Posted October 06, 2026
This morning’s headlines are breaking the news that well-known televangelist Jim Bakker died Monday at the age of eighty-six. His wife, Lori Bakker, announced his passing; his cause of death was not immediately clear.
“He was a pioneer of Christian television, but to me, he was my husband, my best friend, and the man I was honored to walk beside through so many seasons of life and ministry,” she said. The two hosted The Jim Bakker Show on the PTL Satellite Network Bakker had founded many years earlier.
Of course, Lori’s statement about her husband is not what is dominating the coverage of Bakker’s death. As the Associated Press reports, he “built an evangelical empire around the hugely successful The PTL Club TV show, only to lose it all over a sex scandal and financial crimes.”
All of that is true. Bakker was forced to resign from his massive ministry in 1987 after admitting a sexual affair. The next year, he was indicted for financial crimes and sentenced to forty-five years in federal prison, though the sentence was reduced to eight years. He and his first wife, Tammy Faye, divorced in 1992; he married Lori in 1998. They launched their show five years later. In 2021, he settled a lawsuit accusing him of falsely claiming that a health supplement could cure COVID-19.
However, as I reflect on Jim Bakker’s life and death, I remember another very prominent televangelist in the news some years ago. I wrote a Daily Article sharply criticizing a statement he made, only to receive an email later that day from his daughter. She very graciously informed me that her father had been misquoted and suggested that when Christians are publicly antagonistic toward each other, we can harm the cause of Christ. It is right to speak the truth, she assured me, but we must always do so in love. And we must not use others as means to our ends.
She was right. Her note reminded me of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who observed that many of us have an “I-it” relationship with people and an “I-you” relationship with things, using the former to serve the latter.
Reversing this equation is vital to flourishing, for our society and for our souls.
In Monday’s Daily Article, we explored at length David Brooks’ new article in The Atlantic focusing on meaning and purpose in life. There is an aspect of his analysis I didn’t have room to discuss yesterday but wanted to focus on with you today.
Brooks writes:
A well-formed life is governed by two different logics. The first is the straightforward, utilitarian logic that guides us through our careers: Input leads to output; effort leads to reward; pursue self-interest; respond to incentives; think strategically; climb the ladder; impress the world. This is the logic that business schools teach you.
But there is a second and deeper logic to life, gift logic, which guides us as we form important relationships, serve those around us, and cultivate our full humanity. This is a logic of contribution, not acquisition; surrender, not domination. It’s a moral logic, not an instrumental one, and it’s full of paradox: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself to find yourself. You have to surrender something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself.
If career logic helps you conquer the world, gift logic helps you serve it. If career logic focuses on “how” questions—how to climb the career ladder, how to get things done efficiently—gift logic focuses on the “why” questions, such as why are we here, and what good should we ultimately serve? If career logic is about building up the ego, gift logic is about relinquishing it and putting others first.
A well-lived life, at any stage, is lived within the tension between these two logics.
Such “surrender” is basic to life itself. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard wrote:
If you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics… This is what we know. The rest is gravy.
As you may remember from high school science, the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that things naturally move from a state of order to a state of disorder or entropy. Ice cubes melt and bodies age and decay, but neither reverses itself.
So it is with our lives in our fallen world. You and I are riding a bike on a downhill slope. We can ignore our descent, pretending that mortality is for other people until it comes for us. Or we can decide our descent proves that our lives have no purpose and ride aimlessly or even crash intentionally.
Conversely, we can (and should) slow our descent with the “brakes” of healthy diet, exercise, and so on. And we can (and should) redeem the fact of our mortality by investing every day with the highest ideals of life: loving our Lord and our neighbor and serving both with joy.
This is living by the “gift logic” Brooks recommends. It is the path to purpose, the means by which we embrace the deepest meaning of life.
But it is impossible to live fully by such logic apart from power outside ourselves.
King David, described by God as “a man after my heart” (Acts 13:22), nonetheless chose “career logic” when he had an affair with Bathsheba, arranged the death of her husband, and made her his wife (2 Samuel 11). Peter, the leader among Jesus’ closest followers, nonetheless chose “career logic” when he denied knowing his Lord rather than risk identifying with him (Matthew 26:69–75).
This is “my claim to my right to myself,” as Oswald Chambers described our “disposition of sin.” However, in today’s My Utmost for His Highest reading, he gives us the good news: “The moral miracle of redemption is that God can put into me a new disposition whereby I can live a totally new life.” Jesus put it this way: “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
Will you ask God to perform such a “moral miracle” in your life today?
“Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God.” —Tim Keller
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