Why BGV?

BGV stands for Blessed Grateful Victor which is my pen name for this blog. Blessed because without God's blessing I will not be where I am today. Grateful is what I intend to be everyday (hence my other blog a Heart of Gratitude Praise Journal) for every of God's blessing. With His blessing and my gratitude, I will be victorious every day!

New versus Old

When one is born again after trusting Jesus Christ as his Saviour, there is a new nature created in the image of Christ. This is the New Man, filled with spiritual insight and strength because of the Holy Spirit who now resides in him. But the Old Man, the sin nature of each one of us is still there as it can only be removed if we are apart from the physical body we now have.
Hence daily it is a constant battle of the New Man vs the Old Man in us. The New Man has victory if we listen and do the will of God daily. But if we listen to the temptations of the evil one and obey them, we lose and the Old Man in us wins.
Thanks be to God for the victory that we have in Christ who now cancels our sin nature and replaces that with His pure nature.
SIN is, as the middle letter represents, the 'I' nature - self-centred, egoistic and proud. 
CHRIST now replaces our SIN nature when we trust and submit to Him. Notice that the I is still there, as trusting Christ does not make us a robot but we are still unique in our person-hood. But now the I does not occupy the centre position but is subsumed in CHRIST as He lives in us through the Holy Spirit.

WANTED: New Wineskins

All of us who have received the Lord Jesus as Saviour have the New Wine of the Holy Spirit. This new wine enables us to live victoriously as conquerors through our faith. Sin is no longer our master but Jesus is our New Master. But yet some of us are defeated in our daily walk because we still try to keep the new wine in old wineskins. These old skins are akin to old habits and traditions that do not help us and often hinder us in our growth. Old skins especially surface when believers come from Christian homes being products of earlier generations of believers. The "DO NOT"s and "CAN NOT"s of traditional or conservative Christianity can stifle the Holy Spirit's work in us if we are not careful.
May the Lord help us to have our minds and hearts opened to see His new wineskins for us so that the New Wine of the Spirit can be poured into and out of. May we not brand everything that we do not understand as "heresy" or the "wrong gospel" without coming to the Lord and asking Him to reveal His ways to us.

Persevering Faith in Times Like These

The times we live in increasingly show the myriad attacks of our common enemy.
But God is on the throne and He and He only sovereignly rules and reigns.
We need to have perseverance through these times to endure to the end.
We need faith to believe that ALL things will work out for good if we believe and trust in our Good God.
We need persevering faith that will take us through the most difficult of situations one step at a time.
THANKS BE TO GOD who gives us the victory through His Son Jesus Christ!

Common Enemy

Expanding on the last blog, about having the propensity to evil, where then does evil come from?
We all have a common enemy, the devil or satan. He and his minions are out to destroy all that God has created.
Hence before we begin to attack one another, we need to first ascertain what is the root cause of the conflict. In fact most of human conflicts have their root cause in demonic activity.
Jesus said, "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." The thief is the devil who is out to steal our peace, kill our joy and destroy our lives but God through Jesus has come to give us PEACE, JOY and LIFE to the fullest.
Let us then turn to Jesus and stand united against our common enemy.

Propensity to evil

I was reflecting on God's grace and mercy and realised that without His redemptive transformation in my life, I would have spiralled into a life of decadence and self-destruction.
All of us, if we are honest enough, knows how much our hearts are prone to evil.
All of us know that the only thing that separates us from people who murder, steal, rob and do wicked things, is that they act on the temptation to do these things while we don't.
But all of us have that propensity to do evil.
All of us are sinners needing forgiveness and cleansing.
All of us need a Saviour. Who then can save us from such evil?
Thanks be to God who gave us His Son Jesus Christ as the complete solution to our needs!

Kai Xing

The Chinese word for Happiness is Kai Xing which literally means "Open Heart".
It is very apt as no one can truly be happy without opening one's heart to someone or something.
A person whose heart is closed due to past hurts can never truly be happy. Only Jesus can do 'open heart surgery' in the soul of a person to heal and transform so as to bring real happiness and joy.
May you open your heart to Jesus the Healer today so as to receive His joy.