Oklahoma Pastor Michael Todd of Transformation Church got his hair cut and his beard shaved by a barber onstage during his sermon on Sunday to demonstrate to his congregation how submitting themselves to being shaped by God leads to the bearing of godly fruit in their lives.
“I just came to tell somebody that the Church has … done a bad job in this last season of emphasizing how comfortable serving God would be,” Todd said in his sermon as his longtime barber cut his hair.
“I need to say this to you, like ‘just come to God and all your fears and all your tears, and He bottles them, and He’s going to coddle them.’ And we make you feel like when you come to God, then somehow it gets easy. … I just want to let you know that our desire for comfort has made us despise His cut.”
“You think if God tells you ‘no,’ you’re getting punished instead of if God tells you ‘no,’ He’s protecting you. You think if God doesn’t allow you to get the position you prayed for that somehow, He hasn’t heard your cry, but He actually is answering the prayer you didn’t know how to form with your lips by not letting you get into a position that you would be locked into because He knows you’re a people-pleaser and if you got that position, you wouldn’t leave there for 15 years. And three years from now, He’s going to open up the actual destiny step that you need. So, He told you ‘no’ now to lead you to the place of purpose,” he said.
“But if you desire comfort at the expense of desiring the cut, not from anybody, just regular, I’m talking about from God, you will miss out on what God has for you.”
Todd, who wore hot-pink pants and a light pink polo shirt to the stage, highlighted his work in the gym to illustrate the message he grounded in Matthew 7:18-20 and John 15:1-3.
“I was on the beach, praise report, I felt more comfortable in swim clothes than I ever have in my life. Now, some of you all won’t shout with me, but you weren’t with me when I was 275. I was so ready to take my shirt off. … I’m just serious. I was like, ‘What are we wearing today, baby?’ I was getting my bathing suits ready, and I wanted to color coordinate. ‘I want you wearing pink today,'” he said, mimicking his wife’s voice. “I wear pink today. …. What I realized is my comfort on the beach came from the cutting in the gym. Your comfort comes from a place of cutting. You want comfort in your marriage; go get that cutting at counseling.”
“You want … comfort in your finances … cut the budget. Everybody wants comfort, nobody wants cutting, but the cut … gives you the edge. And this haircut by the end of this service, by the faith and crazy faith of God, will be sharp because what He’s doing to me right now; He’s cutting me,” he said, referencing his barber.
“[He] is shaping me into the image of what he sees for me because I can’t see it for myself.”
Todd argued that some people will try to take God’s place in shaping their own lives, but the results will never be the same without His direction.
Todd is well known for his illustrative messages on stage.
In 2022, he apologized to his more than 1.8 million fans across social media after receiving backlash for wiping globs of spit on the face of a man he identified as his little brother during a sermon.
“It’s never my intention to distract others from God’s Word and the message of Jesus … even with illustrations! I apologize for my example being too extreme and disgusting!” he said in a statement on X.
In that message, Todd referenced the Bible verse Mark 8:23, which highlights the story of Jesus healing a blind man at Bethsaida by spitting into his eyes privately.
Todd highlighted how Jesus chose not to spit in the blind man’s face publicly. However, Todd’s actions during the service seemed contrary to how Jesus handled the situation with the man in Bethsaida. He hawked loogies from his throat into his hand three times before wiping them over his brother’s eyes in front of the congregation.
“I watched it back, and it was disgusting. Like, that was gross. I want to validate everybody’s feelings. That was a distraction from what I was really trying to do — trying to make the word come alive and make people see the story,” Todd said in his apology video.
“It [the demonstration] got too live, and I own that, and I just want to make sure people know that we want to help people. We want people to see Jesus. We want people to feel loved. We want people who are desperate to be able to find hope.”
Contact: [email protected] Follow Leonardo Blair on Twitter: @leoblair Follow Leonardo Blair on Facebook: LeoBlairChristianPost
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