Spend any time at all with Greg Mathis, —whose hour-long, Chicago-based “Judge Mathis Show” is seen in more than 130 markets around the country, and you’ll learn first hand the true meaning of redemption. First, his own and then, just as importantly, his quest of redemption for street youth—whom, after a troubled childhood, he still identifies with—and for that matter, just about anyone else in need of it.

“It pains me to think of the hurt I caused my community and my family,” Mathis reflects. “That’s why I’ve made a lifelong commitment to redeeming myself and helping inspire others—especially young people—to redeem themselves and change their lives.”

The Detroit-born and bred former ex-superior court judge’s own redemption came at a hefty price: the emotional toll it took on his mom, a Christian woman who’d raised her four sons in church, and whose death to cancer was the catalyst in a pledge to his mom that served to turn his life around.

Mathis explains, “It was one of her requests that I turn back to church. However, I had felt angry at God for her passing for the next year or two and I found it difficult to embrace the spiritual side of life.”

A key factor in his subsequent transformation was a cousin who had come to mentor him in college.

“He’d grown up in the same church as I had,” Mathis recounts, “and we used to have talks about what my mother would have wanted for me.  I was telling him about my anger and how I felt that God had let me down in the spiritual sense. That I had promised God I would change my life if He’d save my mother from cancer.”

“[My cousin’s] response was that God doesn’t cut deals with people. That the primary principle in spirituality was faith. And you had to have faith. It was him that kind of clarified things for me spiritually and directed me back toward the church. So while I was forced as a child to attend church and live as a Christian, I, in all honesty, made the choice on my own when I became an adult around my second year in college.”

And as part of that transformation, not only did Mathis fulfill the pledge he made to his Mom at the age of seventeen, but after having been jailed several times as a member of one of Detroit’s most notorious gangs as a teen, he went on to become the youngest district court judge in Michigan history.

Mathis’ own brand of “inspirational justice” is rivaled only by his unbridled determination. After making the pledge to his mom to turn his life around, his mother—a nurse’s aide by night, who cleaned houses by day— convinced the trial judge to give him a second chance. As a condition of his probation he was ordered to get a high school equivalency diploma. The following fall, he was admitted to Eastern Michigan University, and in 1987, earned a law degree from the University of Detroit Mercy Law School.

But Mathis’ struggle was hardly over. In fact, it seemed his past had come back to haunt him, and though he passed the bar exam, the Michigan state bar—because of his juvenile record—denied him a license to practice law. It was only after five years of appeals that he prevailed. But that same fighting spirit was what helped him just two years later to unseat a district court judge in a bitterly fought campaign.

It was his streetwise, common sense approach to making sound judgments and his tough (love) yet passionate style of administering them that producers believed would appeal to television audiences that had fast made court shows the most successful genre of TV ever expanding reality-based programming phenomenon.

His success is ever expanding as well. Not only does the two-year old show rank as one of the top three highest rated court shows, but he recently completed a 29-city tour of a stage production he starred in with gospel star Fred Hammond entitled “Been There, Done That”, is prominently featured in a Lincoln-Mercury ad campaign, has a book—”From Gang To Gavel”—due out in the coming months and there’s talk of an HBO biopic.

Still, the 50-year old jurist, who has been married 25 years to wife, Linda, faithfully attends church and is the father of four, hardly considers himself a celebrity.

Instead, Mathis reveals, “Our lives are centered around spiritual principles and I consider myself someone who is gifted, whose been given a gift to share with others.”

What’s more, he prays before each taping and applies his spiritual beliefs in his rulings.

“My power and direction comes from God,” he continues. “I feel empowered to change the lives of others by virtue of the blessings and the power God has instilled in me. All of the wisdom I try to share and the adjudication I lay down is guided by spiritual principles. There are general spiritual principles that many people live by. For instance, “you reap what you sow”. That’s a spiritual principle folks live their lives by everyday whether they know it or not.”

Mathis is also steered by his keen sense of family.

“I had a young man who was suing his parents for delinquent utility bills that they had in his name,” Mathis recalls. “As it turned out, the reason they were delinquent is because they’d spent all their money that year to finance his college education. It bothered me to see that a young man, blessed to still have his parents, would show such disregard and ungratefulness to such a blessing.”

“I ruled, of course, that the parents had to pay the delinquent bill, but I was able to get them to come together and to show him the wisdom in loving and appreciating his parents. And so he agreed voluntarily, to dismiss the case, and they embraced and reconciled after I had a strong discussion with him, to say the least.”

In his spare time, Mathis has authored three books, including a 2008 novel, entitled “Street Judge”, based on a judge who solves murders and was reported to have been working on a video game entitled, Mathis: Detroit Street Judge.

That he has come a long way from the tough, motor city housing project he was raised in Mathis attributes to God’s saving grace.

“What it means to me,” Mathis declares, “is that God has found the grace and mercy to forgive us of all our human frailties and he made the ultimate sacrifice that we might be saved despite ourselves.”