change in Lopez’s life. “I broke down in a one bedroom apartment and gave my life to Christ,” he recounts. “I moved back to Texas and went to a concert where Israel Houghton was opening up, and after listening to him, decided that was my call – I was going to lead others to Christ with music and be a worship leader. That’s what I wanted to with the rest of my life.”

Lopez knows what he’s singing about when he proclaims that we are free to live. He’s been down to the bottom, homeless, and up to the top, among the few who have found pop music success, and found that neither circumstance – whether high or low -- offered a true road to freedom. But when his sister Ruth looked him in the eye and immediately recognized his spiritual emptiness, he knew right then and there that these chains, which had been around his heart all this time, were no match for his heavenly Liberator. Free to Live is the record of substance that it is because God has made substantive changes is Lopez’s life. He is now free to live the life God has always had set out for him. Freely he has received, to paraphrase the scriptures, so freely he now gives. “It was what I was created to do,” he explains. “It’s leading people to Christ. It’s worshipping God with all your heart.”