Pastor T.D. Jakes knows a thing or two about miracles, and he recently shared his own miraculous experience in an interview with the Today Show. The megachurch pastor reflected on the health scare he had while onstage and revealed the cause of the emergency.
“I didn’t really realize what was happening to me onstage until I got to the hospital in an ambulance,” Jakes explained. “I was upset it happened while I was preaching because I didn’t want that to be the moment. And then the doctor leaned over and said, ‘You had a massive heart attack.’”
On November 23, 2024, while delivering a sermon at The Potter’s House Church, Jakes suddenly paused and began to shake. People in the audience were left wondering what happened. Turns out, Jakes had suffered a heart attack.
“The reason I didn’t realize it was because I didn’t have any of the typical symptoms,” he said. “No numbness, no sharp pain, nothing. I just kind of drifted off to sleep. I didn’t even know what was happening, but I almost died.”
And he wasn’t exaggerating. Doctors later told Jakes that had he arrived at the hospital just five minutes later, he would have been “dead on arrival” because the right side of his heart had completely stopped receiving blood. At the time of the heart attack, Jakes had been standing while preaching, but when he sat down, he started to feel something was wrong physically.
“As long as I was up preaching, I felt fine,” he recalled. “But when I sat down, the adrenaline dropped, and that’s when I realized I was preaching with half of my heart closed off by a clot. They had to go in and remove it.”
Days after the scare, Jakes took to X (formerly Twitter) to share an update with his fans, calling the incident “something that could’ve been fatal if it weren’t for God’s intervention.” He followed that up with a video on Instagram, saying, “Many of you don’t realize that you’re looking at a miracle. I faced a life-threatening calamity, was rushed to the ICU, had emergency surgery, and survived. Yeah, I’m back.”
Jakes returned to preaching on New Year’s Eve, admitting that he felt anxiety standing in the same spot where he had almost lost his life. “Honestly, I think I did [die], but God, in His wisdom and grace, brought me back,” he said during the sermon. “I was in the emergency room thinking, ‘Lord, what are you doing? If you’d waited five more minutes, no one would have seen it, but you did it on an open stage for everyone to witness.’”
Jakes continues to express his deep gratitude for his recovery. “I was on my way out,” he said. “Looking back, it was a privilege to stand on the other side of that experience. It gave me a glimpse of what it might be like. In that moment, it was absolutely amazing.”
