Pop superstar Justin Bieber opened up on his relationship with God in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe last week, in which Grammy-winner underscored the “free gift” of accepting Jesus.

“The way I look at my relationship with God and with Jesus is, I’m not trying to earn God’s love by doing good things,” said the 25-year-old Bieber. “God has already loved me for who I am before I did anything to earn and deserve it.”

“It’s a free gift by accepting Jesus, and just giving your life to Him,” Bieber insisted. “And what he did is the gift, the forgiveness is the thing that we look at and, ‘I’m going to worship you, God, because you gave me something so good.’”

Bieber, who recently returned to music after a five-year hiatus, released the solo single “Yummy” on January 3, 2020, which debuting at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The following month, he released his fifth studio album, Changes, on February 14, 2020.

Baptized in 2014 by Pentecostal pastor Carl Lentz of Hillsong Church New York, Bieber told Apple Music last week that he tries to live more by love than by rules.

“And so you live that life of like, ‘I don’t want to cheat on my wife, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because I don’t want to hurt her,’ see the difference there?” he said.

In the interview, Bieber also talked about his past self-destructive behavior — which included accusations of vandalism, DUI, and resisting arrest — crediting God and good Christian role models with his recovery.

“I don’t know if I’d be alive, for sure. It was dark, really dark,” said the Canadian-born artist. “So I’m very, very grateful to have influences in my life that have played a huge part in me seeing their relationship with Jesus and their relationship with their wives, and their relationship with their kids, and saying, ‘That’s what I want,’ and I’m striving after that.”

“So I was thinking too, obviously when we want to be successful in certain things, there’s things we have to work hard at,” Bieber mused. “But striving for God’s love, or God’s approval, or people’s approval, it’s like God’s told me, He said — I mean I don’t hear from God audibly — but I feel like God’s, when he sees us, he’s not this God that a lot of people think, that like judgmental, and he’s a God that accepts us for who we are, and loves us through our pain and through our dirt.”

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