How Darren Mulligan Knows His Musical Gift Comes from God
By Movieguide® Contributor
We Are Messengers member Darren Mulligan used to use music for the glorification of self, and it was only after God radically entered his life that he knew that his gift was because of Him and for Him.
“My mom and dad bought me a little red and white Fender Stratocaster knockoff guitar when I was thirteen, and it absolutely changed my world,” Mulligan explained on the “Jesus Calling” podcast. “…I fell in love with guitar and fell in love with that raw, raucous noise that you could make.”
“…As I got older and became a teenager, being good couldn’t keep me from my own sin. I fell into things I was very ashamed of: promiscuity and drunkenness and violence and blasphemy. And eventually, it led me to agnosticism and atheism,”
When Mulligan recognized the bleakness in his life, he sold his guitars because he thought they led him to where he was.
“It was a very small view of God that He couldn’t use the gifts He had given me, and He couldn’t keep me from my sin,” he said. And so a couple of years later, I started playing guitar again. In my early twenties, I was playing in hardcore bands and screamo bands.”
“[I] spent about three years in my early twenties touring around America and playing at dive bars, living off Wendy’s and McDonald’s dollar menus,” the Ireland native continued. “I learned what it looked like to be a grinder and work hard and survive off very little.”
In his mid-twenties, things got worse. He started to date Heidi, who he is now married to, but then abandoned her after a 10-year relationship.
“I was finding myself sleeping with strange women in cars in strange places,” he recalled. “And I was causing a lot of damage to people. I was very manipulative, just very, very broken.”
“And I used alcohol, I guess, to allow me to sing the way I wanted to sing,” the 43-year-old said. “I was a pretty poor example of what a man should look like, and that girlfriend of mine, Heidi, had this incredible encounter with Jesus in Dublin in 2006, and she fully gave her life to Christ in response to His calling.”
He remembered how dramatic the change in her was. It was hard for him to see because he felt jealous of her happiness.
“I didn’t want her to be happy because I was absolutely miserable. And, you know, misery loves company. But what I later found out in life is that joy needs a friend too, you know?” he said.
Heidi persuaded Mulligan to attend church, and he started to go with her every week.
“One day at my little church meeting, I was hearing the pastor preach the same message he had preached for months about the death and resurrection of Jesus, about my sin and the need for a Savior and repentance,” he said. “And for the first time in my life, I realized that this Jesus was real.”
In that moment, Jesus felt so real that he could almost touch Him.
“And in my mind, Jesus became so concrete, so real, so solid, that instantly all of my sin just condemned me massively in His presence. And so I came to Jesus out of absolute terror. Absolute terror,” he repeated.
“But what’s beautiful about that is that I started a journey towards reading the scriptures. And the more I read the Bible, the more my terror faded and was replaced with a kind of gratitude and a thankfulness and a hopefulness,” he said.
It was a year after he married Heidi that God told him to confess all of his sins to her.
“So I went home and I told her about affairs and shameful things. And I waited for this wonderful lady to push me away. Because in my experience, when you do bad things, people reject you,” he said.
“Or when you disappoint them, they reject you and push you away. But she had been with Jesus and she didn’t reject me,” he said. “She put her arms around me and told me she loved me and forgave me.
Then, she did something he never expected. She kissed him.
Her forgiveness helped him have a love for Jesus.
“…because the words that I had read in the Bible were proved to be true by the actions of my wife,” the musician said.
“There’s a lot of areas in my life that I’ve messed up, nearly every area — being a father, being a husband, being a follower, being a man,” he said. And it’s the grace of God that I rely on so heavily. But one area I’ve kept really pure and true all these years is songwriting and the performance of those songs.”
He said, “Walking with Jesus over the last few years, I find that I have this joy in my life that I only thought was for other people. I always thought joy was something that other people had, but it couldn’t be for this Irishman, you know? Couldn’t be for me”
Mulligan discovered that the bad and sorrowful things in his life are “not things to be avoided” because Jesus is with him throughout everything in life.
“Romans 5:3 says that suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance leads to character, and character leads to hope, and hope does not put us to shame. I think of my musical ability. That’s something that Jesus was sculpting in me long before I knew it was Him,” he said.
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“When Jesus rescued me, I tried to fill my life with being good and with being self-righteous and with being holier than thou,” Mulligan said. “What I found was that left me just as miserable as living the life of debauchery.”
“…My good deeds as a Christian couldn’t be purchased through trying to be bad or trying to be good. My joy could only be found in walking close enough to Jesus that I learn to love what He loves,” he said.
Mulligan learned how to be more like Jesus and tries to walk with him with every step.
“I learned to do what He does, and I learned to listen like He listens. And so I never want to be too far ahead of Him. There’s no joy there. I never want to be so far behind that I can’t hear Him. There’s no joy there,” he said.
He continued, “But joy is right there with Jesus in the scriptures through the Holy Spirit, the steady presence of God in my life. It is the joy of the Lord that is our strength. When I see that this music is acting as something that they can hold onto, I recognize that I’m much too poor of a human to have accomplished that. Jesus is the center, and we all revolve around Him.”
On June 15, the artist shared a short version of his testimony on Instagram and shared his relief to do tours on the band’s “terms.”
The band used to tour for 30 weeks out of the year.
He said. “We’ve went from being pushed around to doing this on our terms, cutting back to 16 weeks gone a year and watching shows sell out all over the world…Thank you, Jesus.”