Todd White’s faith has changed quite radically in just a matter of months.
In May, the Christian evangelist was speaking out against a documentary series that condemned the prosperity gospel and his preaching of it. At the time, he rebuked the show, American Gospel: Christ Alone, as “demonically inspired.” And he was quick to reject the suggestion he was “a heretic.”
But just a few months later, White—a protege of fellow preacher Benny Hinn, who last year walked back some of his own teachings—seems to have had a radical change of heart, a shift he said is the result of conviction.
“I am not perfect, but I am strongly convicted,” White said Sunday. “I feel like I just met Jesus again! There’s just this rekindled thing inside of me. This has been the hardest season of my life. I’m like, ‘Lord, what are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m pruning every branch that you have.’ I’m like, ‘It’s not OK. It hurts.’ And He said, ‘If you were dead, it wouldn’t hurt.'”
At another point early on in his sermon, White talked about evangelism and how people come to accept Christ.
“When you come into the gospel because you came in for a better life,” he explained, “you’ve come in for the wrong gospel. When you come to Jesus because He’s gonna give you this and He’s gonna give you that, you really didn’t surrender. See, what you’re saying is, ‘I’ve come to get this.’ What you’ve done is a taste test to see if it’s true. It’s the same thing as getting a buzz: ‘Well, I’ll try this Jesus thing. Maybe there’s a buzz in it.’ That’s not Jesus.”
He went on to preach, “Your goal as a Christian is to be conformed to His image, is to be transformed into His image, into His likeness, and to actually walk like Christ walked. Jesus didn’t despise sinners, but He hated sin, and He addressed it all the time.”
White told the congregation he has been spending time recently poring over the words of New Zealand-born minister Ray Comfort and 19th-century theologian Charles Spurgeon.
Read the rest of this story from our content partners at Faithwire. {eoa}
