The following are the views expressed by Olufemi Oguntokun in the September 1, 2026 episode of the On the Lord’s Side Podcast — Christian perspectives on news and current events.
ON DESPERATION AND THE DARK WORLD IT OPENS
Good morning to you once again. It is Tuesday, the 1st of September 2026.
I want to begin this morning by engaging with a video of a woman who described what she passed through, having had, for a while, difficulty conceiving and having children. I do not know whether she now has children, but she mentioned a number of things that should set us thinking — a teachable moment for us on the Lord’s side. I came across it on Instagram, on the Linda Ikeji blog. The caption reads: “I wanted a child so badly that I accidentally discovered a very dark world in Nigeria.” Let us hear her out, and ask whether you agree that what she discovered is indeed something to be described as a very dark world.
She said: “When women are desperate to have babies, there are people willing to take advantage of that. I know, because I was one of those desperate women. My problem wasn’t a secret — everybody knew I’d been married a long time without children, and everybody came to me with solutions. Somebody knew a pastor who did something that helped another woman get pregnant; somebody knew a place a woman went to and somehow got a baby. So I had many options from that dark place. At some point I felt I wasn’t being serious with the search, so when someone said she knew a pastor in Abuja who helped women get babies, I asked for his number. He told me the reason I had no children was a marine spirit, and that I needed to do dry fasting. After I sent him some money he had asked for, he said I should go to the market and look for a snail that was sleeping — a snail with a white film over its mouth — rub it around my body, do dry fasting, and then go outside at midnight, naked, to pray. I thought, what kind of prayer is this? What kind of pastor is this? I called a friend, and she said, ‘Women have gone to that man’s altar and stripped naked to pray. He didn’t even tell you to come to his church — why can’t you do what he’s telling you? You’re not serious.’ So the next day I bought the snail, and at midnight after my fasting I rubbed the slime all over my body, took a bowl of water, and went outside naked to pray. But when I came back inside, I felt so stupid — what kind of nonsense is this? — and I stopped after that day.”
She went on: “You gravitate toward women dealing with the same thing, and I met many looking for children, and they told me stories I still cannot believe. One woman told me a pastor asked her to come and fast, and afterward stand naked so he could bathe her before she could have a child. Desperation is a very dangerous place to be, because people know exactly how vulnerable you are and how to use that vulnerability — to get you to do what they want, or to exploit you for money. Imagine looking for a child for ten, twelve years, watching other women get theirs, and society excluding you — no longer inviting you to birthday parties, because Nigeria can be very cruel to women who are looking for children. That desperation grows so large that you stop thinking logically. So when people standing outside that desperation ask, ‘Why would she believe that?’ — wait until you stand inside it, then you will know how she feels.” She then described a “dark market” in children: a woman offered her a baby through so-called adoption for four million naira, with no documentation — “just carry the child and leave immediately.” Later, preparing to move to Canada, she tried a proper adoption, was told she would pay for legal documents through the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and extra to expedite; she was sent photos of babies, chose a baby girl — and then the story around the child’s movement grew so sketchy that, when she kept insisting on the adoption papers her office required, someone eventually told her something that made her say, “I do not want that baby anymore.” “I wanted a child so badly,” she concluded, “that I accidentally discovered a very dark world in Nigeria.”
If you are a person of conscience, you must have been appalled. What is the dark world she described? The advantage people take of those in desperate situations. Desperation is a very dangerous thing — something I have always emphasised. The devil takes advantage of desperate people, and more than that, so do his agents: the false prophets, the wicked and unkind, who prey on the desperate. That is why a Christian must never wear his or her desperation on the face. There is a reason Jesus said, of those who fast, that even when you fast you should anoint your head with oil and put on a cheerful face — to warn against hypocrisy, yes, but also because the people who see how disturbed you are cannot help you anyway, while the Lord God Almighty, who is able to help you, does not need to see you troubled to know your need. As they say on the streets in Nigeria, “Thank God we do not look like what we have been through” — and it is not light-hearted at all. Christians, especially, should never look like what they are passing through. That is why the hymn writer could say, “When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll — whatever my lot, it is well with my soul.” No matter how wild the storm, how turbulent, how high the mountain before us, may God give us the grace to gather ourselves and say, “It is well” — for it glorifies God when people can look at us and say, “You were passing through that much, and it never showed on your face?” That calm is not irresponsibility, nor being impervious to danger, but the assurance that all is well with the one whose hand is held by God Almighty.
This woman has done a great service to the body of Christ by coming out and telling all she passed through, and if you read the comments, many resonate with her. One person wrote that her story is enough for a Netflix documentary — and it is true. She told of pastors and acquaintances attempting to take advantage of her, and of that dark market in children, which is a matter for another day. Another commenter said, in effect, that anyone who doubts the veracity of her claims has simply never been in a desperate situation.
That reminds me of a story from when I was a very young lawyer, at the first firm where I worked. As is typical, on Fridays we would gather around a large table to discuss strategy and the briefs we were handling, and after the heavy lifting we would turn to lighter things. It was around the time the late TB Joshua was gaining prominence in Nigeria — people said there was a new man in a Lagos suburb, and that people who went there with different ailments received healing. Many Christians had questions about him, about his methods, and those questions dogged him even until his death. At that table, some felt, “People go there and get healed, so what’s not to like,” while others doubted that he was using the power of God. And I recall our principal, after listening to everyone, said: “My prayer is that you never get into such a desperate situation that you will no longer mind where help comes from.” He said it in Yoruba, but that is what it means — and it stayed with me for so long. Because a critically ill person may say, “I don’t mind whether it is that man, that prophet, or that mountain; just take me there, I want to get well.” This is not to make light of the pains of illness — I pray the Lord will shield you and me from such horrible diseases — but there have been Christians who, passing through the valley of the shadow of death, did not look out for help from just anywhere; they abandoned themselves to the goodness and the will of God. Such faith we should pray for: that even when we become desperate — and we will, for life happens — we do only what Jesus would do, and go directly to God.
Another person wrote: “In my ten-year wait, someone told me to stop washing my plates at night, because spirit children come to eat, and by extension they’ll bless me. Thank God I finally carried my own child.” Imagine the senselessness of that proposition to a believer — leave used plates in the kitchen overnight so that so-called spirit children who visit the homes of waiting mothers will find something to eat. Yet in desperation people say, “Maybe I should just do it — who knows? After all, the person telling me this has children, and I don’t.” That is how the temptation works. But as we engage this from the Lord’s side, we must not gloss over what this woman said about those so-called pastors who take advantage of people in desperate situations. That is of great concern — they are always waiting in the wings to prey on the desperate.
And we cannot claim to have no precedents in Scripture. Think of Hannah: barren, mocked by her rival, weeping, desperate. But what did she do? We do not read that she ran even to a prophet. In the Old Testament, people went to prophets to reach God, because God would put His Spirit on a chosen vessel — unlike now, in the New Testament, where, glory to God for the sacrifice of Christ, He has poured out His Spirit on all, on His sons and daughters, as in Joel. Yet even then, Hannah knew enough to go before God herself. She knelt before the Lord, weeping, her lips moving with no sound, so that Eli thought she was drunk. That is where desperation should drive us — to God. We know Sarah too: desperate for the child she had been promised, her desperation drove her to propose that Abraham sleep with Hagar, and Ishmael was born, and the rest is history. Desperation is a horrible thing. King Saul was desperate in 1 Samuel 28, the Philistines pressing in; unable to hear from God, he disguised himself and went to the medium at Endor. When God seems silent, desperation easily turns to forbidden spiritual sources — and we must be very careful.
There are leaders in the Bible, too, who exploited the desperate; this is not new. Read Ezekiel 34, where the prophet condemns the shepherds who eat the fat and clothe themselves with the wool, ruling with force and harshness. And Micah 3:11: “Her priests teach for a price, her prophets tell fortunes for money.” These things have been happening from time immemorial — priests teaching for a price: “You want to know the mind of God? Bring money.” So any pastor who diagnoses a “marine spirit,” demands money, or prescribes secret naked rituals at the price of a child is operating outside the pattern of Christ. As Bible-believing Christians, we should be confident enough to identify what does not follow the biblical pattern. Sometimes we are persuaded that, because we cannot predict the ways of the Holy Spirit — since Jesus told Nicodemus that the wind blows where it wishes, and you do not know where it comes from or goes — the Spirit “works in mysterious ways,” and so He could act in any manner at all. He does work in mysterious ways — but that is qualified. You can take this to the bank: the Holy Spirit will not ask you to do something Jesus would not ask you to do. Jesus said the Holy Spirit would testify of Him. So the WWJD test remains a perfect compass: would Jesus do this? Would Jesus ask a woman to take off her clothes, or say, “Until I bathe you, you will not get out of your trouble”? Would Jesus prescribe secret naked rituals, or say, “It’s a marine spirit — bring money”? If Jesus would not do it, His Holy Spirit would not ask you to do it, and would not ask any servant of God to make you do it. That much the Bible teaches. (Going through some preachers’ clips yesterday, I heard New Age-style teaching on patterns of behaviour that supposedly help us “own the world,” and I asked an AI platform — knowing the answer already — whether Jesus ever taught how to become rich or get ahead in this world. He never taught those things. Christian preachers should be careful not to teach what Christ and the apostles never taught. We must contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to us.)
Desperation itself is not a sin — it is human; as long as we are in this world, facing things beyond our power, we will become desperate. The danger is that it makes people credulous. And I love that this lady, having done exactly what the so-called prophet asked, looked at herself afterward and felt sorry for herself. My heart goes out to all such children of God made to do ridiculous, abhorrent things — and I pray you will be able to laugh at yourself, laugh it off, and thank God it did not lead to greater danger. Those who were pushing that woman toward adopting children in questionable circumstances could have landed her in serious criminal trouble.
The biblical remedy for desperation is simple, and the same in every era — whether Hannah’s or Sarah’s: bring the matter to God directly. You have access, and that is a glorious thing. It is always safe to trust the God who sees everything — which is the emphasis today from the Pilgrim’s Joy devotional, from Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening, on Psalm 73:24: “You will guide me with Your counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.” And from Psalm 62:8: “Trust in Him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to Him, for God is our refuge.” A wise person, in desperate situations, comes to the place of saying, “What God has not given me, I will accept His wisdom in not giving; His judgments are true and righteous when taken all together.” So: desperation is not a sin, but it makes people credulous; the remedy is the same in every era — bring the matter directly to God; refuse any solution that contradicts His character; and test every spirit and every prophet by the written Word, not by the intensity of your longing. The Bible says test the spirits — and you test them by the Word of God. The Bereans, after hearing Paul, would go home and search the Scriptures, come back and say, “We searched those things out; you were right — teach us again.” That is how it should be. Unfortunately, today we swallow what popular preachers say hook, line and sinker, and the intensity of our longings makes us believe.
One of the failings of the church today, and of many pastors, is that they fail to teach people to go to God directly — and the reason is not far-fetched. On Saturday, reading Galatians in the Readers’ Club, we considered what Martin Luther wrote about false prophets: they have a twisted ambition to control people, to lord it over them. I gave the example from Wole Soyinka’s play, The Trials of Brother Jero, where the prophet tells his assistant about a parishioner whose quarrelsome wife the man wants to beat. The prophet refuses to sanction it — and you would think he was relaying the mind of God, that a man should not abuse his wife. But when he speaks to his assistant, we see his real motive: “Once I allow him to do that, he will have no more need to come to me. I want to keep him desperate, so that he always comes back.” That is the sad reality of much of the church today. But we should not merely bemoan it — we have been warned. Jesus said there are wolves in sheep’s clothing, and they have gone out into the world. It is for us to know the Word of God, and to know our standing before Him. “Behold, what manner of love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God.” Each of us is a child of God; you can go to Him and say, “Abba, Father,” kneel before Him, and in the name of Jesus table your request. And every true servant of God should teach that — “I am glad you came to me for counsel and prayer, but the better way is for you to go yourself before God.” Paul, moving into 1 Corinthians 13, said, “I show you a more excellent way.” It is good and beautiful to gather God’s children to intercede — I have experienced it — but the more excellent way is for the desperate man or woman to stand before the Lord and say, “It’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer — not my father, not my mother; it is me, and I have come.” After Hannah went before the Lord directly, by faith, did she not break out, in 1 Samuel 2, into a prayer of praise now edged permanently into the hearts of Christians: “My heart rejoices in the Lord; my horn is exalted in the Lord; I smile at my enemies, because I rejoice in Your salvation”?
I am thankful for this woman who shared her story, bringing attention again to a matter of great importance — reminding those passing through desperate situations that there are wolves out there, in sheep’s clothing, and that once people know how desperate you are, they will come with all sorts of “solutions.” It is for every Christian to test every spirit, every prophet, every proposed solution — not by how intense your longing is, but by the Word of God. Ask: would Jesus do this? If Jesus would not do it, His Holy Spirit would not ask you to do it. That much we know; that much the Bible teaches.
ON “SEXY MOMMY G.O.” AND THE ATTIRE OF THE HEART
Next, a video that made its rounds on Nigerian Twitter yesterday. The person who posted it captioned it: “Meet my sexy Mommy G.O. — she’s a deliverance minister.” This is a radio platform, so you cannot see it, but the video shows the inside of an auditorium during a service — you can hear people praying and singing in the background — and it centres on a woman seated among the front-row ministers, dressed in a manner that leaves little covered. “Mommy G.O.” is the Nigerian street expression for the wife of a General Overseer, or a female General Overseer in her own right. And here she is being tagged “sexy Mommy G.O.”
You know that in the culture today, the word “sexy” has become almost harmless — people use it casually — but we must know exactly what it means. To be sexy is to invite people to think about sex; that is what it means. Many Christians today will say, “I want to look as sexy as possible,” as if it were neutral. Some argue that words change meaning over time, and what was unacceptable in one age becomes acceptable in another — perhaps. But we should be reminded that “sexy” is not a positive word from a Christian point of view. Beautiful, yes; comely, yes; healthy, fit — those are positive; you may put effort into being beautiful and well-groomed, and it glorifies God. But “sexy” means dressed in a way that makes people think of having sex with you — and outside the context of a marriage, that is not a God-glorifying thing. So this person wrote, “Meet my sexy Mommy G.O., a deliverance minister” — a reminder that all sorts of things happen today in the name of the Holy Spirit. People say, “This is how the Holy Spirit allows me to dress.” But remember: the Holy Spirit would not sanction anything Jesus would not do.
A Christian brother who reacted to the video wrote that “there is a clothing called the garment of a harlot, and this is shameful.” That phrase is from Proverbs 7:10 — “the attire of a harlot,” which most modern versions render “dressed as a prostitute.” He was right to bring it up, to counter those who readily say, “Whatever I’m doing, I’m led by the Holy Spirit; this is how He has asked me to dress.” There is such a thing as objective wrong. We live in a culture that tells us to refrain from judgment because everything is subjective — it depends on this, it depends on that. No. There are objective wrongs, and they should be called out as such. If you know your Bible, you recall the passage where Solomon describes a young man walking at twilight toward the corner, and a woman — loud, rebellious, away from home — meets him with flattery and an invitation to her bed. The point of Proverbs 7 is a father’s warning: foolishness, opportunity, and a seductive presentation lead to destruction. “Sexy,” even if the culture stops seeing it as inappropriate, is exactly that — an invitation to seduction, to think of carnal relationships outside the context for which God ordained them. And in Proverbs 7 the harlot’s clothing is a visible signal of her intent and character. We cannot run from this: clothing and dress are a form of communication. As people say, you want to be dressed the way you want to be addressed, because dress signals intent and character.
These are matters regularly discussed in the church and in society at large — but to find pastors, and those who put themselves forward as leaders, doing this very thing right in the church, wearing clothing of that nature, is mind-boggling. Of course, the Bible does not give us a detailed dress code, an ancient hemline we can map one-to-one onto the twenty-first century. But Scripture does treat clothing as a form of communication that can advertise availability, rebellion, ostentation — or holiness. If people ask, “Then how do you expect female pastors, or female Christians, to dress?” — that should not even be the question. We do not live in an age of fixed quotas on how long or short a skirt should be. The first thing is the heart — is the gospel in your heart, is the Lord reigning there? For if the Lord reigns in your heart and the Holy Spirit rules over you, everything else follows. And let no one say this addresses only women: in this video it was the woman, but the admonition goes to both men and women. I am not a woman, so perhaps I cannot fully relate to how male dressing affects Christian women — but a young lady on this platform told me long ago that it goes both ways, that men too sometimes dress in ways that lead women to think thoughts they should not. No Christian should go out wanting to be “sexy”; you go out wanting to be comely, beautiful, good-looking — it glorifies God that we are well-groomed and fit, so put effort into that. But to go out wanting people to think of the parts of the body that are sexual in nature does not glorify God, and it invites others to stray in their thoughts. We should be our brother’s — and our sister’s — keeper. A man should not go out wanting women to think about sex, nor a woman dressing to that end.
So to see a video like this making its rounds — a pastor, or the wife of a pastor, seated in church and dressed that way — please, help us. I am delighted by the many reactions. Somebody wrote, “Very shameful — sitting in the front row.” Another: “Inside supposed holy ground.” And another: “This one needs deliverance on herself first — may God have mercy.” That is exactly the attitude: a prayer that God should have mercy, not only on the person dressed that way — a leader in the church, no less — but on the many people under the pastorate of such a person; for what will become of them? May God have mercy, and may God have mercy on His church, in the name of Jesus.
I want to thank you so very much for joining me today for the September edition of On the Lord’s Side — Christian perspectives on news and current events. We were off-air for a while, taking a much-needed break, and now we are back, and I am sure this will continue to be a blessing. I look forward to your joining us again tomorrow, and I pray that the good Lord will keep us. You are listening to GospelBellsRadio.com, the Christian internet radio with a mission to engage the culture with the mind of Christ. Keep listening, and invite others too. God bless you. Engaging the culture with the mind of Christ.
