Our Daily Bread

Good morning church family! I am excited to be back together again this morning. We will be in Matthew chapter 6 here shortly.

If you are new here, would you please do something for us? In the back of the seat in front of you is what we call our Connect Card. If you would, please fill that out with as much as you are cool with (at least your name and a way to contact you). If you’ll do that and drop it by our Next Steps area on your way out, they will give you a little info about our church and a free t shirt. So, you’ll want to take advantage of that!

Today, we begin the homestretch of our study through the Lord’s prayer. Today we look at the

INTRO

Let me read the text for today, just one verse, I’ll pray, and then we will start walking through what this means.

Matthew 6:11 CSB

Give us today our daily bread.

PRAY

This part of the prayer begins a section

1. Provision for us

Hate to keep harping on this, but Jesus didn’t teach his disciples how to pray for themselves. He taught them how to pray for each other. When Jesus taught on prayer, he taught it from an US perspective not a ME perspective.

How

2. Provision for now

Daily is a greek word used nowhere else in literature from this era. Scholars still argue over exactly what it means. Daily has kind of become an in-between word that covers both. But there is one branch who think it means “needed for existence.” Give me the bread that keeps me alive. This is what the NLT is getting at

Matthew 6:11 NLT

Give us today the food we need,

The focus is on the necessity. There is a good chance that Jesus is hyperlinking back here to a Proverb in this idea.

Proverbs 30:8 CSB

Keep falsehood and deceitful words far from me. Give me neither poverty nor wealth; feed me with the food I need.

Bless me, but I’m not asking for a ton. Just give me the food that I need.

The other view on this word is that it means “for the day at hand.” Dealing with the immediacy, rather than the importance.

The Contemporary English Version brings out this idea by translating this passage as, “Give us our food for today.” (CEV)

This is definitely a biblical idea. Jesus could be hyperlinking back to one of the psalms here. Psalm 104 speaks of God as the giver of daily provision to humans and animals.

Psalm 104:27–28 CSB

All of them wait for you to give them their food at the right time. When you give it to them, they gather it; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.

This image is that all of creation is waiting for God’s hand to extend the substance of life. Give us our food for today.

Whether Jesus was drawing the attention to the importance of the provision or the immediacy of it, either way, daily is a pretty good word to use there.

But the two hyperlinks I have shared with you already are small in comparison to the big hyperlink.

Jesus was a Jew. All first century Jews would have known the history of their people well. Some of the biggest stories in that history are found in the first 5 books of the Bible. In the first book, Genesis, we see God bringing about a new family who are supposed to follow him. The second book, Exodus, tells the story of the family from the first book that have now grown in number greatly struggling to follow God as they are led out of captivity in Egypt and back to the land God had promised their ancestors.

The trek from Egypt back to Canaan was a tough one. They would need to fully rely on God to make it through this wilderness alive.

God provided water for them from strange places, provided dead birds to eat from the sky in an instance, and he also provided for them a “daily bread.” Are you familiar with this?

With the morning dew, there would be on the ground some sort of thin bread-like substance that God’s people were supposed to eat. But God gave special instructions

Exodus 16:4 CSB

Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. This way I will test them to see whether or not they will follow my instructions.

They were to only get enough bread for that day. The manna was to be DAILY BREAD. You see it?

Jesus was teaching them to focus their eyes here. We can easily begin to look down the road and miss what’s right in front of us. Either we look ahead in fear and worry. In this situation we are often frozen in those things and can’t even enjoy today. Like when you know you have a really difficult conversation with someone you work with and can’t even work because you know that’s coming on your calendar.

Which reminds me, Kenny we need to talk after the service..... Just kidding.

The other thing we can do is look ahead in confidence and wonder. This leads us to totally overlook the present altogether. I had this issue at the first church I served in. At the end of my time there, I knew God was moving my affections and passions for adult ministry and discipleship, small groups all that. But I was still a youth pastor. Looking back to those days, I didn’t finish as well as I would have liked there simply because my eyes were so fixed on the future. That goes back three weeks ago when we talked about “not neglecting the day of small things.”

Either way you are most tempted to look, Jesus is teaching us that prayer is designed to draw our eyes to the immediate needs.

Jesus would go on to say shortly after this prayer...

Matthew 6:34 CSB

Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

3. Provision for everything

When I was a kid, I hated bread. There was something about a loaf of white bread, I don’t know if it was the texture, the smell, the look, I don’t know. But I couldn’t eat a slice of white bread.

Now, if you were to take two of those slices with some butter on them and a piece of cheese between them, and throw it in a pan to make grilled cheese, I’d wear it out.

I could also do like a hoagie, french or italian loaf. But not slice bread.

This is the demented world I lived in! And now I find that my kids are following right in my footsteps with being very weird about their eating habits.

Because of my despising of bread, the Lord’s prayer always felt strange and disingenuous. Give us today our daily bread (but God don’t make it __________brand name.) Make it a croissant please!?

You may think that is silly, but I found out this week that there were some early church fathers that felt kind of the same way. Their thought was, surely Jesus can’t be speaking of bread. Why would he pray for bread. Right before this comment he has shaken the very foundation of civilization by praying “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” So, while you are working in those incredible ways, could I have a little bit of bread too? Looking to carbo load today!

This led these early theologians to attempt a heavier interpretation. Surely Jesus was talking about the Lord’s Supper here, right? He couldn’t have just been talking about bread?

The truth is, NO. He wasn’t just talking about bread. He was talking about everything! Jesus taught his disciples that prayer reorients the heart towards a dependence on HIM IN EVERYTHING!

Not just food, not just water. We know that we need shelter, relationships, a job for most of us, family, love, conversations during the day, I could keep going I think. Prayer is an opportunity to say “Father, I wouldn’t have anything without you. Give me what I need. PLEASE!”

Let me ask you though… Of the times you have prayed the Lord’s prayer, what was on your mind when you said these words, “give us today our daily bread.” For most of America, we are not worried about where our next meal is coming from.

Compare that to the Christians in places like Nigeria. It has been listed as the 9th most hostile place for Christians to live. In Jan-April, 1400 Nigerian Christians were killed, another 2200 captured for different reasons by radicals. When Christians in Nigeria are praying, Give us today our daily bread, they mean it in a very real way! God, I don’t know what may happen tomorrow, sustain me according to your will.

You see, my prayer for provision can begin to look much less real than these prayers! We can often experience a certain level of comfort that makes it difficult for us to even pray for God’s provision. If we were honest, our prayers would look more like this...

God, I’ve got my life going right now. Not too overwhelming. If you could just keep bad stuff from happening to me so that I can keep all this stuff going because I am kind of killing it now! I’ll let you know if I need you.

It is so dangerously easy to get here!

To you new parents, there were days early on where I can remember praying much more regularly and passionately than I do for my kids now. When Elsie Jo was young I would get up with her if she was fussy. Kelly was with her all day, so I would handle the night.

She would wake up and I wound up feedin her and holding her for what seemed like forever before she would dose back on. The whole time, I”m praying, praying, praying. God help her. God help Kelly! God help ME! I was so overwhelmed. But then there are those seasons in which you can get a little comfortable and forget our utter dependence on GOD!