ICYMI. Mike Todd Says Jesus Never Reached His Potential
Pastor Mike Todd leads Transformation Church (TC.) He is known for crowd surfing during his church’s worship service and spending a lot of money. In the last two years, he’s given away $3,500,000 in houses, cash, and cars, spent $65,000 to buy 168 pairs of shoes, gave $600,000 in “reparations,” and purchased $66,000,000 in real estate.
He’s also known for preaching some good old-fashioned Modalism, giving the world perhaps the grossest illustration in church after he snorted and then hocked a loogie full of spit and snot into his hand and rubbed it in another man’s face and claiming his church had 75k salvations in the last 18 months even though practically none of them stuck around. He recently had a service where ballet dancers with bare butts danced around the stage.
During the 2019 VOUS Conference 2019, pastors Rich Wilkerson Jr., Chad Veach, and Mike Todd collaborated on the message “Scared but Prepared,” where Todd make the startling claim that Jesus never reached his potential.
And this is one of the thoughts I want to end with if it’s okay. Jesus never reached his potential. Now I know this is messing with a lot of people’s theology. Cause since I’ve been young, everybody’s like ‘Mike, you need to reach your potential. Everything that God said and put inside of you, it needs to happen.’
But when I studied the scriptures, he never reached his potential. When he died upon the cross, he said three words, he said, ‘It is finished.’ What was finished? Not his potential, because he had the potential to overthrow Caesar. He had the potential to be a Roman guard, he had the potential to do all kinds of stuff.
The thing that was finished was his purpose. And if you don’t follow the pace of God, if you don’t have perseverance in hard times, if you don’t get patient, you spend your life trying to fulfill your potential and you’ll die never reaching your purpose.
The only way we get ‘well done good and faithful servant’ is not if we did everything we could do. It’s if we did the thing that God called us to do
Jesus’ purpose was to die on the cross for our sins. John 3:16 states, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life, demonstrating that the ‘full potential’ of the Savior was to achieve the goal of ‘believing’ folk receiving eternal life. Since we know this is true- that all who believe in him will be saved- saying that Jesus didn’t reach his potential is heretical and blasphemous.
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Maybe not the best choice of words, and I’m not defending everything Todd says or does, but in this instance, what he’s trying to say is not wrong. He could’ve taken it further and noted that potential and purpose are often at odds. If a man wants to sell his soul, he can be a millionaire just about overnight. There are many things we could do, few things we should do. The greater achievement is not being all you can be by the world’s standards. It’s being what God wants you to be. Jesus, being God, could’ve done anything He wanted. The fact that He willingly chose to die, even though He did not have to do so, is what makes the Gospel the Gospel.
Purpose being God’s purpose. God’s purpose being according to God’s standards. It means to honor the Lord no matter the cost.
The problem is that Todd doesn’t practice what he’s preaching.
Exactly. Jesus asked if it was possible to take this from Him but He said ‘never the less not my will but thy will be done.’
Todd and many like him only want their desires fulfilled and then they lie and put Gods stamp of approval in it.
Yep, I believe some reach that point of compromise as a matter of trying to justify their millions in ill-gotten gains. In an effort to avoid being a hypocrite they try to tell everyone else “you can do it too”.
The fact is that God may indeed want some of us to be poor in order to serve His purpose. We need look no farther than Jesus and several of the Apostles to verify that fact. God has promised to meet our legitimate needs in this life, but not our wants.
That’s a message a wealthy preacher will have a hard time preaching. Wealth isn’t wrong in and of itself, but it does make things more difficult – about like trying to fit a camel through a tiny gate called the eye of the needle.
I’m not a preacher and never will be, but a poor guy like me can say such things, where a wealthy person will have trouble getting the point across without coming across like they’re just trying to keep other people down and beneath them. That ends up with a back and forth focused on the temporal here and now. Start talking about laying up treasures in heaven, and you’ll tick off all sides
Todd’s remarks show his total lack of understanding of what Christ’s sacrifice was all about. This WoF heresy breeds blasphemous conclusions. Years ago my dad stood in my living room and angrily asked me if I thought Jesus died on the cross so people could be broke!
I shook my head and told him he was messed up.
Todd is stupid and evil. Christ did everything His Father had purposed for Him. His potential is NEVER measured by what worldings like Todd imagine. And now He sits at the right hand of His Father and rules and over rules nations…like the Roman empire. The God/man was King of kings and Lord of lords from all eternity. The idea that Christ has somehow not fulfilled His potential is just a blaspheme uttered by a man who really doesn’t study the scriptures.
Technically, His potential is infinite. It has no limit. And for that reason it is beyond measure.
I would never use the the word, either as an adjective or noun, to describe anything related to God. It is the idea of becoming. God is never becoming anything, He is perfect in all His being and attributes, and works.
When He became flesh, His purpose in doing so was finite, and it was finished when He said “it is finished”
A better perspective might be to say that His purpose, being God, is also infinite. It is infinitely larger than the purpose for which He became flesh. But as flesh, He willingly undertook and completed a finite mission, even though He had and has infinite power, knowledge, authority to do otherwise. He did not have to do it.
It’s just as wrong to say that finite mission fulfilled His infinite potential. That puts a limit on His potential, where no limit exists.
Because the the work of redemption might be described as “finite” doesn’t indicate that it wasn’t a perfect work. The work of redemption did not have the potential to be better.
Right, on that I agree.
I would ask, what greater thing on earth could Jesus have done to show that He fulfilled His potential? I would think there was no greater achievement than to save His elect from their sins. It seems that idiots like Todd think there is something greater thing Jesus could have done than that. My aching head.
We’re a bit too much into nitpicking semantics. Of course His work was perfect and complete. But that is not the sole purpose of the existence of God the Son, and it is not all that He is capable of doing. He did not lose His infinite capability when He became flesh.
He has always been and always will be. He’s much more than the 33 years He became flesh. Infinitely more.
We sing, He could’ve called ten thousand angels. He had the potential – the capability – to call ten thousand angels (and to do an infinitude of other things). But he willingly did not do so, specifically in order to fulfill the purpose for which He became flesh, and to make His work perfect and complete.
As I said in the first post, purpose and potential (capability) are often at odds.
I believe I’m just going to quit.
There are many things that Todd should be rebuked for. And it’s very rare for me to disagree with Protestia, but this article I believe is a bit too much in the category of semantic nitpicking.
I do not believe that Todd meant Jesus work was incomplete or imperfect. He needs to be rebuked for many things, but I don’t believe that’s what he meant in this case.
I’m afraid I have to disagree. I’ve seen and heard enough of Todd to know he’s TOTALLY unqualified to be any kind of Christian minister or elder. He has continually manifested lowly thoughts and words about God/Christ. He should be sitting in the pews learning from godly preachers, not standing up in front of goats spewing nonsense. This guy is way past being rebuked, he should be excommunicated and handed over to Satan until he repents of his heresies. Would you actually sit under this guy? I doubt anyone here would, I certainly wouldn’t. He’s like the poster boy for everything wrong in evangelicalism.
I can’t disagree with your assessment of him. But I’m not willing to accuse a man of something he’s not actually guilty of doing, even if he is a total apostate. There’s no need for it, particularly since the known facts are plenty enough.
For example, if we are given a purpose to add 2+2, most of us can pretty much perfectly fulfill that task. That doesn’t mean adding 2+2 is the only thing we’re capable of doing. And saying that adding 2+2 is not our full capability in no way takes away from the fact that we perfectly added 2+2.
Trying to achieve and do all we’re capable of in this life can cause us to veer away from God’s purpose for us. It can cause us to get caught up in the temporal things of this world, laying up treasure on earth that moth and rust doth corrupt.
I believe that’s what he was trying to say. As I said, he doesn’t practice that preaching, but I believe that’s what he meant.
He may be trying to say something profitable, but he evidently doesn’t have any real ability to preach from the text of the bible. As an example, he thinks that explaining the Trinity as the 3 states of water is a good thing. It’s something a well versed 10 year old would see through it. In fact, and you probably know this, it’s modalism…a damnable heresy. But yet his knowledge of the bible is so deficient that that’s what he was left with. I have never heard this guy actually be able to exegete any scripture, he just does motivational pep talks. I wouldn’t even call it fluff. My pastor had to actually know Greek and Hebrew to graduate from seminary, he had to be called by a presbytery, voted on by the congregation.
I would also add that this comparing His/our potential to His/our purpose is an exercise in non-biblical teaching. The scriptures never make any of these comparisons. A person, I suppose, could make the argument that we have the “potential” to become better people through the sanctifying power of the Spirit, but that should come through a good explanation of the Spirit’s work in us, rather than some made nonsense about Jesus’ potential and purpose dichotomy.
Believe I am indeed going to quit, go silent, lay low and try to survive like everybody else. If there are any posts after this thread, which use the name tekton, they are coming from a different individual.