Remembering Jim Bakker: The Lessons He Learned About Success, Failure and Jesus

There are lessons learned through success, and others learned when everything you once considered success is stripped away.

For Jim Bakker, some of the deepest lessons of his life came not during the height of PTL, when millions watched his broadcasts and his ministry seemed to be expanding in every direction, but after the cameras, crowds, money and influence were gone.

Bakker’s life and ministry were anything but simple. He became one of the most recognizable faces in Christian television, experienced a spectacular and deeply public fall, went to prison and spent the years that followed speaking openly about failure, repentance, restoration and what he believed God had taught him through it all.

Years later, in a conversation with Charisma founder Stephen Strang, Bakker looked back on that journey with remarkable candor.

“I was facing 45 years. To me, at my age, it meant I would die in prison,” Bakker said.

The life he knew continued to unravel while he sat behind bars. He recalled watching his house burn to the ground and, two years into his imprisonment, seeing his marriage come to an end.

For Bakker, those losses also forced a painful examination of his beliefs about God, prosperity and success.

“So, I really believed that it was God’s will for me to prosper,” he said. “I felt that all these good things that were happening to me- houses, cars, boats, everything- I’d worked for $50 a week for years. I thought God was rewarding me. I was preaching this message of prosperity, and I was living the message of prosperity.”

When those things disappeared, Bakker was forced to reconsider whether material blessing had become too closely connected in his mind with the favor of God.

That spiritual reckoning took him back to Scripture.

Bakker recalled a dream in prison in which he sat next to Christ. In the dream, he said, Christ placed a sliver from His eye into Bakker’s eye and told him, “I want you to see everyone and everything through my eyes.”

Bakker woke up wondering how he could do that. He answered by studying the words of Jesus.

“So, for 2 years I wrote out every word Jesus spoke. I wrote it out by hand,” he said.

What followed was not merely an academic Bible study. Bakker said that what he discovered brought him to grief.

“And honestly, I began to even privately weep and grieve,” he said. “I realized I was I had taught things that were opposite of Jesus Christ.”

He began looking again at Christ’s warnings about the deceitfulness of riches, storing up treasures on earth and attempting to serve both God and money. The message Bakker had once associated with prosperity was being reconsidered in light of Jesus’ own words.

But some of Bakker’s hardest reflections had little to do with money.

They involved time.

He remembered working constantly during the PTL years, building facilities and expanding the ministry with little rest. Bakker acknowledged that he did not take a Sabbath and had failed to follow through on something he believed God had impressed upon him years earlier: to come apart and spend time alone with Him regularly.

“When I started PTL, it was like stepping on a roller coaster,” Bakker said.

The ministry grew to thousands of employees and extraordinary financial proportions. Yet looking back, Bakker recognized that the relentless pace carried a cost no ministry accomplishment could repay.

One of the most painful examples involved his son.

During an emotional public appearance following his imprisonment, Bakker recalled what happened when his son was old enough to visit him in prison by himself. They spent the day together, and at the end, his son said something Bakker would never forget.

“Dad, this is the best day of my whole life,” Bakker remembered him saying. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to get your attention. I wanted just to spend one day with you and have you to myself.”

For a father who had spent years attempting to reach people around the world, the words carried tremendous weight.

“Preachers, don’t go around the world and win the world and lose your own kids,” Bakker said.

Part of that restorative journey would later play out publicly at Phoenix First Assembly, where Jay Bakker shared his testimony of deliverance from addiction and rebellion. Outreach through Revolution, a youth ministry at Phoenix First Assembly, had provided relationship and accountability during a turbulent season of his life.

Following Jay’s testimony, Pastor Tommy Barnett invited Jim Bakker to come forward. Father and son embraced before the congregation in an emotional reunion, offering a picture of a relationship that had experienced deep pain but was not beyond restoration.

Restoration, however, did not require pretending the past had never happened.

The legal and financial failures surrounding PTL and Bakker’s highly publicized trial remained part of his story. The collapse affected staff, ministry partners, donors and, perhaps most painfully for Bakker, his own family. His later reflections did not erase those realities. Instead, they revealed a man trying to understand what went wrong and what others might learn from it.

Among those lessons was the danger of isolation.

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

Bakker described how the people surrounding him gradually became a “buffer” between him and others. Information passed through layers of people before reaching him, and the voices closest to him often reinforced his success.

“When a man becomes rich and powerful, or a minister becomes rich and powerful, for some reason you think that you become special to God, that God loves you so much,” Bakker said.

He described the process not as one dramatic moment but as something that could happen “little by little by little.”

Looking back, Bakker wished there had been people willing to come directly to him and challenge him.

“We need men of God. We need elders. We need the office of prophet in the church today that can go to men and warn them, ‘This is happening. God is saying this, so that you can repent, because God is a god of the second chance.’”

It was from that place of personal experience that Bakker delivered one of his starkest warnings.

“There are ministries and people heading to the side of the mountain at as as we speak, and they’re going to crash and burn,” Bakker said. “Not because God hates them, but because God loves them, and whom he loves, he chastises.”

His words were strong, but Bakker’s reflections repeatedly returned to the same remedy: humility, time with God and immersion in Scripture.

“The only mirror to see yourself as you really are is the word of God,” he said.

For Bakker, that meant more than finding individual verses to support an idea. He emphasized reading Scripture broadly and continually, allowing the whole counsel of God to shape the believer.

Yet perhaps the most profound change Bakker described concerned the very purpose of ministry.

Reflecting on Jesus’ words, “I never knew you,” Bakker said his understanding of what it meant to know Christ had changed. Ministry accomplishments, no matter how visible, could never substitute for relationship with Him.

“He’s not interested in my buildings. He’s not interested in what I can do for him. He wants me to know him,” Bakker said.

Those words carry particular significance when viewed across the scope of his life.

Bakker had built. He had broadcast. He had raised extraordinary sums of money and sat among some of America’s most influential people. He recalled flying on Air Force One and meeting presidents. Yet when he reflected on what prison had taught him, his conclusion was remarkably simple.

Relationship with Jesus mattered more.

“Before I went to prison, I felt it was my job to win the world to Christ,” Bakker said.

Eventually, he realized that was a burden he could not carry.

“My goal is to have an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, to walk with him, to fall in love with him,” he said. “And if I do that, then I will hear him because I’m walking with him every day, and I’ll automatically do my part to win the world to Christ.”

There is something deeply poignant about those words now.

Jim Bakker’s life cannot be reduced to its greatest successes, nor can it be understood only through its greatest failures. His story contained both, along with consequences, controversy, repentance, family pain, restoration and years spent trying to make sense of what God had taught him through the valley.

The lessons he articulated were hard-earned: success is no substitute for intimacy with God. Ministry cannot replace family. Influence needs accountability. Scripture must remain the mirror believers use to measure themselves. And failure, however devastating, does not mean Christ has abandoned those who turn back to Him.

Bakker knew what it was like to watch much of what he had built disappear.

“I watched my house burn to the ground from prison. I lost everything. I watched the money go. I watched the houses go. I watched the cars go. I watched some acquaintances go,” he said.

Then came the words that perhaps speak most clearly to the hope Bakker wanted others to find in his story:

“Jesus never left me. Jesus never walked away.”

In the end, that may be among the most important parts of Jim Bakker’s legacy to remember.

His story reminds the church that grace doesn’t require us to ignore failure, and accountability doesn’t require us to abandon restoration. Scripture makes room for both truth and mercy, correction and redemption.

For all that Bakker accomplished, lost, endured and learned, his later reflections pointed away from buildings, platforms and possessions and back toward something far simpler: knowing Christ.

After a lifetime spent largely in the public eye, Bakker’s hard-earned message was ultimately deeply personal.

Walk with Jesus. Know Him. Listen to His voice.

And when everything else fades away, remember the One who remains.

Prepared by Charisma Media Staff.