Prayer is for Amateurs

by Harry Riley

Did you know the word 'amateur' means, to paraphrase, 'someone who does something for the love of it'? (It's your actual French, you know...)

We are all amateurs in prayer. Prayer is not a technique: it is a living, ever changing, life changing and world changing relationship with the living, loving, never changing Creator of everything, who wants to restore us to the condition he always intended us to be in, shown perfectly in Jesus. It is entering the perfect, totally accepting friendship of God.

Let God be big

And the rest! But why talk or write about something as beyond words as prayer? Prayer springs from real life and returns to God, who is our Life. We were made for prayer, whether we know it or not. All our attempts to find satisfaction anywhere else leave us in the end empty and disillusioned. But to be disillusioned is exactly what we need to be, curiously - to get rid of all our distorted ideas of God and let him be as big, loving and powerful as he is, and to let him live and work in us through the Holy Spirit to change and restore us both individually and as a truly human community.

Need and supply

We never pray out of strength, only great weakness. We need to be experts in our own weaknesses, if you like, letting go of our control freak mentality, our insecure and destructive need to manipulate others into giving us what only God in Jesus can ever give. We need to come as we are, to worship, as a modern song has it, and to recognise our common and constant need for grace and forgiveness. It all comes down to our need and God's infinite supply.

Transforming friendship

If we do this, God hugs us into wholeness. If we do this, we become more like Jesus. If we do this, others see the difference this transforming friendship has on our lives, and are deeply attracted. Prayer is the life-blood of this friendship.

The more we respect someone, the more we want to model ourselves on that person. If that's true on a merely human level, how much more is it true when it comes to friendship with God. When we find that we don't have it in us to do this, God himself steps in and does it in us, for us, through us. It is all his work, and he's promised to do it. We must let him do it.