There's something about worship music when I don't know if it's a softening of the heart or opening of the heart I'm convinced there's something about drawing near to God that's going to keep you open it to some

some degree. Welcome to the Jesus Calling podcast.

Today's guests share the indelible power

that music has to heal our hopes and hearts.

Worship leader Matt Redmond and singer-songwriter Mark Schultz.

Grammy winning worship leader Matt Redmond has traveled all over the world bringing people

together in song. Along the way he has sung in venues such as Madison Square Garden,

Wembley Stadium, as well as recording an iconic studio such as Abbey Road in London and capital records in LA. as through music for saving his life during an extremely difficult time. My name is

Matt Redmond. I was born in the UK. I currently live in California with my wife

Beth and our five kids. We've got one daughter and four boys from the age of

19 down to 10 and so it's never a boring moment and we love doing life.

Sometimes people ask me why do you write songs or how did you start writing songs and the reason was because I needed to I needed to talk to God I needed to cry out to God and music seemed like a really powerful way to do that.

When I was seven years old I lost my father he actually took his own life and that was

obviously a crazyly hard thing to take in and process at the time but then things didn't get much better. Some abuse happened to me in my teenage years. The guy who did that ended up

going to jail and it was a crazy turbulent time

But the thing that was keeping me sane and stable was my faith and particularly

Faith expressed through music. So I started playing music

because I wanted to sing some of the songs we were singing at church. What actually happened was a group came over from America a month after my dad died and they

brought this wonderful new expression of worship music. And for me it was so captivating. I couldn't have summed it up at the time, but I guess the dynamic that I was seeing was the people of God in the presence of God pouring out the praises of God.

There was something so appealing about what these guys were doing.

And so from that moment on, I loved Worship Music.

I remember the first song I ever led, it was There is a Redeemer by melody green and it was just

...