By India McCarty
Christian artist Zach Williams recently shared the “turning point” in his faith that completely changed his life.
“When I first got married, I was in a rock band at the time, and I was living a completely different lifestyle. A lot of drugs and alcohol back in those days for me,” he said during a conversation on the “Dad Tired” podcast. “My first few years of marriage, I was not living for Jesus.”
In 2012, Williams was preparing to head out on tour when his wife told him “If you can’t make some changes, we’re [she and the couple’s children] not going to stick around for this anymore.’”
“I was a week or so into the tour and I was just like, ‘God, if You’re out there, if You’re real, prove it,’” he said.
A few days later, while the band was riding on the bus, the song “Redeemed” by Big Daddy Weave came on the radio.
“[I] went to my hotel room and looked up the song and the lyrics, and it just completely changed my life,” Williams recalled.
After the tour was over, Williams quit the band and canceled all his shows, choosing to dedicate his life to Christ.
“We never looked back, and that was kind of the turning point,” he said. “Within a year, I started working for a church, leading worship, and then the whole ‘Nashville, writing songs’ — that kind of birthed out of that season and I ended up getting a record deal at 38 years old. I’d been chasing that dream for 20 years, and it just kind of happened when I stopped looking for it.”
Related: Zach Williams Reveals the Christian Song That Brought Him Back to God
Williams spoke about that moment in greater detail in an interview with CBN, saying, “I was asking God to just come and save me from this life I had created. I just remember feeling this immediate relief and for the first time, not feeling like I had somebody sitting on my chest. It was like this breath that I could breathe.”
“I never turned back and wanted to go backwards. God started revealing Himself to me and showing me this plan that He has had for my life all along,” he continued. “He’s allowed my story to be something that I can share with people and to show people the goodness of who God is and what He can do with somebody’s life.”
Zach Williams has also spoken about his relationship with God and how it changed over time.
“When I was growing up as a kid in church, I had this completely other idea who I thought God was,” Williams told Songwriter Universe. “I thought He just sat on his throne all day with his arms crossed, like a judge and jury, shaking his head at everything I did wrong. I didn’t truly understand who God was, or what He had done for me, until I started having my own children.”
He continued, “And you realize when you become a father, you think about how many chances you’re willing to give your child and how much you love them. And when you hear the stories and you know what God’s done for us and the love that He had for us, there’s no way I can send my son to go die for the sins of the world. But God loved us so much that He did that, and Jesus chose to do that because he loved us. And for me, when I think of God now, that’s the Heart of God.”
Zach Williams’ faith journey is an inspiring example of the ways God can change our lives once we open our hearts to Him.
Read Next: Zach Williams Shares Testimony: ‘God Had a Plan from Day One’
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