Prayer is relating, not begging

Lovelocks in Bakewell, Derbyshire: couples use them to
affirm their commitment and symbolise their relationship

Prayer is always on the agenda. Many people pray, probably most often when conscious of some personal need or confronted by news of a major national or international tragedy. It’s a kind of natural, spiritual reflex. But a frequent and provocative question is “Does prayer work?” The answer is either yes or no, depending on what you mean by “work”.

There have been unconvincing experiments comparing the recovery rates of people who were, or were not, prayed for. But prayer can't be tested in a lab. It isn’t another kind of treatment for human ills. It doesn’t “work” like that.

It certainly doesn’t work (at least, not consistently) if it is a shopping list of me-related requests, however laudable they are. Christians are regularly disappointed when their prayers are not answered as they hope they will be. A desired outcome to prayer is never guaranteed. Prayer is not a force we can learn to manipulate in order to get what we want. God is not our personal butler whose sole purpose is to make us comfortable and handle the difficult logistics of daily life.

But prayer does work, in a different way, if we regard it as aligning ourselves with the living God as we deal with those logistics. Prayer is consciously including God in all we do, think and say. It is making space for God to speak, act, lead, support, heal, empower, deliver, encourage and yes, rebuke. Prayer is nothing more or less than relationship. Joanna Trollope, in her novel The Choir has a bishop declare, “There’s no need to say anything when you pray. Just take time to look at God. And let him look at you.”¹

That’s how friends and lovers behave, whatever circumstances they face. So Bishop Stephen Cottrell suggests that “Prayer is the lover coming into the presence of the beloved and saying, ‘I love you’.” He adds that in that kind of prayer God also comes into our presence and says the same to us.² Prayer is “keeping company with God”, as a fourth-century writer Clement of Alexandria put it.

Prayer at its essence is “remaining”, or “abiding”, in Jesus’ love, which in turn determines what we shall ask him for (John 15:7). Such requests will be more to do with his long-term activity in the world than with our transitory wants. This kind of prayer doesn’t come easily to western Christians; we prefer the more business-like immediate transactions of requests and responses, after which we give God relatively little thought as we get on with “our” lives. But they’re not ours, of course. “You are not your own; you were bought at a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19,20).

As in any love-relationship, prayer is primarily an attitude, not merely an action. Jesus called his disciples friends, not servants (John 15:15), and the 20^th-century American Baptist minister and prolific writer Harry Emerson Fosdick made much of this. In The meaning of prayer (originally published in 1915 and still available) he wrote of “an overweening desire to beg things from God, and a corresponding failure to desire above all else the friendship of God himself.” He continued, “friendship is…a life to be lived, habitually, persistently – and its results are cumulative with the years. So prayer is a cumulative life of friendship with God.”³

And that does not sit comfortably with the contemporary rush to find quick answers to a rolling programme of needs. Friendship cannot even begin if one party is always begging from the other and sees them as a soft touch or a means to an end. Friendship depends on recognising the other party’s intrinsic worth and not on the exchange of goods and services.

When Jesus confronted Peter after the resurrection, he didn’t rebuke the apostle for having denied him. Nor did he ask him if he was sorry for his failure. They were friends. Their friendship could handle Peter’s failure. So Jesus just asked, “Simon, do you love me?” And when he received an affirmative answer, he gave Peter more work to do (John 21:15-19).

That’s why the many promises of answered prayer in Scripture are almost always in the context of spiritual enrichment and church growth: of developing the relationship. “You may ask for anything in my name, and I will do it,” said Jesus (John 14:14). “In my name” is not a mantra, but a condition: it means, “in accordance with my character and purposes.” So, for example, prayer “worked” in the early church when Christians threw off the straightjacket of personal desires and material possessiveness and focused on the bigger picture of building God’s Kingdom. Then, as they prayed, “the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42-47).

Some of the Psalms capture this God-focused attitude within daily life that many of us find hard to adopt. When one writer felt downcast, rejected and oppressed by circumstances he (or she) developed a passionate longing for God himself, not just a restoration of good fortune: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God” (42:1). Prayer is thirsting for God himself, not for what he can do. It is an active component of building a closer relationship whatever our circumstances: “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him” (Job 13:15).

This sort of prayer changes us before it changes other people or circumstances. “To pray is to let Jesus come into our hearts,” is how the Norwegian pastor Ole Hallesby opened his classic book on prayer.⁴ When we do that we begin to discern what he wants to do in the world and therefore how we should act, how we should intercede and what we should ask for.

Then we can become Kingdom-focused, as was the early church, so that our immediate personal concerns for comfort and success become less significant in our minds. So when setbacks occur, our faith doesn’t crumble; God hasn’t abandoned us, but is just doing or allowing something we didn’t expect.

This is not to say that the details of daily life are of no interest to God. They are; he loves us where we are and how we are. But it is to say that these should not be the main focus of our “prayers”, but that prayer-as-relationship should be our way of life. When it is, we start to pray more for others than for ourselves. And when we do that, in some mysterious way prayer seems to enable the “wind” of the Spirit to blow his renewing grace into both our lives and the lives of others more effectively. That is when things “happen”. That is how prayer “works”.

Think and talk

1.  What can you do to turn your prayer life into more of a relationship of love and trust than a series of transactions?

2.  Paul tells us to “pray constantly” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). What steps can you take to de-clutter your mind in such a way that God isn’t crowded out and you remain aware of his unceasing presence?
3.  Read James 4:1-8. What can you learn from it about attitudes to God, the world, and to prayer?
4.  Look at these promises of answered prayer. What are the conditions attached to them which prevent them from being guarantees that we’ll always get what we want? Matthew 7:7-12; John 14:13,14; 15:7-8, 16-17; 16:23-24; James 5:13-16.

References

1.  Joanna Trollope, The Choir, Bloomsbury 1988, p.76.
2.  Stephen Cottrell, I thirst, Zondervan 2003, p.131.
3.  Harry Emerson Fosdick, The meaning of prayer, Association Press 1917, pp. 23,27, his italics.
4.  O. Hallesby, Prayer, Inter-Varsity Fellowship 1963, p.9.