| | | Written Off | | |  | | God poured out His Spirit as Dr. Rick Amato and team ministered in the eastern region of Cuba. | | Having returned safely from a trip to Cuba where RAM has now worked for over twenty years, it is awesome to see the boldness and passion of the Cuban church and pastors that are so on fire for the Lord I personally predict that within three to five years (if we have that long before the second coming) Cuba will be a Christian nation sending missionaries around the world. Our great Pastor friend, Dennis Gray, informed us last night that he was so thankful that RAM introduced him to Cuba and pioneered the kingdom work there being the first ones in even though we were arrested upon our first visit for even coming.
Sex, money, power. Ego-driven people believe they can control and rule other peoples' lives. Often when they find they can't, or there is a failure to speak the truth in love and to talk to each other not about each other, people are written off. In the same way, Cuba has been written off for so many years. Yet, the church has emerged from underground purified and empowered, and there is more fruit there than any one of the many ministries birthed out of RAM or the many other ministries now operating there can harvest. Neither time nor page space allow us to bring adequate glory to God in the highest. As Jesus Christ prayed to Our Father with great passion and love, may we all be One and labor together that the Word of God goes forth and that there may be fruit that remains for eternity. Let it never be said that we ever wrote anybody off.
| | Written Off | | | Have we written you off or in the towel threw?
Our attitude says we've washed our hands of you.
We know it's a tragedy and it pierces our heart.
We claim to love you, yet we want no part.
Though pricked within, we just can't get involved.
The situation seems hopeless; the problem can't be solved.
We just can't be bothered, you're hard to be around,
With anyone else, let the solution be found.
We've thrown our hands up in futile desperation,
We strive to maintain complete separation.
We don't dislike you, and surely don't hate.
But leave you to your choices and to Sir Fate.
If you're not in our face, then we don't have to see.
That look in your eyes and that haunting silent plea
, "Won't someone please love me and help me to find
The way back to myself and sweet peace of mind?"
Who knows what sacrifice that would take?
We're just not willing that effort to make.
We each live with our choices every day;
What is the end result and the ultimate pay?
We look within; this coldness shouldn't be.
What if places were switched and you were me?
Such searching leads away from our comfort zone.
We search no further; you're still on your own.
Another victory for evil, see the prince of darkness scoff.
For we've washed our hands...we've written you off | | | | Penny Amato-Richardson 8/17/02 | | | | Evangelist Amato has toured the United States preaching and teaching the Matthew 18 covenant begging hundreds of thousands of Christians to speak to each other in love that we might grow as Ephesians teaches us. Dr. Amato's heart is to see Christ followers live in covenant with the "red words", the words of Jesus, as Matthew 18:15-20 teaches. This poem penned by Dr. Amato's sister and this page is a heart cry for Christians to stop talking about each other and talk to each other. In fearing or avoiding conflict, we sometimes just write people off. We want to encourage those who feel written off by others, and remind Christians it is a victory for Satan when we give in to the temptation to write others off. Let us follow the example of our Savior speaking the truth in love and "growing in the grace and knowledge of our beautiful Lord Jesus Christ," 2 Peter 3:18. May it never be said that you or I ever wrote any nation or any person off for Jesus Christ died for us all. | | |
| | Amato's Daughter Weds | | |  | | | | | | The youngest of Rick and Nancy's five children, Sara Elizabeth, married James Ryan this spring. The Amato's family has now increased from two to twenty-two! To God be all the glory and praise for the great blessings He has bestowed on the Amato family. | | | | | | | | | |
| | Have You Seen Jesus? |  |
This letter was received from a young man I just call, "Chas," who played Jesus Loves Me perfectly for me on his birthday. He has been parented by two of our greatest warriors, and the best is yet to come. Just like we leave the best to be defined by God, we also leave the answer to this little angel's question to the imagination of the millenniums. Many claim to have seen Yeshua El Nazaree (Jesus of Nazareth), and accounts about Him vary regarding what He looked like when He was here on earth.
There is a story about how St. Francis of Assisi forsook everything to be God's and yet remained sleepless for weeks. In outrage, he prayed for sleep and asked God what he had left undone. Supposedly, God answered him that until he found a leper and kissed him, he would never really see Christ or know Him. Then, he had a vision that God would stop the rain and bells would ring, which he should follow the next morning.
The following day, his companion, Leo, witnessed as St. Francis would take no other roads than those that led to the bells. When he came to a leper shaking a staff of bells to warn others to stay away, with the leper's nose and fingers gone and ooze coming from his lips, St. Francis embraced him, kissed him, wrapped the leper in his robe and carried him toward the city. Bro. Leo's testimony is that when they arrived, light was all around St. Francis and his facial hair gone from the conflagration. Leo suggested perhaps lightening from the storm had struck Francis. Weeping for joy, St. Francis said, "All lepers, crippled sinners, if you kiss them become Christ." St. Francis legacy cannot be denied, and this story is neither confirmed nor denied by Citizen Amato.
Many ministries are now focusing on doing social works, which our mother ship, RAM, and our house church movement, Grace Place, have recognized for years as critical for "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." |
To the right is a photo of a man in West Palm Beach left to die in the hot sun. As my wife found food and water, which he couldn't eat or drink, I told him of a place where there is no sickness, sorrow, suffering or pain. I shared with him that somehow by the shedding of Jesus Christ's blood all of us are forgiven everything, past, present and future, and Christ rose from the dead to prove His blood, handed down through the Jewish faith, was more important than food or water. Gladly receiving the message, for the first and only time, I saw a twinkle in his eye as I told him, "By the blood of Jesus Christ and His resurrection power and authority, your sins are forgiven you." Soon the authorities arrived and took him away.
|  | is there someone in your life in great need? Someone from whom others would flee? To me, that person is Christ, and the message to many of my pastor friends, who are focusing on meeting human needs, is to remember as we do to make the main thing the main thing - Jesus and Him crucified, the shed blood of the Lamb of God who has taken away the sin of the world. This is Jesus Christ. He is not only the homeless man on the ground but in the cities where we build roads, an orphanage or a church building. Without the gospel, we forget who we really are.
Absolutely, we do good works in His name, and like St. Francis of Assisi, embrace the sick and suffering that no one else wants to be near. We must see that we, too, are Christ coming to Christ and if we bear not the good news and prioritize sharing it as our primary purpose, soon we will experience in Christendom further division and ultimately, dissolution, its daughter.
This clarion call is to see that every leper is Christ, every outcast is Him, and to run enthusiastically to them to love them passionately. Then, we, too, are Christs, bearing witness that the nail holes in His body and the open wound in His side through the Resurrection provided the Holy Spirit so that each one can reach one. As for Chas' letter, someday, the blessed hope is that during a time of the beginnings of nuclear war, Jesus Christ will return, save all Israel and set up a new government on earth that will last for 1,000 years. Until then, we are Him. Just one look in the mirror reassuring yourself that you are deeply loved, fully pleasing, totally forgiven and completely accepted through the blood of His cross, and out of gratitude changing to become more like Him each day, taking His gospel, especially to the outcasts, is what makes us "the called out ones" - the church not of this world calling others to leave it, also. Until then, HE is everywhere. | | | |
| | | | YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE | | | Most people are aware that have followed the life and ministry of Rick Amato that over a decade ago he founded the Grace Place International Fellowship of House Churches. Few are aware of why.
Those who know Rick and Nancy know that along with being children raising children (they had five when Nancy was at the tender age of 21), neither seemed suited to be a pastor or a pastor's wife in the typical protestant tradition. Early on, Amato found himself unexpectedly at center stage after being used of God mightily to help open the crumbling Soviet Union in eastern Europe to the gospel. The one lesson he never forgot there is documented in a video entitled, The Greatest Story Never Told, in which he attributed the fall of the Soviet Union to the underground church and a secret network of houses that linked believers, who manifested apostolic-like Christianity. The leader never was apprehended by the KGB even though the movement extended to the furthest regions of Siberia.
Amato started the first Grace Place in his Upper Room and began ordaining ministers, training them only in the doctrines of justification, propitiation, regeneration and sanctification, one on one, until the number grew to above 500. He called this "his part-time job."
Many now say this was at the expense of his health as for over 20 years he gratefully enjoyed a full time itinerant ministry, which involved local church, area wide and international crusades along with a brief career as a television and radio evangelist.
As religion changed in America, Amato and his teammates searched for the astonishing decline in evangelism and the missing bridge between it and discipleship in what James Dobson called, "the most important quest of the American church." Beginning long before preachers were podcasting and live web streaming, Amato started broadcasting and training in the Upper Room of his home in Detroit and still hopes to feature many of those raised up as Trophies of Grace - "If not here, then on the other side," he says.
Now, in the research and development phase, Amato is seeking how God would have him raise up what he calls Worshipping Warriors as he sees the day approaching in the United States when an American resurgence economically and the survival of the value of the dollar will be embraced much like Nazi Germany by both believers and unbelievers alike.
Recently, Amato was quoted as saying, "Perhaps sooner, but absolutely no later than in the lifetime of my grandchildren, the house fellowship of Christians will become the mainstay of true believers whose first priority will be advancing the kingdom of God and not nationalism."
It is Amato's deepest heartfelt prayer that pastors who still have the fire of evangelism in them will accept the evangelist as a gift to the church and continue to plant house churches by training up leaders rather than swapping sheep and expanding their campuses with more buildings.
Feeling strongly about this, Amato, whose ministry is currently going through enormous transition is seeking those pastors and people, both male and female, who want to be ministers in their own right and share the vision to penetrate the public marketplace with the Good News, the message of the Cross, and manifest the kingdom of God within us and among us.
Amato says, "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In this day when revivals and guest evangelists are almost unheard of in churches, I am not ashamed to beg people for monthly support to help us continue our work in the public schools of America and our incredible, unbelievable overseas opportunities. However, that's just the starting point. The experience of a lifetime begins with a lifetime of experience. For those who will walk with us the rest of our journey. All of my plans are to bring to bear all of my resources to ensure that if you walk with me, you'll never walk alone - I'll be there with you."
Dr. Amato's masterful teaching and preaching and lifetime of experience as a uniquely anointed evangelist of God are being offered up to those interested in going deeper in their experience with God, using their own unique spiritual giftings and bringing forth fruit that remains for eternity. If you want to become such a Worshipping Warrior, going beyond giving and praying and growing into advanced fruit bearing, call 1-800-543-9673 and ask about studying with Dr. Amato in his highly acclaimed curriculum, Finding Myself, Finding God.
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| | | | | | Worshipping Warriors! A Call to Prayer “Call to me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things you do not know.” Jeremiah 33:3 | Thank you with all of our hearts for your interest in Rick Amato Ministries (RAM). If you are a Worshipping Warrior, thank you for you faithfulness to stand by this ministry these 35 plus years! What a privilege to serve the Lord as an evangelist and to have been ordained to preach the gospel to the world. We are all part of a sum. How grateful we are that God uses us together as He unfolds His glorious plan! God has done “exceedingly, abundantly above all that we could ask or think,” Ephesians 3:20. The mighty works we have seen are incalculable. As the Apostle Paul cried out, so, too, we cry out to finish strong as we unwaveringly preach the shed blood of Jesus Christ on the Cross alone for the forgiveness of sin. Please pray as never before for RAM. With its many ongoing ministries, ask God to reveal His preeminent focus in these days. Ask Him to thrust laborers into the harvest. Please consider becoming a part of the daily, 24 hour prayer chain by calling the number below. God bless you and keep you. If you are not yet a Worshipping Warrior, please prayerfully consider joining us in the war for souls. And, please pray for the public schools of America. For more information or to become a Worshipping Warrior call (800) 543-WORD (9673) or visit www.rickamato.com or www.rickamatolive.com/Become_A_Worshipping_Warrior.html | | | |
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| What is a Worshipping Warrior? Worshipping Warriors are the driving force behind Dr. Amato's life and ministry. They are the ones who have the courage to say, "I want to find myself and find God and how He can use me to reach the world." Together, we are knowing God and making Him known
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| | Let it be known by all before whose eyes these words pass that the seemingly endless stalemate between good and evil is behind us. As these letters are read by your eyes and before this 24 hour period passes, 175,000 people will have joined the ranks of this REVOLUSHUN©. | | | | What to Know More? | | Enter Here | | | | Rick Amato Ministries is pleased to present to you a viewing of Rick's DVD on How to Defeat Depression. From this link you can also download a copy of Dealing with Depression. May God lift up your heart. You are loved. | | To view this awesome video and download a copy of Dealing With Depression | | View Video | | | | | |