Matthew
Dear Friends in Christ,
I’d like to begin with very little introduction other than to say that today we come to the mid-point in our examination of the Lord’s Prayer. We have looked at the address and the first three petitions thus far, and after today we will look at the final three plus the closing statement (which we refer to as the “doxology”). But our primary focus this morning is on this middle petition, the Fourth, where Jesus directs us to present this request before our Heavenly Father:
“GIVE US TODAY OUR DAILY BREAD”
The way in which we’d like to approach this petition is to first take a look at
The first thing we should note about the Fourth Petition is that with it a very significant shift in pronouns takes place. Up until now Jesus directs us to make God’s name and God’s Kingdom and God’s will the primary emphasis of our prayers. So we pray, “Hallowed be YOUR name… YOUR kingdom come… YOUR will be done.” And we are reminded that first and foremost our purpose as God’s redeemed and blood-bought people is to employ ourselves in His service and pray for the furtherance of His will and work in every way…
This is a very important lesson, because by nature we are enormously self-absorbed and have the tendency to think the world (and perhaps God Himself) revolves around us and our needs. The first three petitions put things in their proper perspective and steer us away from such selfish and self-centered thinking. Jesus reminds us in the Lord’s Prayer that it’s all about God, not us.
But that is not to say that we as individuals with our own personal and physical needs are not important to God. Because we are. So now the pronoun shift takes place and the focus does become us and our needs. And the Fourth Petition – “Give us today our daily bread” – is where we begin this new direction.
You may have heard it stated that the Fourth Petition is unique from the other petitions in that it is the only one dealing with physical and earthly affairs. This is true. The six others deal with exclusively spiritual matters. And that should tell us something about the way in which we structure our prayers…
Nevertheless, the very fact that Jesus instructs us to
include this concern about our physical life in the Lord’s Prayer also tells us something. It speaks volumes about how well He knows
us and how much He loves us. As one
Bible commentator put it, here in the Fourth Petition “He occupies himself with the trivialities of humankind.”
In other words, here Jesus meets us in the midst of our everyday life. He knows us. Not only that, He accepts us. He knows that for the most part our minds are not preoccupied with lofty spiritual thoughts and goals; that we are not always caught up in the eternal, but more often mired in the temporal.
He knows that, realistically, we spend far more time thinking about how we’re going to make ends meet or whether we’ve got enough saved for retirement or whether we’re going to be able to afford tuition for our kids to go to college or whether our health is going to hold up for the long run, than we do about the world-wide march of the Gospel. He knows the frail creatures that we are and that so often we can’t think past our immediate circumstances.
So He meets us on our own turf. There is no scolding here.
Jesus doesn’t chide us or belittle us because of our fearful and
untrusting nature. Rather He directs us
to simply ask Him for the things we need.
He meets us where we’re at in this petition and assures us of His
provision for our lives. Therefore we
pray with gratefulness and confidence: “Give us today our daily bread.”
With that broad understanding serving as the backdrop for
this petition, let’s take a closer look at some of the specifics. The first thing we should consider is what
exactly is meant by the term “daily
bread.”
You might find it interesting to know that some well known ancient Bible Scholars (Augustine, for example) felt that “daily bread” had to be a reference to something spiritual, rather than physical. Keying off of other portions of Scripture which use this kind of analogy, they thought Jesus must be referring to the need for daily contact with the spiritual food (or “bread”) of His Word.
And certainly that is true. The Word of God is indeed the Staff of Life for us. We need to be in daily contact with it to be growing ever stronger and healthier. We need daily rations of sin and grace, law and gospel for the vitality and well-being of our spiritual lives. The Fourth Petition calls this to mind…
But there is a more basic understanding. These words of Jesus certainly also apply to our physical lives as well. Consequently, the “daily bread” Jesus tells us to ask for can be defined as the basic necessities of life. That’s obviously the way Luther understood it, because in his explanation of the Fourth Petition he expands the meaning to include “everything that we need for our bodily welfare, such as food and drink, clothing and shoes, house and home, land and cattle, money and goods, a godly spouse, godly children, godly workers, godly and faithful leaders, good government, good weather, peace and order, health, a good name, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.”
However, as we ask our Heavenly Father to provide us each day with “daily bread” and reflect on how He has, it is also important for us to understand the difference between necessities and luxuries. Let me give you a Bible example of someone who understood the difference and was grateful for his daily bread, meager as it may seem to us…
The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah lived through some very
difficult and disturbing times in the history of God’s people. He watched his people turn away from
God. Finally, after receiving warning
after warning by prophets such as himself, he watched God’s disciplining hand
come down on them through the destruction of their beautiful capital,
But here’s the point.
It was under these circumstances – when every stitch of clothing, every
sip of water and every crust of bread was at a premium – that Jeremiah penned
these words: “Because of the Lord’s great love
we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
Jeremiah recognized that God provided for His people, and he was grateful.
This is worth mentioning because one of the pitfalls of living in a materialistic, affluent society is to take for granted the myriad of physical blessings God bestows upon us. The fact of the matter is that compared to the vast majority of the rest of the world, we live like kings. This is not to say that we should feel guilty. But it is to say that we should feel blessed. Because we are. Without even praying for it, our Heavenly Father gives us each day “our daily bread.”
A final thought on the implication of the Fourth Petition for our lives is this: Embodied within it are a couple of grand invitations. When these invitations are understood and applied and, with God’s help, accepted, the result will be what Paul refers to as “the peace of God that passes all understanding” taking residency in our hearts.
The first is an invitation to trust. In the Fourth Petition, Jesus asks us to trust Him. So often our lives are shrouded in worry. We worry about the future. We worry about the past. We worry about this or that. Sometimes our worries have a negative impact on our loved ones. Sometimes our worries suck the very joy out of life.
Our Gospel lesson for today tells us we don’t have to do
that. “Look at the birds of the air,”
says Jesus, “they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and your Heavenly
Father feeds them. Are you not much
more valuable than they? Who of you by
worrying can add a single hour to his life?” He concludes: “Therefore,
do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Think deeply about this.
Here we have Almighty God – He whose timeless eye encompasses all
eternity and sees our lives as accomplished facts; He who set the stars in the
sky and the planets in their orbit; He who calmed the raging sea with a word
and with another word raised the dead – telling us not to worry. When it comes to our lives and the
provision for our lives, Jesus tells us to trust
that He will “give us each day our daily
bread.”
As if this pronouncement from Jesus is not enough, added to
it is what the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8. He takes us to the cross of Christ and asks us this
question: “He who did not spare His own
Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also,
along with him, graciously give us all things?” In other words, because God has provided us
with the greatest thing – salvation through Christ, can we not count on him for
the smaller things, such as “our daily
bread?”
The second invitation is an invitation to be grateful. We touched upon this earlier. In our first lesson for today we saw how God provided for the prophet Elijah in miraculous ways. Sometimes He still does that for His children. Sometimes he brings blessings into our lives in such a way or at such a time that we can only stand in awe at His goodness. Perhaps you can recall an event of provision in your life that cannot be explained by coincidence or luck or chance; only by God taking care of His people in a very specific way…
But most of the time God provides for us by allowing us to work or make decisions or to somehow have a hand in what we use to sustain our lives. But a caution is in order. It is the same caution Moses issued to God’s people as they were about to enter the Promised Land. After telling them about the rich country they were about to take possession of and how richly God was about to bless them materially, Moses warned: “You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced wealth for me.’ But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth…” (Dt 8:17,18).
Both Moses and the Fourth Petition take us back to the Source of all we have. God is the one who is behind everything we are and everything we have. That invites us to respond with grateful hearts. And a grateful heart is the basis for a life that is content in the present and confident of the future…
So mid-way through the model prayer Jesus gave us a shift takes place. In His grace and mercy and intimate knowledge of the needs and concerns of His people, the Lord moves the emphasis from Him to us as He instructs His followers to pray: “Give us today our daily bread.”
And that is what we do. Mindful of His providence. Secure in His promises. And grateful that we have such a loving Heavenly Father who is so vitally interested in the lives of His children. May the Lord teach us to pray this way! Amen.