What are you using to be ok? with Michael Todd

October 15, 2020

Jennie Allen

Bible teacher, founder of IF:Gathering

You are about to love, love, love this guest - Mike Todd is in the house! 

I'm excited to be here this morning!

You know what - here's what you have to know about Mike. He is one of those people you meet and he's your best friend from the second you meet him. That's how I feel about you. I feel like you're my brother and it happened really fast. We bonded and then I was like, "Mike, I need you in my life." He was pastoring me, and he's younger than me, and he was rocking my world about rest. I wish we were talking about that today, I'll have you back on and talk about that another day, but today we're talking about coping. If you look around today, the world is a wreck. We're kind of in chaos and disarray. I know this: the number 1 thing we all go to is coping. It's just human. I have watched your stuff on pornography and I'l telling you, it is world changing. If you have not gotten his book on relationships, you have to get it here. Everything is connected. Our emotions, our thoughts, our relationships, our behaviors. It's all wound up. You can't piece out one of those things.

So let's talk about this today. We're going to get real and you're going to love it. Let's go. Let's talk about how coping is going today with everything out of control. What is coping and why do we do it? Why do we go to that?

The thing is we fall back to our natural desires when we don't have direction. That's the thing most people don't realize. You don't have to teach a kid to be bad. They come out selfish. It's the natural state of a person, because we were all born into this fallen world. The thing everybody has to understand is when you start coping, you really lose focus on the thing, the goal, the idea that you had, and you fall back to nature. All of our nature is usually lower than where we want to actually be. When I'm trying to go on my weight loss journey and exercise and do all of these different things and I lose focus of the goal, I don't go eat kale chips! I don't go and have quinoa! I want a double cheeseburger, cake, ice cream, Bluebell cookies and cream! I fall back to my nature. When you fall back to your nature, what you're trying to do is to temporarily feel better about a situation you feel like you can't control. That's what coping is. It's an attempt to temporarily feel better about a situation you feel like you can't control. In 2020, as there are so many situations that feel like they're out of our control - racial issues, political issues, financial issues, virus issues - you might ask, "what can I control?" You can control how you feel. When people say feel, you should replace that word with flesh. Your feelings are just an allowed version of what your flesh wants. Many times that's what we fall back to. When we cope, we're asking ourselves, "what does my flesh want?" That's why you can go have sex with somebody and not even like that person. That's why you can take this quick business deal that you don't even believe in. That's why you can go binge eat or binge watch or get stuck on that Target app or Amazon app. Because what does your flesh want in the moment? Something to control. I really believe it's time for us to get a new focus. We still have some months that this could turn around and be the best year of our lives! But it's going to take us to stop coping and get concentrated. When we get concentrated on something, there's some amazing things that can happen in that. 

I love what you're saying, because you're saying we're going to go this direction. If we don't interrupt it and stop it and change something, this is the route we're going to take, because it's the least resistant. 

It's the current of human nature! Until we intentionally - that's the thing I ask people all the time, "what's the greatest gift that God gave you?" There's all kinds of different answers that people say, but I truly believe the greatest thing God gave us was choice. He gave us choice. When he gave us choice, he even says in his word, "I present to you today life and death." He gives us the answer to the test! Choose life! That's the answer! But we still have choice. I think for everybody that's listening right now, I believe this moment is to help you choose to interrupt the pattern. To choose to not just let the rest of the year happen to you, but you happen to it. To choose to allow God to come in and intervene and be the one to help you get a new focus on what he's called you to do. When you do that, you interrupt the plan that I really believe the enemy has for us, as well as the plan that our nature just takes us back to. I believe that God did not just create us to survive, he created us to thrive. But he can not do that without our participation. It's time to make a choice. 

Let's talk about whether coping is ever a good thing - is it? Is there ever a coping that's okay?

You know, I'm not going to speak for everybody. Maybe somebody has found a situation, because I know many times, coping is a defensive mechanism. There are some people who are in really bad situations. I've counseled people and been around people who have been in situations that without their coping mechanism, they would not have survived that season. So I don't want to say there's never a time where coping comes in. I believe God can use all things if you let him. I do think if we rely on those things as a foundation forever, they will fault us somewhere down the road. 

Let's talk about that. What happens down the road? If we escape our pain and don't deal with it, what happens over time? 

I tell people all the time that pain is inevitable. It's going to happen to everybody. It doesn't matter if you're a pastor or preacher. It doesn't matter if you're a stay at home mom who is championing the kid. You're going to experience pain. I tell people that pain hurts more when it's pointless. When you don't actually find the reason and meaning and why and dig deeper into the root of it, and you just stay on the coping mechanism level, but you don't go down and find out why you're coping and where that started - it hurts more. You never find the purpose in it. I'm encouraging people that there's no judgment for where you're at. Some people go to alcohol, some people go to shopping, some people go to networking and being in the in crowd, or their children are their coping mechanism. They put all their attention, energy, Etsy projects, everything on their kids, and they become the mechanism to feel okay about themselves. All I'm saying is, wherever you're at today, is there something deeper? If it's something that's just helping you maintain - the word maintain is the connotation that it is nursing it to death. You can't maintain a car. We know as soon as you drive it off the lot, all you're going to be doing is nursing it until it doesn't work anymore. That's what I feel like a coping mechanism is. It may be able to get you down the road a little further, but at some point, it's going to lead you to something that won't work anymore. That's why it's a sad situation that sometimes we make it such a part of us, we don't know anything but that. Then down the road, in 15 years, when our kids leave the house, something breaks. It's because you're coping mechanism is no longer able to take you further. That's why I'm always encouraging people, no matter where you are, it's okay to have a coping mechanism. All of us have them in some areas and in some form, but look and see what's under that or you'll never be able to actually find the real problem. 

Okay talk a little bit about your story and journey with this.

Man, how much time do we have? There's so many different areas and facets, but I'll talk about my relationship right now. I have the most beautiful wife in the world - her name is Natalie. We've been married for 10 years and the crazy thing is we are high school sweethearts. I met her and we started dating when she was 14 and I was 15. It was the most beautiful love story ever until I started letting culture and people's ideas and what the world said come in. When I was 21ish, I started thinking, "how could I commit to this one girl without experiencing these other things?" So I call it my 10 months of insanity. I went out and dated other people, messed around with people, and it devastated her. It made her start going and doing stuff and trying to cope with the hurt and the pain that I had caused. That 10 months of insanity cost 10 years of trust building. I need everybody to hear me say this right now: 10 months cost me 10 years. I'm going to tell you about the gateway that tried to destroy my life when we were in that process of trying to build up and get back together. We were having sex outside of marriage even though we knew we shouldn't have been doing that. Now I'm trying to do the right thing and not have sex with her, and I end up going to pornography. It became a coping mechanism. I was so twisted and perverted in my mind that I thought it was a better option than actually doing it. That's how the enemy will mess you up. What it was doing was placing images in my mind and heart that would become the playlist or the idea that I would be trying to fulfill in my life. Those perverted images and thoughts began to ravage the way I saw everybody I came in contact with. It began to try and make me forfeit the call of God on my life. It was so bad, because I thought, "I can't have this, so I need to do something to make me feel better." What I really needed was a real relationship with Christ. But I went to the counterfeit to make me feel better. That thing literally laid under every success I had, every step I moved forward, there was still this sludge. Even when it looked like I was doing good things, I knew. I knew what was under there. It wasn't until I had to come clean with everybody. What ended happening was, long story short, Natalie and I are back together and headed towards marriage. But because of that pornography, I cheated on her a year before we were about to get married. What happened right there is it destroyed everything. The young lady I cheated with told Natalie, and I tell people all the time that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It made me go down lower than my coping mechanism. I knew after that pornography wasn't the issue. It was some insecurity in me. There was a void that was bigger than the coping mechanism. That's what people try to do - they try to blame the thing they go to. It's the alcohol! It's this or that! Honestly it's usually something on the inside of us that may be too hurtful to talk about or we may not want to identify, but when I got found out in that season, it made me go to the root of it. The root of it was an insecure little pre-teen that was chubby and not liked my girls, and wanted to feel special, wanted, and needed. I had to deal with all of that crap. The only way I could was coming clean and having accountability. I needed Christ at the center of my mess. I didn't see any future. I just thought I was about to lose the best thing that ever happened to me, because I was coping with pornography that then made me want to experience something that was illegal! It messed up everything in my life. The reason I'm so passionate right now is I know that I could have stayed - I talk to guys all the time who are 40, 50, 60, 70 years old that are still at the coping mechanism of pornography. That's my story, but I don't know what everybody's situation is. But whatever it is, it's deeper than whatever coping mechanism you're using. 

I want to stay here on the pornography thing, because it is rampant. Coming out of quarantine, are we going to keep coping for the next 10 years or are we going to deal with our stuff? I think this is a powerful moment to deal with our stuff. I want you to talk a little bit more on that, because your teaching, what I love Mike is you're telling the whole truth. You're fighting this. This isn't something that you're willing to sweep under the rug of the church. I think the numbers show that this has to happen. With all of our coping mechanisms, but today, since that's your story, I want you to talk specifically to people fighting that. Men and women of all different ages are listening right now and they struggle with it, or they have a kid that struggles with it. So speak really plainly and talk about fighting that specific struggle.

What you have to understand is the enemy's whole plan for humanity is to pervert what God says is good. It goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden where he says, "you can eat of any tree in the whole garden, just not this one." The enemy comes to pervert it. The word wicked just means to twist, and that's all the enemy is doing. He's putting a little perversion in there, because if you go just a degree off of the straight and narrow, after awhile it'll end you up in a whole other stratosphere. That's what pornography does. It is the gateway to perversion. What people don't' realize is that perversion is the worst place you can be. It starts off with an image, but then the image becomes common. When an image becomes common, it loses its allure, so you have to level up and go to another level of perversion. Once you go to that level of perversion, then you have to level up because it loses its steam. That just keeps happening. That's what people don't understand. They think it's an image or video - no, it's a gateway to perversion. Pedophilia doesn't start with pedophilia. It starts as an image that then gets upgraded to another level of perversion. Bestiality doesn't start of as bestiality. It starts with an image that then goes to another level of perversion. That's why I try to tell people, we are being lulled to sleep by images that will end us up in a place we would never even think we would be looking at, doing, or participating in. That's all the enemy wants to do - pervert. Sex is good! Sex is God's idea! But culture and Christianity are so taboo on it - we don't talk about it. For me, everything I learned on sex and sexuality was not from a pastor, a youth leader, my parents, or my church. It was from MTV, kids in the locker room, and magazines. That's how I learned about it. The truth of the matter is in 2020, for all of the Christian moms and dads, if you're not intentionally talking about it, they're learning about it from other people. You do not get to interject the purity or the virtue into it. They are learning it from people who have already done it from a distorted or perverted place. It is so much harder to teach the right thing after I've learned the wrong thing. People will ask "should I bring my kids to this?" because I talk to them very candidly. I tell them if your kid is over the age of 8 years old they need to be in there listening.

I love it. I agree.

I'm not going to call any names, but all these networks, they are planting images in our kid's heads right now. All of these shows and streaming services and toy companies, they are planting images about sex and sexuality in our kids' heads. I understand it as a parent of 3 that we don't want to be the one to introduce them to it. I flipped that. You need to be the one to introduce them to it! You may not get it right, but I would have been saved from so much if I would've had people who knew God and understood the world we lived in to give me the first idea of what the standard would be. Even if I would've messed up and missed it, at least I would've had a standard that was set by somebody who had a Godly perspective. Instead, my standard was set by culture. When culture sets the standard for what God has made, it is already at a lower level than what God created it to be. What I encourage people all the time when it comes to pornography and images and sex and sexuality - if we're honest - that's one of the biggest coping mechanism of adults. From people pleasing themselves to people watching stuff and reading romantic novels, all you're trying to do is feel something. What God is saying is, "I can give you peace beyond understanding. I can give you drink and you will never thirst again. I can help you deal with the root issues to the point that you will be in a place where you can be in a relationship and not self-sabotage the whole thing. But you have to bring it to me!" I really believe that in this culture if the church doesn't talk about this, if pastors don't talk about this, if people of influence don't talk about this, we are literally abdicating the truth that we have for culture to be able to define something that has never worked for them. Culture does not do relationships well! But we keep deferring to them even though God has given us the playbook. That's why I wrote Relationship Goals. I had the opportunity to be authentic and tell people what I wish I would known. Not just the church answers - I had people tell me not to have sex before I got married. But that was all they said! There was no why. There was no understanding. No revelation behind it. For me, the days of the church being able to say something that's not lived out are over. You can't tell me something and not be living it. 

That's where your stuff is changing the world, because you're saying all the hard stuff! We have to not be afraid to say that. It's resonating with people! People are dying on the vine. It's not just like they're sitting there saying, "man, I'm just finding life and peace over here." People realize it isn't working - their relationships or failing and they're isolated and they're not happy. So this isn't working. The cool thing is; there's a way out. I love what you're saying right now. You're hopeful that Jesus can interrupt and change it all. I mean let's talk about your relationship now! I saw all those pictures of y'all getting hitched again! Your kids were there. I love that you show us your family. I don't know your wife yet, I can't wait to know her, but man do I like her. Everything you've said about her, I just know she's tough and she has stuck in this. What a team y'all seem to be!

This is the thing I tell people: #1 Natalie is not dumb. She wouldn't be in this relationship if I didn't change. That's the thing I want everybody to realize - God can change your life. I am a living witness. If I go down my wrap sheet of things, six years ago, I had a potential felony case. There are so many reasons I shouldn't be a pastor and people shouldn't listen to me. But God is in the transformation business. That's why our church is named Transformation Church. God is the only one that can take the mess of your life and turn it into your message. He can take the pieces of your life and turn it into a masterpiece. He's the only one that is undefeated at doing those things, and I live in that everyday. I just feel so strongly - for anybody that's listening that feels like you're too far away from where you think you should be, if you come to God, turn, and repent, he can take everything that is horrible right now - every horrible thing in my life is why people like me now. Every mess up that I ever did is what I share in my testimony and share how God has changed and transformed me. When I tell you I am more in love with my wife today than I've ever been my entire life - we're 10 years in, we have 3 beautiful children - we are in the prime of our life making memories and moments together, because we don't just love each other, but we like each other. This is why I tell people all the time when it comes to relationships: I love a lot of people I don't like. In a marriage, you need to like the person that you're with. That takes work and time and investment and energy. But God has so beautiful restored our marriage. If you would've told me 10 years ago that we would be sharing about how God has made our marriage an example and we're able to share about it, I would've told you you were lying. The best thing about my life is I don't have to be fake at all. There is not one ounce of being unauthentic. I'm in a series right now called "FU" - Forgiveness University. That's just how it came to me, because people need to learn to forgive but they really want to say "F you!" I know what it's like to live a lie, but to be exactly who I am and who Christ wants me to be is the most freeing thing. I can be authentic. I believe that's what God wants for everybody, and it's available to you. That's the thing people need to hear. I'm not special. I'm surrendered. I'm not special. I just actually do what God asks me to do. I'm not special. I actually will try even when it's hard. I'm not special. I will actually admit when I mess up. I encourage people all the time, God is not looking for special people, he's looking for surrendered people. He can do more with a surrendered person than a person who has everything to give him.