An author who never meant to write a book. A musician who never planned to be a Christian singer-songwriter and worship leader. A meth addict who never wanted to give up meth. A preacher’s son who never intended to forgive. This is Stephen McWhirter. “Radically Restored: How Knowing Jesus Heals Our Brokenness” is McWhirter’s recent release that includes his testimony of how God’s grace brought him out of the darkness and into His light.
“Brokenness” isn’t simply a word in the title; it’s the reason behind the book’s themes of grace and forgiveness. After McWhirter was saved, he had a thought. “If broken people break things, do healed people heal things?” he wondered.
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“I mean, it’s the same concept of forgiveness,” McWhirter noted. “Those who have been forgiven much must forgive much. If I’m a broken person and I break a lot of things around me, the obvious flip side is that I’ve been healed, so now I’m someone who heals things around me and forgives things around me or has grace for things around me, builds people up around me instead of tearing them down.
“I believe this primarily comes from someone who spends time with Jesus. You spend time with Him in His Word. You spend time with Him in prayer. You’re shaped out of that place and not for the sake of what you’ll do on a stage or what you’ll teach somebody, but you — and just you — and Him, right?” McWhirter said.
McWhirter said that as a teen and young adult, he was very good at breaking things. He put his fist through many walls and car radios. He broke relationships with family, employers and friends. Instead of living by, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” he instead lived out the belief, “If it’s broke, keep breaking it.”
He tried just about every drug he could get his hands on. He was arrested for stealing, possession of narcotics and underage drinking seven times before he was 21 years old. He used his musical gifts to play in a hardcore, metal rock band.
There was a reason for this brokenness, the reason he broke everything he touched. His father, a preacher, was also an abuser. His father abused his mother behind the scenes while pretending to have a perfect family in front of others. His family had a rule: Keep the secret that everything was OK, and hide the bruises and the pain at all costs.
Forgiving his father was one of the hardest things that McWhirter ever had to do. Giving up his addictions was nothing in comparison.
“Forgiveness is about a debt — a legitimate debt that people owe you or you owe someone. You have the ability to tear that debt up, just like Jesus did. To the world that’s offensive but it’s the Kingdom, right? It’s the gospel,” he said.
“One of the most massive Kingdom things we can do on this side of eternity is to forgive,” McWhirter continued. “It’s the most hard. It’s the most offensive. It’s also one of the most powerful things we can do. I believe there’s something important on the other side of that.”
‘Awkward’ moments
A week after McWhirter was saved, he drove to his father’s house, entered his bedroom and told him that he forgave him for hurting his mom and for the trauma he put their family through. He told him that he believed Jesus was leading him to forgive.
This didn’t lead to a Hallmark moment. His dad didn’t get up, crying and hugging McWhirter. He just looked shocked and muttered, “OK.”
“I wish forgiving my dad was all God asked me to do. I felt like all of heaven watched my awkward moment of forgiving my dad and was saying, ‘That was crazy!’ And then, like in an infomercial, God shouted, ‘But wait! There’s more!’” McWhirter says in “Radically Restored.”
His fiancee (now wife), Tara, told McWhirter that she believed his dad should baptize them. Then she went even further by saying she thought he should officiate their wedding. Both acts of obedience led to healing father and son.
“Phillippians 2:13 says, ‘For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases Him.’ There is this part of His grace that’s like, ‘Hey, I don’t want to do this, so You’ve got to do it through me, and You have to help me believe that You can,” McWhirter said.
Perfect sacrifice
And God did.
There were many other times when McWhirter said, “I don’t want to do this. I need You to do it for me.
“There’s a million, million instances of my life where I was like, man, I don’t want to do this, but You’re going to tell me (to) forgive my dad, write the book. … My own testimony is like, I want to quit all this addiction, but there’s no way I can. You’re going to have to help me do it. You’re going to have to do it.
“You know, it’s a constant thing. This is why you have Him in you because on your own, you literally can’t do it. You couldn’t save yourself. You weren’t a sinless, perfect sacrifice. He was.”
To learn more about McWhirter, go to https://worshipjesus.life/.
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