Our good friend, Sams, is a Latvian pastor that also just happens to be from India. He is one of the most dynamic, God-inspired and God-led preachers that I have ever met. He started a new church about a year ago in Riga so Laura and I decided to visit him today.
He had told us that the church (House of God) was meeting between two casinos, of which there are numerous ones in the cities of Latvia. As we found the right entrance (next to the Las Vegas Casino) we were directed to the back of the building. The usual banquet room they rent for Sunday services was actually being used for a banquet so the House of God had to move. Yes, it moved to the bar...actually two bars joined together to get the approximately 125 worshipers into one place.
I have always heard that the church is not the building and that was proven today. Sams preached from Matthew 15:21-28, the story of the woman with the demon possessed daughter. He did a great job of relating the lady's history and where she came from to what many Latvians feel today. Most new Christians in Latvia have no other Christians in their family. Many come from divorced families, or alcoholic relatives and the suicide rate for Latvia is always in the top 5 of the world. His point was that we can't keep making excuses for our problems today from what happened in our past. We have seen the same thing happen in some of the people we witness to. They feel that God cannot accept them because of what they have done or the generations before them have done. He zeroed in on 2 Corinthians 5:17 to prove his point. (Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!)
We always enjoy Sams' enthusiasm for worship, his desire to give all the recognition to God and the special way he can relate the scriptures so that everyone can understand God's messages. He is doing a great job of helping a new generation of young believers see the light. We pray that God will continue to bless him and the new church.
My parents always told me to stay out of the bars and get into the church. Today I did both.
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