The Lord's Prayer - Petition 4: Our Daily Bread
Dr. James Smith
Matthew 6:9-13
2 November 2003
In our study on the Lord’s Prayer, we have noticed that for many people, this prayer is recited week after week in churches all across our country with little or no spiritual passion.
For many, the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer is just something that you “do.” It’s a habit, like brushing your teeth or showering each morning, except it occurs on Sunday.
And in response to the mindless repetition of this prayer, many otherwise, thoughtful evangelical believers have simply discarded this prayer of Jesus altogether.
But I wonder, why do evangelicals so frequently react to things? I mean, just because someone else is abusing something that’s otherwise good, does that mean we should just “throw the baby out with the bath water?”
All of this came to my mind this week as I was considering this 4th petition of the Lord’s Prayer . . . “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Remember, this petition brings us to the 2nd set of 3 petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, moving us from petitions for God’s glory to petitions for human need.
Evangelicals are particularly concerned with God’s glory and it is frustrating to hear people mindlessly repeating the 1st 3 petitions for God’s name to be hallowed, for His Kingdom to come and for His will to be done, without any real spiritual conviction.
But I can’t help but think that we as evangelicals have done a particularly poor job with this 2nd set of petitions ourselves, especially beginning with this idea of praying for our daily bread.
And I’m as big of an offender as any. I remember when I was in college, I had a roommate who was really hostile to the gospel. We became good friends and often ate together in the cafeteria.
I was particularly notorious for wasting food. I would fill my tray with anything that looked even slightly interesting and proceed to eat half of it and then dump the rest.
This drove my unbelieving roommate crazy. As a matter of fact, after a while, I would do it just to make him angry.
He had been raised in a home that believed food was a precious commodity and that it was wrong and even “sinful” to waste perfectly good food.
Even as a Christian my heart was hardened to this idea . . . why? . . . because I never really had to pray for my daily bread.
In fact, by the time I got an apartment in college, I was doing pretty well. While all my friends were eating cheap hotdogs, mac & cheese and Ramon noodles, I was grilling steaks and swordfish on my balcony.
My dad was suspicious of my monthly grocery bills, but outside of some occasional complaining, he kept paying for my food habits.
It wasn’t until I went to seminary, got married and had to start paying my own way, that as the Methodists used to say, “I got religion on this one.”
I began to understand experientially that most people literally have to trust God for their daily bread . . . not mom, dad nor anyone else.
When Jesus taught His disciples to pray . . . “give us this day our daily bread,” they knew the physical and spiritual gravity of this petition. All of them had experienced nagging hunger pains on a regular basis . . . just as so many people in the world still do.
And herein lies the great spiritual tragedy for most Christians living in North America and Western Europe today. We have no idea what this petition really means . . . we simply mindlessly repeat it just like everyone else.
After all, I’m confident that everyone here this morning, will eat at some point before the close of this day . . . and probably several times.
Our culture testifies against us in so many practical ways. For example, I got sick and tired of running out of bread and having to go to the store all the time, so I bought a small freezer and guess what it’s now stocked full of? . . . bread!
The medical profession keeps chanting the mantra, “eat healthy, get some exercise, take care of yourself” but all the while we keep making “runs to the border” in our cars, we sit at our desks all day and wonder why all our friends are on Lipitor for high cholesterol.
Obesity is at an all time high, not simply among North American adults, but among children as well.
Folks, these things have spiritual implications for our lives and in our prosperity . . . we can no longer pray in truth . . . “give us this day our daily bread,” because we have our choice of white, wheat, rye, pumpernickel, sourdough and a whole host of other breads.
And we have food choices that Solomon with all his worldly wealth could never have procured for his own royal table and yet all the while, millions around the world continue to starve as we speak.
This leads me to the profound conviction that if we are to pray this petition in spiritual truth and honesty . . . then obviously our needs do not lay in physical sustenance but rather spiritual provision.
While it is far too easy for me to say as a guy who is overfed, I’m reminded that Jesus said, “Men and women do not live simply by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
And the good news is that within this very petition itself, there is this request for not only daily sustenance but for God to provide what is necessary for the days ahead.
On a technical note, the Greek word here, epiouvsio~, is commonly translated as “daily” in English, but it has other important meanings as well. In fact, it is an extremely rare word and only found here in the New Testament.
Christians throughout the centuries have debated about its exact meaning and in addition to daily bread, they have understood it as 1) the bread needed for tomorrow 2) the bread necessary for existence 3) the bread of the fulfillment of the end of time.
For most of us, the issue is not whether we will eat today, tomorrow or any of the days of our lives, but rather do we have the spiritual sustenance we need for today, tomorrow and our lives leading up to the end of time when we shall join in the marriage banquet of the lamb of God in heaven.
Last week we talked about the “will of God.” And we determined that it’s God’s will that you and I “belong to Jesus” and that we say, “yes” to Jesus each and everyday of our lives.
I have no doubt that you all are receiving adequate physical nutrition. What I wonder about is your spiritual caloric intake. Because the tendency of people is to assume that if they have what they physically need, then they have what they need to live, grow & thrive.
But this assumption is spiritually deadly and while it is simplistic, I’m going to say it anyway. Frequently those who have an overabundance of physical bread & provisions unwittingly experience serious to appalling spiritual poverty and vice versa.
In other words, not only do we no longer know what it means to pray for the physical bread we need, but more significantly, we have lost our spiritual hunger altogether.
They say that those in the final stages of physical starvation no longer feel those intensely painful hunger pains they had had previously. Somehow I think the same analogy could be made of those who are on the verge of spiritual starvation.
To my shame, my unbelieving college roommate was more righteous then I in this important 4th petition of the Lord’s prayer. But to my great encouragement, he later decided not only to trust Jesus Christ for his physical bread but for his spiritual bread as well . . . so that he could then pray, “give us this day our daily bread.”
Today, this connection between the physical and the spiritual is frequently overlooked by Christians to their own peril. And we cannot afford to miss either the physical or spiritual implications of the 4th petition of the Lord’s prayer.
What would it take to for you to understand these things? What kind of life assessment do you require?
Do you need to learn to eat more simply or the forgotten spiritual discipline of fasting? Do you need to volunteer in a soup kitchen or support a needy child overseas?
Do you need to learn the joy of giving or to give away a significant proportion of your worldly goods to those in need?
Do you need to begin to say “no” to the glut of possible opportunities that lay before you so that you can begin to physically and spiritually say “yes” to Jesus?
I cannot answer these questions for you but I do want to encourage you to diligently and prayerfully seek the answers that each of you need so that you can truly pray . . . “give us this day our daily bread.
Let’s Pray