AFRICAN PLUME

By Akin Ojumu Let me paint the grim picture of Nigeria’s current political situation for you. Maybe then you'd understand the fierce urgency for a radical action to change the country’s ruinous trajectory. The average Nigerian National Assembly member receives an annual salary package of about $600,000. That’s a total of $65.5 million for 109 Senators and $216 million for the 360 members of the House of Representatives members. In a year, Nigeria spends a combined total of $280 million in salaries alone for the entire NASS. What does that amount of money translate into in terms of productivity as measured by the number of bills debated in both chambers? The answer is, not very much at all.  In a year, both chambers of the National Assembly of Nigeria consider an average of 516 bills. What that means is that for every bill debated in NASS, it costs Nigeria $540,000.  Contrast that level of productivity with that of the United States, the leading democratic nation in the world.  The

By Akin Ojumu Birds of the same feather flock together. Entrenched powers will do anything to hang on to power. They’ll go to any length to secure their stranglehold on the necks of the citizens. This is the case with the civilian dictators ruling most of Africa, particularly West Africa. The saber-rattling ECOWAS leaders pushing to go to war with the Nigerien coup plotters aren’t doing so because they care about the sufferings of the people of Niger Republic. What concerns them is not the extreme poverty or the country’s security and humanitarian situation. The miserably shortened lifespan and disease plagued lifetime don’t bother them one bit. These out of touch civilian dictators are only concerned about themselves and their hold to power. With multiple military coup d’état in Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, they can see the handwriting on the wall. Sensing it’ll soon be their turn, i.e., “Emilokan,” their cage is rattled, and they’ve caught the shivers. An eerie sense of foreboding

By Akin Ojumu Grace Productions, a ministry of Grace Community Church, Sun Valley, California, where Dr John MacArthur serves as the Pastor, has released a new documentary. Titled, “The Essential Church,” the film tells the story of how three pastors, one of whom was Pastor MacArthur, resisted the public health measures instituted to stop the spread of COVID-19. The film, they claim, “exposes the gross hypocrisy of state and local officials who had ordered houses of worship to shut their doors while permitting deadly, destructive riots to sweep through major cities unchecked.” In their view, resisting the COVID restrictions was a courageous defense of the faith. A little bit of a disclaimer here. I consider Pastor John MacArthur one of God’s gifts to the present-day Church. His teachings and sermons have contributed to my spiritual growth tremendously. He is one Christian leader for whom I have utmost respect and admiration. That said, as a medical professional involved in COVID-19 the

By Akin Ojumu From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is all about Christ Jesus, the only begotten Son of God. Both the Old and the New Testaments speak of the wonderful works of the Second Person of the Triune God. The Holy Book reveals what the Savior of mankind did, is doing, and plans to do for all those whom He has predestined from the foundation of the world and has chosen to be His elect. Hebrews 10:7 “Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of Me in the Scroll of the Book.”  Mark 1:1 “This is the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  Luke 4:18-21 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…”  John 1:1-5 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.

Those who tell you military coup is not the answer – or an answer – are part of the problem. A lot of them are covertly and overtly profiting from the untenable and intolerable status quo. Pay them no heed.

By Akin Ojumu God always hears and answers our prayers. The thing is though, His answer may sometimes be a no. There are numerous instances when all we get as a response is complete silence. Does that make God evil or uncaring? The answer is of course, “No!” As humans with a sinful nature living in a fallen world, our will is almost always not aligned with God’s will. Even more so is the fact that our humanity incapacitates us; for we are unable to see beyond the present moment and our present situation. Blinded by our consummate desire to have it our way no matter what, a nope from God is never an acceptable answer to us. Because we’ve already convinced ourselves that what we prayed for is best for us and something that must be granted to us, God’s silence always sounds to us like He is ignoring us. This was the important lesson that Jesus was trying to convey to His disciples in Luke 11:5-13 when, after He had taught them how to pray, He concluded with the following profound remarks:

By Akin Ojumu Those who pay, even the most cursory, attention to American politics must have heard of the term narcissism. The past decade has seen the Google search for the word and its associated terminologies skyrocket. Along with this resurgent interest are all sorts of armchair psychologists and psychoanalysts crawling out of the woodworks and tagging everyone with the narcissism label. With etymology in Greek mythology, narcissism derives from the name of Narcissus, the son of the river-god Cephissus and the fountain nymph Liriope of Thespiae. He was so incredibly good looking that, despite many suitors, Narcissus didn’t find any of them worthy to be his soulmate. Spurned and rejected, some of his admirers took their own lives. Narcissus left a trail of jilted lovers and broken-hearted maidens in his wake. One of them was nymph Echo, who beseeched the god Nemesis to punish Narcissus for breaking his heart. His prayer was answered one day when Narcissus was walking along a lake. A

By Akin Ojumu This book that I’m currently reading talks about a seismic shift in the way we do Church. Titled “The Rise of Network Christianity,” it explores the decline of mainline protestant Christian denominations and the rapid rise of what the authors describe as a “fast-growing, closely connected movement of religious entrepreneurs” for which they’ve coined the term “Independent Network Charismatic” (INC) Christianity. What distinguishes INC Christianity from other traditional Christian institutions is the fact that they: (1) do not seek to build a movement or to create affiliated franchise congregations using a particular name. (2) are not primarily focused on building congregations in the traditional sense, but rather seek to influence the beliefs and practices of believers regardless of congregations or affiliation. (3) seek to transform society as a whole rather than saving individual souls and building the church. Here’s how C. Peter Wagner, one of the influential leaders of

By Akin Ojumu Taken at face value, statements such as, “I gave my life to Christ” or “I surrendered my life to Christ,” are benign assertions of an individual’s salvation. These are testaments to the establishment of new relationships with the Lord Jesus. They are attestations to the severance of ties to the kingdom of darkness and affirmations of allegiance to the kingdom of light. Pious as they may sound, however, these expressions give unmerited credit to man for his own redemption. Inherent in these words is the idea that it is the sinner who, of his own volition, chooses to gift the Savior with his life. For anyone to say he “gave his life to Christ” is to extol himself with the decision to turn from death to life.  And that’s the case with all of us. Being the egoistic narcissists that we are, it’s in our nature to hug the spotlight. The burning desire to be the captain of our own ship is what propels us to want to take the glory for our rescue from hellish gory. Our penchant to

By Akin Ojumu There are those who believe that man is inherently good and endowed with a free will to choose God or do that which is right. They teach that humanity was morally unaffected by the Fall. This view of man is a heresy that dates back to early Christianity.  Known as Pelagianism, this heresy originated from Pelagius, a fourth century Monk and theologian. His heresy was condemned at the Council of Carthage in 418 A.D and the condemnation was summarily ratified at the Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431). Pelagius denied the imputation of Adam’s sin, original sin, total depravity, and substitutionary atonement. He taught that man has an unimpaired moral ability to choose that which is spiritually good and possesses the free will, ability, and capacity to do that which is spiritually good. He believed that a Christian can attain sinless perfectionism in his lifetime. This resulted in a gospel of salvation based on human works. Man could choose to follow the precepts of God and then fo

By Akin Ojumu Public opinion is a powerful force that shapes government policies in most civilized societies. Because the viability of a political career hinges on the goodwill of the people, politicians invest considerable amounts of money to assess their public approval. Periodically, elected government officials like to feel the pulse of the citizenry to gauge the public’s view of their job performance at a particular point in time. While it’s true that the people of Palestine in the time of Jesus didn’t have scientifically objective tools to measure the approval of the man who called Himself the Messiah, there are plenty of anecdotes in the Bible from which we can glean moments when Jesus’ popularity shot through the roof and those times when His approval rating dropped like a rock. For much of His 3-year ministry, Jesus had a favorability rating that would have put the nail in the coffin of any aspiring politician’s political ambition. There was nothing attractive about Him, nothi

By Akin Ojumu From time to time, I highlight video clips from sermons by ministers of the Gospel. By comparing what these people say in the name of God to the Word of Word, I’m able to point out what’s wrong with the message they preach. To most people who read these commentaries with a Biblically informed mind, the flawed teachings in these sermons become apparent when exposed to the pure light of Scripture. Once again, this video clip is another example in this series. This time around, it is a video clip from a sermon preached four years ago by Randy Feldschau, Senior Pastor at One City Church (formerly Cathedral Church), Beaumont, Texas. Titled, “Making Room for Miracles,” the sermon was preached from Matthew 24:12-14. This is the story where Jesus entered the Temple and drove away those buying and selling. We read that Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves. The lesson Randy Feldschau drew from this story, however, was that

By Akin Ojumu You are a genuinely born-again believer in Christ Jesus. But you’ve now found yourself at a point in your Christian life where the flood of disillusionment is eroding your faith and, in the process, washing away your confidence. Downcast and dispirited, a heavy overcast sky presses down on your mind, preventing the sun from shining through.  Try as you may to get this monkey of despondency off your back, it fastens its grip and stubbornly refuses to let go. To rekindle the fire that once burnt in your soul, you try to bury yourself in more activity, but the spark is long gone. The more conferences and retreats you attend, the further into the funk you sink and the more disenchanted you get. So dreadful is the discontentment in your soul, going to Church has become a great ordeal. To make matters worse, whenever you succeed in dragging yourself to Church, you are immediately full of regrets even before the service gets halfway. You are confronted with a progressively stale

By Akin Ojumu Hearing from God is big business. It brings in loads of dough and pulls in torrents of moola. Vast empires of vainglory have been built on the foundation of hearing the still small voice. There exists today a considerable commercial conglomerate of covetousness erected on the pillars of getting a word from God. Those who boast of a direct line of communication with God are greatly esteemed among men. The select few believed to receive regular downloads from Heaven are considered especially devout and profoundly spiritual. These highly anointed oracles of God glide on rarefied air. Pomp and pageantry seem to follow them wherever they go. Their words and deeds are cradled in an otherworldly aura of superfluousness. Expectedly, chasing after these hallowed deities is a cult of relentless wackadoodle followers. With unabashed relish, these awestricken devotees readily gulp down every spittle-laden utterance that gushes out of the mouth of the demigods, as though their very ex

By Akin Ojumu Black people are ingrates. At the slightest provocation, they are quick to spill out onto the streets to protest one injustice or another in American society. These thankless agitators have conveniently forgotten all the good things the good White folks have done for their kind over the centuries.  Bombed out on the intoxicating Kool-Aid of the Black Lives Matter hysteria, they choose to be amnesic to the benevolence of White slave owners who, out of their kindheartedness, built huts and shacks of worship for their foreparents during the period of their indentured servitudes on Southern slave plantations. Thank God for good white men like Pastor Mike Keller who, at the risk of being lynched by the black mob on the social media circular firing squad, summoned the courage to remind these ungrateful descendants of slaves of the magnanimity of White people towards black slaves. This courageous white missionary put his own precious white fat neck on the chopping block to teach

By Akin Ojumu I present to you, Laurie A. Ditto, a celestial frequent flyer and avid traveler to the heavenly realm.  In this video clip, you’ll hear her narrate how she was chosen by God for the very important mission of making recurrent long-distance commutes to Heaven because God wants her to learn something from Heaven to bring back to earth. Whatever it is she is learning in Heaven, apparently, must have been mistakenly omitted from Scripture. As we all know, earth dwellers don’t know how the will of God is done in Heaven. So, it’s impossible for them to replicate it here on earth. It, therefore, becomes necessary for celestial astronaut Laurie Ditto to go on these heavenly excursions to learn how folks in Heaven go about doing the will of God over there. In a process of spiritual technological transfer, she can then come back and teach everybody else on earth what she learned in Heaven. Luckily for us, Laurie Ditto isn’t in any way under any divine embargo that prohibits her from