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.”

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.”