On Marriage, Motherhood and Ministry

By Lori Bakker | | Filed in Last Days | Tags: , ,

My readers often ask me how I do it – how I manage marriage, motherhood and ministry all at the same time.  The short answer is “I don’t” and the long answer is “He gives me grace”.  Though a book could be written on each aspect of my life and someday, probably will, today I want to start addressing these topics in little bites on my blog.  You’ve heard the expression “How do you eat an elephant” and most of us know that the only way you can do that is “one bite at a time”.  So, that’s how we’re going to start to cover these topics… a little at a time.

I will begin with a little background on where I came from and my thoughts about where I’m going.  I will always be completely open and transparent about everything because I believe that people are looking for other REAL people, not people wearing masks or personas.  The Lord knows we have enough of those kind of people!  When I’ve opened up like this in the past, some have said that it’s just TMI (too much information) and I need not tell every little detail of my life!

But what I hear from my Heavenly Father is that my life is to be an open book because it is my testimony that will help many people to recover from lives that were train wrecks like mine, and to be restored to a place of right standing with God, and then to minister powerfully out of what He has done!  Rick Joyner has said that your anointing is in direct proportion to the degree of your suffering.  My decisions in my life before Jesus caused me much pain by my own rebellion.  But after you become a Christian, your life is supposed to be simple, wonderful and pain-free.  Well, isn’t it?

In my early years of ministry, I worked very hard to overcome rejection and shame.  Even after you are born-again into the family of God, sometimes it’s hard for others to forgive and forget your past.  Oh, they say you are accepted, but some will never view you in any other way than defective.  It’s ok.  You are not limited by what others may think or say.  You are playing to an audience of ONE.  You are free in God to do and say what He says.  Words are powerful.  They have the power to either heal or hinder.  As for me, I will use my words to help others heal (Isaiah 61).

Today, I live to tell of His love, forgiveness, goodness, and restoration.  I live to know Him and to make Him known.  There were those who encouraged me in my testimony, and there were those who preferred I would just come to church, sit quietly and not cause any waves.  Let those who are qualified to minister, minister!  As I said in an earlier blog, God doesn’t call the qualified, He qualifies the called.

A religious spirit will always try to shut you up and sit you down or at the very least, minimize what you have to say.  This is my story, my testimony, and I will tell it to the world in the way God has instructed!  I am trusting that some of you need to hear it and will walk with me through this journey God has called Lori Beth Bakker’s life and testimony.

I will build with every new blog, so be sure to read my blogs regularly.  But if you miss one, they will be archived and readily available so you can go back to pick up prior ones.

God Bless You!

Lori Signature

Crisis or Opportunity

By Lori Bakker | | Filed in Last Days | Tags: ,

Rick Joyner recently said that the Chinese word for “crisis” is the same word for “opportunity”.  How very appropriate for the times we live in.

If you take Katrina as an example, the crisis certainly initiated emergencies of all types.  People needed to be rescued, relocated and restored extensively with everything from material things to healing of the traumas caused by the crisis.  Families were separated, loved ones were lost or missing – some injured and in hospitals, some injured and unable to get help, and some fatally wounded by the ferocious storm.

During this crisis, the government could not meet the needs of the people – not in the short term or the long term.   There was mass-confusion in trying to organize and deploy food, water and medical help.  The news media reported the deplorable and inadequate attempts of government to provide relief for the suffering.

I remember the pleas of those taken to the Superdome for water, diapers, baby formula, and food.  It was heartbreaking.

As the hours and days wore on, the churches stepped in and attempted to help with food, water, clothing and other basic necessities.  But it was clear from the beginning; neither the government nor the churches were prepared to deal with a disaster of this magnitude.

If we were to have a complete economic collapse, conditions in this country could become every bit as devastating as those we previewed in Katrina.  Experts have said that the inner cities would be out of food and water within ONE day.  This would not be a regional crisis, but a national and probably international crisis.

Are we, as the church, going to be prepared to help ourselves and others?  An economic collapse will provide unprecedented opportunity for ministry.  Those who understand it and are prepared for it, will have the opportunity to be Jesus to others.  Biblical prophecy indicates that those prepared will be God’s people.  We must address this with clarity to be prepared and to offer help, hope and healing for the hurting.

It’s time we all get ready.

Love,

Lori Signature

The Shaping of a Disciple

By Lori Bakker | | Filed in Last Days | Tags:

When God wants to drill a man,
And thrill a man, and skill a man,
When God wants to mold a man
To play for Him the noblest part,
When He yearns with all His heart
To build so great and bold a man
That all the world shall be amazed,
Then watch God’s methods, watch His ways!
How He ruthlessly perfects
Whom He royally elects;
How He hammers him and hurts him
And with mighty blows converts him,
Making shapes and forms which only
God Himself can understand,
Even while His man is crying,
Lifting a beseeching hand…
Yet God bends but never breaks
When man’s good He undertakes;
When He uses whom He chooses,
And with every purpose fuses
Man to act, and act to man,
As it was when He began,
When God tries His splendor out,
Man will know what He’s about!

-Dale Martin Stone

Those who are passionate for the Lord have often prayed the prayer of consecration which usually includes a petition to “do what you need to do in me, Lord, to be used of You”. When you are called of the Lord to His ministry, the calling will require you to submit to His processes. We are all called to be His disciples, and as disciples, we must be molded into His image.
The processes of God are never easy, but they are worth it all. Most of us have heard the phrase “die to self”. Dying is not easy for a living being – but what we speak of is a death to the things we desire in our own natural way, and then life to the things God desires in a spiritual way.
Then, an amazing thing happens. As you die to your own natural desires, you find that what He requires from you spiritually becomes what you desire. In other words, God changes you from the inside into His disciple – one who can walk worthy of the calling.

What’s a Girl Like You…

By Lori Bakker | | Filed in Last Days

Early 90’s….

A lady in our church owned the shoeshine company at the Phoenix airport.  She often hired church members, especially women.  It was a smart business idea because it was unusual; I haven’t seen that anywhere else.  I worked as a team with another lady. READ MORE →

A Reason, a Season or a Lifetime

By Lori Bakker | | Filed in Teaching

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. When you figure out which one it is, you will know what to do for each person.

When someone is in your life for a REASON, it is usually to meet a need you have expressed. They have come to assist you through a difficulty, to provide you with guidance and support, to aid you physically, emotionally, or spiritually. They may seem like a godsend, and they are! They are there for the reason you need them to be.

Then, without any wrong doing on your part, or at an inconvenient time, this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end.

Sometimes they die.

Sometimes they walk away.

Sometimes they act up and force you to take a stand.

What we must realize is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled, their work is done. The prayer you sent up has been answered. And now it is time to move on.

When people come into your life for a SEASON, it is because your turn has come to share, grow, or learn. They bring you an experience of peace, or make you laugh. They may teach you something you have never done. They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy. Believe it! It is real! But,only for a season.

LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons; things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person, and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas of your life. It is said that love is blind but friendship is God-given.

Author Unknown

Joy Came in the Morning (pt 4)

By Lori Bakker | | Filed in Teaching | Tags: ,

Early August 1998

“The next year, 1977, I got pregnant again. Jesse and I had moved to Farmington, New Mexico. I remember we drove there the night Elvis died, pulling a small trailer with everything we owned. Jesse was working a lot of hours as a boilermaker for a power plant there. We rented a double-wide mobile home, and it was one of the nicer places we lived. I fixed it up, and I was the typical little housewife—except that I smoked pot all the time. We weren’t doing major drugs then. My grandma Graham died, and when I flew to Phoenix for the funeral, I made a doctor’s appointment. I needed to have a cyst removed, and since I had just found out I was pregnant—and Jesse didn’t want the baby, of course—I decided to have an abortion at the same time. That was the only abortion that was done in a hospital.”

Chris and Jolene asked a question now and then to prod my memory, but mostly they just let me talk.

“Jesse and I separated for a while, and he had a girlfriend. When we got back together, we moved to Pinetop, up in the mountains; it was very beautiful there. Because of Jesse’s work we moved a lot, little towns all over Arizona and New Mexico. I once counted fifty different apartments or houses or hotels where we had lived in the ten years we were married.

“We went to Prescott for the fourth of July. It was wild there in the ‘70’s. The Hell’s Angels would ride into town, and the police would close the streets for the holiday. Prescott is a quaint little town with antique shops, and there’s a street called Whiskey Row with a bunch of saloons. Jesse and I were doing Quaaludes and partying in and out of the bars. I was so spaced out, I was offering Quaaludes to cops; there was no way they could control the drugs and alcohol, so they simply tried to keep the peace. We were in front of the courthouse, in the center of town, when Jesse went nuts and started hitting me, and the cops had to pull him off of me.
“Jesse screamed, ‘Just get the ______ out of my life. Go find somebody else.’

“I literally took him up on it. I turned around, walked across the street, went into a bar, and met a man. Paul took me to his cabin, and I spent the night there with him. We had an off-and-on relationship for the next couple of years. Whenever Jesse beat me up, I called Paul; he came and got me and nursed me back to health. He was a very gentle guy. I don’t think he ever wanted me to leave Jesse to marry him, but he was always there for m. Jesse never knew about him.”

…..more to come.

Joy Came in the Morning – Part 1
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 2
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 3

Joy Came in the Morning (pt 3)

By Lori Bakker | | Filed in Teaching | Tags: ,

Early August 1998

We had a beautiful suite with a separate bedroom and a kitchenette off the full-size living room. From the moment we walked in, I felt the presence of God, and I began to realize that something truly supernatural was in store for me that night. Because I knew it would be an emotional time, I went to the bathroom, took my contacts out, and washed my face. While I was putting my pajamas on, Chris and Jolene prepared the living room. They placed boxes of tissues in various spots around the room, and they decorated one of the tables with a white linen tablecloth with lace trim.

“We want to anoint you with oil and pray before we begin,” one of them said. They prayed and asked God to reveal whatever memories I needed for my healing. That’s an important part of post-abortion ministry, because you immediately start blocking out the memories of that event. It’s a defense mechanism. You couldn’t live with what you did if you had to face it, so you suppress the memories and bury the details so deep in the recesses of your mind that you’re able to live in complete denial of what you’ve done.

After we prayed, Chris and Jolene asked me to start telling what I remembered about my abortions. “The first one was in May 1975,” I said. “That’s the only one I can even tell you the exact month and year.” I told the story of being pregnant before I married Jesse and choosing him over the baby.

“The second abortion was in 1976,” I said. “I don’t remember the actual abortion; I just remember coming home to our apartment and lying on the loveseat-rocker all day. Jesse asked me, ‘Are you okay?’ and I remember looking up at him and thinking, Now you ask. I just killed my own baby—our baby— something I really wanted and you’re asking if I’m okay. But I didn’t say it.

“There were always two reasons for the abortions. One was that Jesse didn’t want to have kids yet. ‘Someday,’ he’d always say. The other reason was drugs. I’d seen films in health class about babies who were born addicted to drugs, and it horrified me. We were so into drugs—cocaine and LSD, and even PCP, an animal tranquilizer that produced a cheap but intense high. The one time I thought I was going to die from drugs was the time I did PCP, around the time of that second abortion.

“My brother Mark and a friend brought the PCP over to our apartment; Mark had wanted to turn me and Jesse on for a change, since we were always sharing our drugs with him. Mark laced a joint with the PCP, and the four of us smoked, it. The drug makes you so high, you’re numb for hours; you can’t feel anything. It was wintertime and raining, but I remember going outside and letting the rain pour down on me. I couldn’t feel the cold or the rain. I started getting really scared. I went back inside and sat on that rocking loveseat for twelve hours without moving. I was virtually paralyzed. Jesse was sitting next to me, watching an old rerun of The Honeymooners. I started crying, becoming almost hysterical. ‘I’m going to die,’ I told him. ‘I’m not making it this time.’ He tried to talk me through the high, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be fine,’ he said. But he later told me he had thought we were both going to die. At one point I cried out, ‘God if you’re real, please spare me from this, and I’ll never do it again.’ That was one promise I made good on; I never used PCP again.”

I paused to take a sip of water. Jolene and Chris encouraged me to take my time and tell it all.

…..more to come.

Joy Came in the Morning – Part 1
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 2
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 4


Joy Came in the Morning (pt 2)

By Lori Bakker | | Filed in Teaching | Tags: ,

Early August 1998

That summer, my new friends Chris Harper and Jolene Dreisbach had been to a post-abortion healing conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’d never even heard the term post-abortion before that time, but I knew God was dealing with me about the abortion issue, and I knew that’s why he had brought Chris and Jolene into my life. I also knew it was time to leave Master’s Commission but did not yet know what I would do after that. Pastor Barnett had asked me to go to L.A. and help start the LAIC, the outreach that eventually became the Dream Center. Jack Wallace, who had been teaching the singles’ class the Sunday in 1989 when I made a commitment to Christ, was now pasturing a church in Detroit and wanted me on staff there. It would be a paid ministry position, and that would be a first for me.

As I prayed for direction, God started putting all the puzzle pieces together, and by August, Chris, Jolene, and I had decided to start a ministry to help bring healing to women who’d been through abortions. Before we formalized our plans to start Truth Ministries, the girls had told me they wanted to hold a memorial service for me. They’d been working on the ideas they’d learned at the Milwaukee conference, which had been not just for helping women heal emotionally after abortion but also after miscarriage and SIDS. “If we incorporated the Holy Spirit into the memorial,” they told me, “incredible things could happen.”

“Lori, think of it this way,” Chris said. “You never had a baby shower or did any of the things that would commemorate having a child. That’s what this memorial will do.”

“Or think of it this way,” Jolene added. “If you’d had a still born child or even a miscarriage, friends would have consoled you, and you would have mourned. But women who’ve had abortions—women like us—actually had the same kind of loss, yet we never had the experience of grieving for our children.”

I thought the idea of holding a memorial service for me sounded kind of strange at first, but they persisted.

“This is a way to deal with the abortions once and for all and to bring closure on the past,” Chris said.

Jolene agreed. “Please let us do this for you, Lori.”

We scheduled the memorial for the last weekend in August, right before my birthday. The week prior to that, God started softening my heart. I had always been the strong one, the one people came to with their problems. That week I became mush. Pastor Barnett rarely mentioned abortion from the pulpit, but that week he mentioned it twice, Sunday morning and Wednesday night. For some reason it was on his heart; he didn’t know I was that reason. He preached that abortion was wrong, but he also expressed compassion for women who had felt they had no other alternative.

On Wednesday night after church, Chris and Jolene told their families good-bye, then we drove to neighboring Scottsdale, where they had rented a one-bedroom hotel suite. We planned on staying until Friday night, so the fact that Chris and Jolene’s husbands were taking care of their kids for two days so we could be free to do this was a big deal to me. I didn’t think I deserved it. I was always telling people that God had great things in store for them, but I didn’t believe I would ever have the great things of God because the sin I had committed—abortion—was so horrible. I felt I would have to live with the pain and the emptiness, the loss and the shame, no matter how great a Christian I became. As we drove to Scottsdale, I sensed God saying to me, “Let these people minister to you.”

…..more to come.

Joy Came in the Morning – Part 1
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 3
Joy Came in the Morning – Part 4

A Cinderella Story Times Two

By Lori Bakker | | Filed in Teaching | Tags: , ,

We are all familiar with the Cinderella story of how a poor little servant girl became a princess. In that wonderful story, Cinderella had no ambitions of becoming a princess, but she was magically thrust forward into it by true love.

Not too long ago, I wrote a blog about the first time I saw Maricela. She was filthy from head to toe standing at the top of a stairway in danger of falling. She has come a long way since that day; from destruction to destiny, a real-life Cinderella!

My life has truly been a Cinderella story as well in the last 12 years, and the magic was by design of my Creator, Savior and Lord. In 1998, when Jim and I married, Pastor Lloyd Zeigler presented me with a pair of old worn-out shoes, representing my old life. He then presented a beautiful pair of glass slippers representing how my life had been changed into a Cinderella story with this surreal romance and marriage to the very high profile Mr. Jim Bakker. I was suddenly in front of millions of people on nationwide television telling our love story.

While in Master’s Commission in Phoenix, my mentor and teacher for 10 years was Pastor Lloyd Zeigler. He was my covering and spiritual leader until Jim came along. I learned how to be a true servant through this humble man whom God has used to equip young leaders to be servants first in the Kingdom. Jesus was the ultimate servant-leader, serving humanity by humbling himself even to his death on the cross.

Humility is not so much taught as it is caught. I remember once when it was time for our group to leave for an event, they sent me to knock on Pastor Lloyd’s hotel room door. When he answered, he said he had to finish cleaning the bathtub before he would be ready to go! You see, he taught us to always leave a place cleaner than when we came – even our hotel rooms. When you have a servant-leader who models true servanthood, as Pastor Lloyd did to us, you begin to understand that it’s not so much about living your dreams as it is about dieing to self.

Just as the Cinderella story came true in my life, it has also come true in Maricela’s. I didn’t have much of a chance in life if I had continued my sinful ways. Maricela didn’t have much of a chance if she stayed in the ghetto. But God had other plans.

Cinderella represents the dreams of many young women who are trapped in lives going nowhere…. Fast. But even Cinderella can’t compare with the utter transformation in the lives of those who follow the real Prince – the Prince of Peace, our Jesus!

Watch Maricela and John’s wedding ceremony with us tomorrow at www.jimbakkershow.com and click on the “watch us live” tab.

Who knows, you may even see a glass slipper or two!

Pre-Wedding Thoughts

By Lori Bakker | | Filed in Teaching

As the Mother of the Bride, I was asked recently what thoughts I was having about my oldest daughter leaving the nest. Quite frankly, I have great thoughts about it! She is marrying the absolute most wonderful man for her – it’s truly a match made in heaven.

Even so, as a matter of responsibility and love for both of them, one week before the wedding, I had the proverbial “it’s not too late to back out” talk with both of them – together. Before I did that, I thought it all the way through in my mind, or so I thought. I knew it might cause the family some embarrassment should one of them take me up on it, but better a little embarrassment now than either one of them feeling like they were trapped (as unlikely as that was)!

John had this child-like grin the entire time I was talking and then he smiled at me with the most reassuring boyish grin I’ve ever seen and told me frankly that there was no chance of that happening! Nena rolled her eyes and grinned – and then she assured me that she was going into this with eyes wide open and that no one is going to back out!

All through this entire process of John and Nena dating, being engaged, and now to marry on Saturday, I have had a protective instinct! But now, finally, as we are about to see these two wonderful young adults begin their life together – I realize that my protective instinct is gone! It may have been a process for me to work through – but now I am assured Nena is in great hands, and they are very right for each other. Their relationship has been consistent, solid and joyful with God at the center!

Now I feel totally prepared in heart to let her go….. I think.

Besides, she will only be a few doors down the hall!