In this guest message, evangelist John Jacobs teaches that the gift of faith is a supernatural consciousness that God cannot fail and cannot lie, and that a believer who lives and talks that way becomes dangerous to the devil. He speaks a prophetic word over the church: a new season of God’s favor over your family, your finances and your future, marked by divine appointments and divine surprises.
John Jacobs draws on 1 Corinthians 12, David and Goliath and Jesus’ command to speak to the mountain, and he illustrates each point with testimonies from five decades of crusades and school outreaches. Below you will find the full video, a structured summary, every passage linked to the New King James Version, a timestamped outline and practical steps.
Sermon at a Glance
John Jacobs spoke at the Sunday morning service ahead of an evening outreach at the church in Merrill, Wisconsin. He is a strongman evangelist who uses feats of strength to draw people who would never otherwise come to church. A love for Wisconsin’s people, wildlife and scenery runs through the message, along with his gratitude for the church and its Christian school.
He tells the congregation that he does not preach traditional sermons, because he doubts people remember them. Instead, he asks the Holy Spirit for a prophetic word for each church, prays that the Spirit will perform it and imparts it. The message ends in prayer, followed by an offering for his ministry’s school outreaches.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Speaker | John Jacobs, guest evangelist |
| Occasion | Sunday morning service before an evening outreach |
| Main text | 1 Corinthians 12 (the gifts of the Spirit) |
| Key theme | The gift of faith and a new season of divine surprises |
| Length | About 77 minutes, including prayer and the offering |
Bait That Works: Drawing the Community In
John Jacobs says most church meetings are filled mostly with church people. He is believing for the opposite: the roughest crowd in the history of the church, unsaved dads included. For a year, he says, his Sunday night outreaches have seen remarkable moves of the Holy Spirit, and the people who come are often people who have never set foot in a church.
He gives examples. Two motorcycle gang members saw a flyer, came and were saved. A man who had robbed two banks wept and asked whether God could forgive him; that night he brought nineteen men with him, and all nineteen came forward. Two weeks later, he says, the county sheriff called to say the meetings had changed the atmosphere of the county. A man who had been arrested twenty times that year also came and gave his life to Jesus.
What does bending steel and breaking bats have to do with Jesus? Nothing, he admits, but it has everything to do with people. Anyone who fishes in Wisconsin knows you need the right bait to catch the right fish, and this is bait that works. He reports more than 17,000 decisions for Christ in a single year, 47 crusades and school assemblies in seven states.
So he asks the church to pull together for one night. Look at your neighbor, he says, and ask: who is your one? Think of a co-worker or loved one who would never darken the door of a church but might come to see some strong men break and bend things. Each one reach one, and let the Holy Spirit do the rest.
A New Season of Divine Surprises and Divine Appointments
He had been hearing about this church for over a month, he says, from people in other Wisconsin churches and from people two hours away who told him the Holy Spirit was moving there. When he asked the Lord for a prophetic word, this is what he heard: God finds pleasure in putting His favor on people’s lives in a new season, and in giving divine appointments and divine surprises.
The word he imparts is that today begins a new season of God’s favor over your family, your finances and your future. You are leaving the land of the same old same old, he declares, and moving to the land of what you have never seen and never been. He prays for an anointing for divine surprises and divine appointments every day.
To show what he means by a divine surprise, John Jacobs tells his own story. His grandparents raised him, took him to church and saw him saved at eight; he was filled with the Holy Spirit at seventeen. His grandfather taught him to hunt and fish on 800 acres that flooded three times a year. When his grandparents died, he inherited that land, which could not be farmed, built on or sold.
About thirty years ago he heard of a pastor in Florida who could not afford to save his own son’s life. The Lord woke him in the night and told him to send all his savings, which then came to $10,000. He had never done that, and he heard God say, “If you want to see what you’ve never seen you got to do what you’ve never done.” He went to the bank and sent it.
Two months later a caller told him his swamp had become some of the most valuable land in the world. Seventy giant prehistoric ferns, thought extinct, had been discovered growing there, and the land had to be bought as an international sanctuary. A month later a check for $2 million arrived. He says the Holy Spirit told him, “That is a divine surprise.” You cannot explain it, he says, but God loves to do it.
The Gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12
How do you open the door to that new season? John Jacobs points to 1 Corinthians 12. When you are saved, he teaches, the Holy Spirit lives in you and wants to demonstrate His power through His gifts, and a demonstration of the power of God is the gifts of the Spirit. Why would the Holy Spirit not want to give you a gift that glorifies Jesus?
He walks through several of the gifts. With the gift of healing, he says, almost everyone the person prays for is healed. There is the gift of tongues, a message to the church with interpretation. The gift of prophecy gives a supernatural word for the future. Discernment of spirits warns you to watch out for a person or situation. A word of wisdom or knowledge reveals something about someone’s life that cannot be explained.
He gives an example of a word of knowledge from a meeting of about 10,000 people. He announced that someone there had “a bat in your blood.” A woman ran forward, shaking, and said that as a twelve-year-old she had been held down by bullies who dripped a dead bat’s blood into her mouth, and she had lived with a blood disease ever since. He prayed, and he reports that tests that week showed the disease was gone.
The prophecy of the last days fits here, he adds. God promised to pour out His Spirit in the last days (Acts 2:17), and he expects to see unusual manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Then he tells the church to fasten their seat belts, because he is about to describe the gift he will impart to them.
The Gift of Faith: Consciousness, Language and Lifestyle
There is one gift of the Spirit, right in the middle of the list, that John Jacobs says the devil hates most of all: the gift of faith. When you walk in it, the odds against you, how things look and what people say no longer matter, and nothing will be impossible again. He defines it as a supernatural consciousness: “My God cannot fail, my God cannot lie, I’m going to live like it and I’m going to talk like it.”
When everyone expects you to cave in and give up, he says, the person with this gift does the opposite. They stand their ground and say, my God is faithful, my God is able, my God will make a way where there is no way. He quotes David: I have never seen the righteous forsaken or his descendants begging bread (Psalm 37:25).
The gift of faith has a language. It calls those things which do not exist as though they did (Romans 4:17), and it makes a covenant with the mouth. John Jacobs puts it this way: “I will not curse it, I will not nurse it and I will not rehearse it, because God is going to reverse it.” God has come through a million times, and He will do it again.
David had the gift of faith, he says. Facing Goliath with only a sling, David announced that he would strike the giant and cut off his head, and then turned to the whole Philistine army and said he would give their bodies to the birds and beasts so all the earth would know there is a God in Israel (1 Samuel 17:45–47). He did not even have a sword; he used Goliath’s own.
Jesus said to speak to the mountain and not doubt in your heart (Mark 11:23). He did not say push on it, John Jacobs notes, yet many church folks spend their lives pushing on their problems instead of speaking to them.
| Aspect of the gift of faith | What John Jacobs teaches | His example |
|---|---|---|
| Consciousness | God cannot fail and cannot lie, so you live and talk like it | A football player’s advice to him at twelve |
| Language | Declare it, speak to the mountain, do not curse, nurse or rehearse the problem | David announcing Goliath’s defeat |
| Lifestyle | Do not panic; ask the Holy Spirit what to do | Twelve men with machetes in South Africa |
Finally, there is a lifestyle, summed up in two words: don’t panic. No matter how big the problem or who slanders you, do not react in the flesh. Simply ask, “Holy Spirit, what should I do?” The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you (Romans 8:11), and He loves to speak.
In South Africa, during a season when he says a quarter of a million people were saved in four months, his driver faked a breakdown and twelve men with machetes jumped out of a truck. He asked the Holy Spirit what to do and was told to jump out, rip his shirt and run at them shouting Jesus. They fled. After their arrest, police told him the men said they were afraid of the bigger men running alongside him.
How John Jacobs Opened the Spout
John Jacobs calls himself the last guy anyone would expect to preach to 85,000 people in Moscow. He failed at seven instruments in grade school, was told he was tone deaf and was weeded out of the youth choir. But someone told him God had put greatness inside him and would use his strength to impact the world.
That someone was a professional football player in his church when he was twelve. The man told him to drink a gallon of milk a day, pushed him through “one more rep, John Jacobs,” and told him to always remember that God cannot fail and cannot lie: live like it and talk like it, and you will change the world. He went on to become second in America in powerlifting.
His church taught him to win souls and that there is no greater miracle than having your name written in the Lamb’s Book of Life (Revelation 21:27). After strongmen visited his school and half the school was saved, he and two football players who had come to Christ began doing crusades in country churches at sixteen, using feats of strength to bring country people into the church.
At Oral Roberts University a detective taught him to break police handcuffs, which opened prison revivals. Then the 700 Club called, followed by a Christian network that broadcast his story to 120 countries. He describes coliseum crusades in some forty countries, including 20,000 who came forward in Caracas, and an actor known for a top television action show getting saved in one of his crusades.
The secret, he says, is that he opened the spout where the glory comes out, and a new season of God’s favor hit his life with a lifetime of divine surprises and divine appointments. He tells the church that one person with the gift of faith can win the battle for everyone else, just as one David won the battle for all of Israel, and that America needs this church.
One Act of Faith: A Grandmother’s Seed
John Jacobs closes with a story from a church in Virginia. A tiny grandmother asked him to visit her granddaughter’s school. The girl’s mother was addicted to heroin and her father was known as the most violent drunk in the county. “If I plant this seed,” the grandmother said, “my family will be saved.” With shaking hands she wrote a check to sponsor the school.
His schedule already held five schools that Monday, but he prayed for God to make a way, and they went. A girl in the third row kept her head down and told him he did not really care. He invited her to the evening service, and when she said her parents would never bring her, a youth pastor agreed to pick up her whole volleyball team. They filled the first two rows and all came forward.
John Jacobs took the girl’s hand and agreed with her in Jesus’ name for her mother’s salvation, reminding her that somebody had already spoken it and planted a seed. The next night her mother came forward and was saved. On the last night, a huge man in a cowboy hat stood in the doorway, refusing to come in, until the handcuffs broke. Then he ran forward, fell on his knees, cried out to Jesus and asked to be baptized.
Seven months later, he reports, the whole family was still in church every Sunday. All God needed, John Jacobs says, was someone to speak it and someone to plant a seed, and all of hell could not stop God from doing His part. One act of faith changed a family.
He then prays over the church, leading them to surrender all to Jesus and to declare, “My God cannot fail, my God cannot lie.” The congregation declares Psalm 1:3 over their lives, that their leaves will not wither and whatever they do will prosper (Psalm 1:3), and that today begins a new season of God’s favor.
Living It Out This Week
Here are practical steps drawn from the John Jacobs message on the gift of faith and divine surprises:
- Ask for the gifts. Read 1 Corinthians 12 and ask the Holy Spirit to work His gifts through you for the glory of Jesus.
- Make a covenant with your mouth. Refuse to curse, nurse or rehearse a problem; declare that God is faithful and able.
- Speak to your mountain. Instead of pushing on a problem, speak to it in faith, as Mark 11:23 says.
- Do not panic. When pressure hits, pause and ask, Holy Spirit, what should I do, then follow His lead.
- Do what you have never done. When God prompts you to an unusual step of obedience, take it.
- Find your one. Invite one person who would never come to church on their own.
Timestamped Outline
- 0:00 Greeting Wisconsin
- 1:03 A tool to draw the community into the church
- 3:08 Nineteen men and the sheriff’s call
- 9:35 The right bait to catch the right fish
- 10:38 Who is your one?
- 16:03 Asking for a prophetic word
- 17:14 A new season of God’s favor
- 18:18 Raised by grandparents and 800 acres
- 20:25 Do what you’ve never done
- 21:28 A divine surprise
- 22:29 1 Corinthians 12: the gifts of the Spirit
- 24:34 A word of knowledge
- 26:41 The gift of faith
- 28:59 The language of faith
- 30:07 David and Goliath
- 31:11 Speak to the mountain
- 32:17 The lifestyle of faith: don’t panic
- 33:18 Machetes in South Africa
- 36:30 The last guy you would expect
- 37:35 One more rep
- 39:50 Oral Roberts and breaking handcuffs
- 42:59 One David for ten thousand
- 44:05 A grandmother’s seed
- 48:15 A family saved
- 50:25 Prayer for a new season
Frequently Asked Questions
How is the gift of faith different from ordinary faith?
John Jacobs describes the gift of faith as a supernatural consciousness given by the Holy Spirit, one of the gifts listed in 1 Corinthians 12. It is a settled awareness that God cannot fail and cannot lie, deep enough that you live and talk like it whatever the circumstances. He says that person no longer moves by what things look like, and that one such person can win the battle for everyone else.
What does “the land of the same old same old” mean?
It is his picture of a life, or a church, stuck in routine, where nothing ever surprises anyone. John Jacobs says many churches are stuck in the same old same old spirit of religion. Leaving it means moving into what you have never seen and never been for God, and he ties that move to obedience: to see what you have never seen, you have to do what you have never done.
Why does a strongman preach the gospel?
John Jacobs explains that he cannot sing or play an instrument, but God gave him strength. Breaking handcuffs or bending steel has nothing to do with Jesus in itself, he says, but it has everything to do with people. Like bait in fishing, it draws people who would never come to church, and then he shares his testimony and the gospel.
Scripture References
All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:
- 1 Corinthians 12:4–11 — the gifts of the Spirit
- Romans 4:17 — calling things that are not as though they were
- Mark 11:23 — speak to the mountain
- 1 Samuel 17:45–47 — David’s announcement to Goliath
- Psalm 37:25 — the righteous not forsaken
- Romans 8:11 — the Spirit who raised Jesus lives in you
- Acts 2:17 — the Spirit poured out in the last days
- Psalm 1:3 — whatever he does shall prosper
How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.
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