‘Because of Jesus, This Is Not Goodbye’: Jim Bakker’s Final Message Points to Redemption

Jim Bakker’s life was anything but a straight line.

There were extraordinary highs, devastating lows, and in Bakker’s own telling, a radical encounter with the grace of God that changed the trajectory of everything that came afterward.

Following Bakker’s death at age 86, much will undoubtedly be written about PTL and the years Bakker spent behind bars. Yet he did not believe the darkest chapter of his life was the end of his story.

He believed God gave him another one.

As Charisma reported Monday evening, Bakker’s wife, Lori, announced that her husband had “gone home to be with the Lord,” writing that he had “finished his race with faith.” She said that even in his final days, Bakker remained focused on the work of God and spreading the Gospel.

Years before his death, Bakker reflected extensively on his fall and what came afterward in his book You Can Make It, published by Charisma House.

For Bakker, prison became far more than a punishment. It became a place where he said he returned wholeheartedly to God.

Bakker wrote that he “recommitted, rededicated, and refocused” his life on the Lord and truth. After serving five years of what was originally a 45-year sentence, Bakker walked through the prison gates on July 1, 1994, into the waiting arms of his children, Tammy Sue and Jamie Charles.

To order Jim Bakker’s book, You Can Make It, visit Amazon.com.

“I was once again a free man,” Bakker wrote.

Yet that freedom did not erase his past. Bakker admitted he had nowhere to go and did not know how he could fulfill what he believed was a renewed call upon his life. Many people, he wrote, still could not see beyond his “sin and public disgrace.”

And that is where one detail surrounding Bakker’s death becomes particularly striking.

Bakker died Oct. 5, 2026.

Exactly 37 years earlier, on Oct. 5, 1989, a federal jury convicted Bakker on 24 fraud and conspiracy counts.

The date that once marked the beginning of Bakker’s loss of earthly freedom now marks his step into eternity.

For a man whose testimony became so intertwined with captivity, repentance, grace and freedom, the symmetry is difficult to ignore.

In You Can Make It, he credited Billy, Ruth and Franklin Graham, along with other pastors and ministry leaders, with helping rebuild his life. Eventually, Bakker said, he was recommissioned into ministry and surrounded by people willing to accept him for who he was rather than continually define him by who he had been.

Bakker described himself and Lori as “broken pots”—two people whose lives had been shattered by painful choices but whom he believed the Lord had pieced back together.

“Our cracks and fractures were not hidden,” Bakker wrote, saying they became examples of God’s “restoration, grace, and love.”

But perhaps one of the most poignant glimpses into Bakker’s faith came not years ago, but just days before his own death.

Bakker was grieving.

His sister, Donna Puckett, had died, and Bakker shared a deeply personal tribute to her on Facebook. He remembered his sister serving alongside him in ministry, loving his children and using her gift of playing the piano to bring him peace and comfort.

“Donna loved Jesus with all her heart, and she faithfully served the Lord for so many years,” Bakker wrote.

His heart hurt, he acknowledged, but his grief was accompanied by the hope of eternity.

“Because of Jesus, this is not goodbye,” Bakker wrote. “I’ll see you again.”

Days later, Bakker himself was gone.

Those words now carry a weight they could not have carried when he wrote them.

Bakker had just publicly declared his confidence that death was not the end, that because of Jesus he would see his sister again. Within days, his own family would be grieving his death and clinging to that very same Christian hope.

It is a striking final testimony from a man whose life was filled with second chances.

Bakker believed God could take the broken pieces of a life and put them back together. He believed a prison cell did not cancel a calling. And just days before his death, he proclaimed that the grave itself did not get the final word.

Thirty-seven years after Oct. 5 became associated with Bakker’s fall and eventual loss of earthly freedom, Oct. 5 became the date his earthly journey ended.

The man who once walked through prison gates declaring, “I was once again a free man,” is now gone.

Yet perhaps Bakker’s own final words about his sister say it best.

“Because of Jesus, this is not goodbye.”

For Christians, that is ultimately the hope beyond every rise, every fall and every broken chapter: In Christ, neither our past nor the grave gets to write eternity’s final word.

Prepared by Charisma Media Staff.