Give Us Our Daily Bread

Please turn in your Bibles to Matthew chapter six again. So glad that Chip read from verses nine to 13. I would like to read from verses 25 to the end of the chapter, verse 34, which is a commentary on verse 11, give us this day our daily bread. And as you're turning to the place I do want to thank the leaders of the church for giving me the opportunity to minister for the next six weeks. It will be a kind of pastoral ministry because it will be continuous. And I'm so grateful for that because you are a wonderful family of God to work among and to be with. And I want you to know that it is a great joy for Muriel and I to be among you and you have received us so warmly and so graciously for which we thank the Lord. Remain seated as I read then our Lord's words from the Sermon on the Mount. Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on, Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you, by worrying, can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. And yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field which today is and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothes you, O you of little faith? Therefore, do not worry, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear? For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble." And as I said, our text tonight is expounded in those words. The first three petitions in the pattern prayer are concerned with the glory of God. and the preoccupation that God's interests should have in our lives. We are to pray supremely that God's name, his person, should be hallowed, be honored by everybody, that his kingdom, his salvation should come to everybody, and that his will should be done on earth as it is in heaven. In the remaining three petitions, our Lord tells us to now pray for our own personal needs, beginning with, give us this day our daily bread. Now, we automatically ask ourselves, seeing we've been on such a lofty plane, praying for such deeply spiritual things, is this a comedown? Are we now no longer praying for the interests of God? And the answer is absolutely not. There is a progression of thought here which continues to focus on God and is honoring to God. To begin with, those who truly pray the first three petitions and commit themselves completely to the interests of God need food to keep themselves alive in order that they may carry out the first three petitions. A corpse cannot serve God. And there are men, despite what God has done to speak to them, who have put themselves in an early grave and ended a life of usefulness because they did not pay attention to this very petition. As someone has said, those who ignore the needs of their stomach are soon in no condition to care about anything else. Secondly, It's a very appropriate prayer because the God who has become our Heavenly Father in saving us and in adopting us as his children is also the maker and the sustainer of everything in his universe, above all the creatures who are made in his image. Only God as Creator is self-existent and dependent on himself for his own being and existence. We are creatures and of necessity we have to depend upon our Creator for our being and our existence. So it is right It is God-honoring to acknowledge this dependence on Him in prayer, particularly in an age like ours in which the reality of God is in denial. And so we need to show by our lives and the way we live that God is very important to our daily existence. Thirdly, God is truly concerned that His servants should have the food that they need, which is why Jesus fed a multitude, first the 4,000 and then again the 5,000, something that no other religious leader ever thought was necessary to do or could do. It is also the reason why God provided bread for the children of Israel as they were wandering through the wilderness for 40 years. The bread called manna, you remember, was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey. God's provision was both wonderful and mysterious in the wilderness. And when at last they entered the promised land, God's providence and provision came to the fore, because immediately they entered the land. There was food in the land that had been provided by the labors of the people they were conquering. So, the manna ceased. and God fed them with the food of their enemies. So important is this truth that God provides the material needs of His people that an Omer of manna, Moses is commanded to take an omer of manna, put it in a golden pot and place it in the Ark of the Covenant as a perpetual reminder to all the generations of the people of Israel that God provides bread for His people, their material needs. So he said to Moses, it is to be kept for your generations that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness, which I brought you out of the land, when I brought you out of the land of Egypt. So this is not a prayer that is unimportant. It expresses a very vital part of our relationship to God. And you know, the experience of the prophet Elijah teaches us how God is able to provide for his people even in the most difficult of situations. When King Ahab, king of Judah, sought to kill him, he had to hide and God told him to go to the brook Cherith. And it shall be, God said, that you shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there. And we read in 1 Kings 17 that the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and again bread and meat in the evening. The very food that the ravens loved to eat, God enabled them to bring to Elijah every morning and every evening. And then when the brook dried up sometime later, because of the three year drought that Elijah had predicted, God then provided for his servant in another way. And he instructed him to go further north up the coast of Palestine and board with a Gentile widow and her son in Zarephath, which is a city in the country we now know today as Lebanon. Well, this area was also suffering from the drought. And when Elijah got there, he found that all that the woman had, quote, was a handful of flour in a bin and a little oil in a jar, just enough to make a last meal for herself and for her son. But Elijah came to her and he said, Do not fear. Go and do as I have said. But make me, as you have said, but make me a small cake from it first, and bring it to me, and afterwards make some for yourself and your son. For thus says the Lord God of Israel, the bin of flour shall not be used up, nor shall the jar of oil run dry until the day the Lord brings rain upon the earth." Now you can imagine how tested that dear woman was. So she went to the barrel, she took out enough to make Elijah a cake, enough of the flour and enough of the oil, and she went away thinking, well, there's really not going to be very much for me and my son. She made the cake, she gave it to God's servant. Then she went back to the bin, and to her great surprise, the flour hadn't diminished one bit, nor had the oil. So she made a full meal for her son. When she went back the next day, the flour was at the same level, and so was the oil. Amazingly, the widow responded in faith, and God's daily provision was faithful until the end of the three-year drought. Now, having established then from the Scriptures that this is both a legitimate and a God-honoring petition which Jesus taught us to pray, there are some questions that we need to answer about the text. And as I endeavor to do that, I want us to study this request, give us this day our daily bread, starting with the last word and working our way forwards. Or, well yes, backwards I should really say. Let's take the word bread first. Because there are some ultra-pious and super-spiritual people through the centuries of church history who have found it very difficult to believe that Jesus should actually be concerned about our material needs. And as a result they have spiritualized this prayer and they say surely what Jesus is teaching us to pray for here is that spiritual bread which is himself and that feeds our soul and strengthens our relationship with God. And then there were others who said, well, no, this really refers to the bread of communion in which we are spiritually nourished because by the transformation of the bread into the body of Christ and the wine into the blood of Christ, we are spiritually fed in that way. And that is what Jesus means when he calls us to make this petition. But as John Calvin, the reformer, justly said, this, meaning these explanations, are exceedingly absurd. Jesus said, daily bread, and he meant it. Because Christianity is a very earthly religion, and Christians have often made the mistake of neglecting the care of their bodies. But God created our bodies, friends. Jesus himself was made flesh with our human flesh and took care of his body. And it's our bodies that the Holy Spirit is pleased to indwell and make his temple. Indeed, Christianity is the only religion in the world that emphasizes that God is committed not only to the saving of our souls, but also to the redemption of our bodies. On the last day, the Christian's body is going to be resurrected. It's going to be glorified. It's going to become a body that is no longer subject to the imperfections, the sinfulness, and the limitations that we experience in our present life. This petition, therefore, teaches us how to regard our bodies. The Christian is to respect his body or her body, never to deify it, like we see today in the culture of paganism, where everything is done to pamper the body, to spoil the body, to preserve the body with hot miracle working stones and special spas and Botox and all the rest that I haven't had time to go in and try to understand what they mean. But it's a culture that it's all about. beautifying and preserving this body. The Christian way, rather, is to accept our body as part of God's creation and as a wise steward to enjoy that body and to use it to the utmost for the service of God and our fellow men and women around us. So, such enjoyment of the body is not unspiritual. For the body is just as much God's gift to us as is our soul. To enjoy good food, a healthy appetite, physical ability, marriage, children, is all part of our duty to God. Not to enjoy these things is simply to show an attitude of ingratitude to His gift. Well, that's the first thing. To pray for our daily bread is to seek all our material needs from God, whether they be for food, for clothing, for education, for housing, for children, or anything else material in our life. And just as we love our children to come to us, their parents, for their material needs, so our Heavenly Father loves us to come to Him to supply us with our material needs. John Thompson in his book, The Praying Christ, says, and I quote, how the father must rejoice when one of his children, though living in affluent circumstances, is still humble enough to pray sincerely, give us this day our daily bread. Now, secondly, let's look at the word daily, which seems simple enough, but you know, theologians always make everything more complicated than it is. And they have proposed, as I have been suggesting just now, such weird interpretations of what daily means that we need a little bit of help here. And normally we would just go to the word, the Greek word, and we say, well, it occurs here in the New Testament and there in Greek classical literature, and this is what the meaning is. But unfortunately with this word, daily, it only occurs in the two instances in which this prayer was taught, in Matthew 6 and in Luke 11. It's never repeated in the New Testament, and its occurrence was never found in Greek literature elsewhere. It's the Greek word epiusias, and no one was quite sure of what it meant. Now, I know that because we're just common folk, and by that I mean folks with just ordinary horse sense, as Americans called it. We know jolly well what it means, but the theologians really were battling over this for many, many centuries. Roman Catholic scholars guessed that it meant super substantial bread, which is, as I said, blessed by the priest at the at the service of the mass and by the supernatural powers endowed to him by God, the bread can be changed into the body of Christ and the wine can be changed into the blood of Christ. Others said, well, it simply means give us this day our subsistence bread, the bread we need for every day. Well, that's coming pretty close to it. And then a third group turned around and said, well, no, it refers not just to subsistence bread, it refers to a generous amount, a plentiful supply, because God only supplies in plenty to his people. Well, a few years ago, somebody was digging in the sands of Egypt in the 1950s and discovered a papyrus fragment that was 2,000 years old with some Greek writing on it. And actually, it turned out to be a woman's shopping list. And she was going to buy a bowl and, you know, some other articles that she needed. And one of the articles was food. And against that article was this word, epiusius, our daily food. And in the sentence in which it occurred, it made it clear that it was a note to buy supplies of food sufficient to last her for 24 hours until she could go to the shop the next day, which is how we commonly understand that meaning. And it seems superfluous for me to have gone into that detail to explain it except for the fact that the church has fought for a long time as to what was the meaning of this word daily. And so I think it is important that we understand that we have proof from literature that it means what our common sense tells us it does mean. Bread enough to last until tomorrow. And of course, it's precisely what Jesus went on to explain in the passage that I read to you from Matthew 25 to 34, chapter six. And, the Christian duty or the Christian way then is to live as Jesus said, not to worry about these things, not to be overly concerned with multiplying them and storing them for a rainy day. that basically we should be focused on the kingdom of God and on the interests of God and trust God to supply us with enough each day. So the Christian way is to live in constant dependence on God one day at a time. And we are to ask for bread as the Israelites were told to gather manna on a day-to-day basis. And God took extraordinary steps to ensure that the Israelites were going to learn this lesson and not hoard the food that they had gathered. Because whenever they tried to do that and gathered more than they needed, as you remember from the story, the next day it turned rotten and stank and it was unfit to eat. Now, this day-to-day reliance upon our Heavenly Father is not an easy attitude to maintain in a society where we take it for granted that material security is part of our culture and even part of government policy. But it is something we are to work at, and one of the ways to do so is to pray to our Father in Heaven every day in our private devotions and in our public worship this petition in this prayer. Something else that this Word daily teaches us is that we are to ask for the bread that we need. We are not to ask for luxuries, but for necessities. God did not give cake to the Israelites in the wilderness. Our Lord Himself sometimes lacked bread to eat and also a place to lay His head. But God will always give us, we can rely on it, what we need in a way and at a time that He sees best. This petition does not justify extravagance. And if Christians only understood this petition, Jesus taught them to pray, they would never have got sucked into the prosperity gospel, which says, I am a son or a daughter of the king, and I should live like a prince or a princess. Accordingly, as we pray this prayer, we must accept that when God, by His providence, does not give us what we are seeking, that we really do not need it after all. And we will find every time that God was true. Now, the next word we come to working backwards is our and the word us, which goes with it. Give us this day our daily bread. So it is a prayer in which we are being taught to pray not only for our material needs, but for everybody else who is involved in this whole process of the material needs of mankind. So we have others in view. And to begin with, we are to pray for farmers and for everyone else who is involved in the production and the distribution of food. Again, the prayer covers clothing and shelter and therefore becomes a petition for all of those who manufacture clothes and who build homes. So Christians are involved in that kind of thing. Again, the prayer covers physical health and the power to earn money, and so becomes a cry against poverty and against sickness. You cannot pray this prayer without including those aspects of our bodily needs. Luther said, and he said that he wished that rulers would put loaves of bread in their coat of arms rather than two lions, just to remind them that the material needs and welfare of their people was their first responsibility. And I believe that that is part of the meaning and application of this petition of Jesus which he is teaching us to pray, that we are to pray for our government and for our rulers, that they will commit themselves to taking care of the material needs of all the people in the country. But you know, not only are we to have these people in view, we are also to have those who depend upon us in our mind. Because God gives us bread that we may give it in turn to our children, to our family, our extended family, to our neighbors, our church family, and so on. Paul, you know, used his tent making not only to support himself, but to support his fellow workers in their missionary endeavours. In Ephesians 4 verse 28 he says, Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labour that he may have something to give him who has need. I love the story of John Wesley. It's quite delightful. He had a friend, a good preacher by the name of Samuel Bradburn and this man was much esteemed and on this particular occasion the brother was in severe want and financial assistance. So John Wesley sat down and he wrote him a letter, Dear Sammy, and then he quoted from Proverbs, Trust in the Lord and do good, so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed." With the letter he enclosed two five-pound notes, which was a considerable amount of money in those days. Ten cents would be enough to get you through one day. The reply from Sammy was prompt. Reverend and dear sir, I have often been struck with the beauty of the verse of scripture quoted in your good letter, but I must confess that I never saw such useful expository notes on it before. I am, dear sir, your obedient and grateful servant, Samuel Bradburn. Our bread is bread to be shared with our family, our church family, our pastor's family, our missionaries, and the hungry of the world. And that is why this prayer is in the plural. Give us our daily bread. It would be sheer hypocrisy for me to pray, give us this day our daily bread and be concerned only with accumulating my own material needs. And finally, the last word, give. This word acknowledges a number of things. The first thing it emphasizes is something I've already stated at the beginning, but it needs to be reiterated here. And it is that God is ultimately the giver of all material things, as well as He is the giver of all spiritual things. All things come from the Father above, with whom there is no variableness. And the fact that we can buy our food from a supermarket must never obscure the source from which our food ultimately comes. Because in the end, our food comes from God. Without Him, none of us would have any food. from the fertility in the soil He gives, from the sun and the rain, which are His creation, and from the physical strength He gives to us or to others to work for it or to buy it. And God warned the Israelites against forgetting this in many places. especially in Deuteronomy 8 where he says, The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing. Beware that you do not forget the Lord your God when you have eaten and are full, when your heart is lifted up and you say to yourself, My power and the might of My hand have gotten me this well. You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth. As the hymn so beautifully puts it, all good gifts around us are sent from heaven above. O praise the Lord, O praise the Lord for all His love. Another thing which the word gives, implies, is that we have no right to our daily bread. It's a gift of God when it comes to us, a gift of His goodness. And, you know, that is why we have learned from Scripture, from Jesus and the apostles, to return thanks at the table. for our daily bread. Our Lord Himself did this when He fed the 5,000, do you remember? He commanded the multitudes to sit down on the grass, says Matthew, and He took five loaves and two fish, and looking up to heaven, He gave thanks, and He broke the loaves. This was our Lord's regular practice at His last meal, the last supper with His disciples in the upper room before going out to be crucified the next day. We read, He took bread and gave thanks before He broke it and gave it to his disciples. And in the midst of a shipwreck, it's very interesting to read that Paul took some bread and gave thanks to God in the presence of them all. And when he had broken it, he began to eat, and he ate it with them. Now, we continue that practice today, and we call it saying grace, because the word grace means receiving a good gift from God which we do not deserve. We fail Him, we disappoint Him, we grieve Him, we often ignore Him, and He could easily treat us as we deserve to be treated, but He doesn't. Thirdly, the word give must never be taken as an excuse for idleness. And so the Bible says, if a man will not work, It's no good in praying, give us this day our daily bread, if he is not prepared to play his part in the food chain. And when I say if a man will not work, Paul means that he's not talking about a man who wants to work and can't find work. He's talking about a man who refuses to work when work is available. And he says that man shall not eat. Proverbs 28 verse 19 says, He who tills his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows frivolity will have poverty in plenty. And then fourthly, the word give must not encourage wastefulness. People who are given charity, you know, often do not appreciate what they receive. And accordingly, They fail to take care of it. It doesn't matter whether it's food stamps or whether it's free housing. It is often abused because it is received for nothing. It is not worked for. The Christian, however, is to see himself as a steward of the daily bread that God gives him. for which one day he or she is going to be accountable. And even here, you know, our Lord and Master is our example, because when he fed the 5,000, there were pieces of bread and fish lying all over, and he didn't just walk away and leave it for the birds to eat. He said to his disciples, gather up the fragments, so that nothing may be lost." And John goes on to say, they filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley loaves which were left over by those who had eaten. Jesus never threw leftovers into a trash can. In my days as a pastor in America, I must say I never saw it in Africa where food was a little more scarce. but it often grieved me to be at a church supper and to see young people go up to the table and take a leg of chicken, take a bite out of it and not too good and go to the bin and throw the rest of the chicken leg into the bin. Wastefulness like that and in many other instances we can be very wasteful is not showing appreciation to God who supplies us with our daily food. As I conclude, I want to end on a higher spiritual note. Important as it is to pray for our daily material needs in every aspect, we are to pray and to seek for that living bread upon which we can feed and never die, because our daily bread cannot keep us alive forever. And so Jesus said to the multitude who followed Him after the feeding of the 5,000, He said, I want you to learn a lesson. You were fed yesterday, and now today you are looking for more bread. That's why you are following Me. But I want to warn you, that's not your priority. This is not what is going to keep you through life. There is a bread that comes down from heaven, of which if a man eats, he will not die. And they said to him, Give us this bread always. And Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst. In other words, I gave you ordinary bread yesterday that kept you going for 24 hours, but if you will come to me and look to me to supply your spiritual needs, you will live forever. For I am the bread of life. If you receive me, you receive eternal life. It is wonderful to get our daily physical bread from God, but in the end, it will not save us from dying. Much, much more wonderful is it to come to Christ in faith and receive Himself, the bread of life of which a man may eat and not die. And so, my friends, I cannot close the message from God's Word tonight without urging you to, through this petition, Progress further and see ultimately your need for Christ himself, the bread of life, and to have him as your savior, and through him to know and to enjoy the gift of eternal life. So let's pray. Heavenly Father, We do want to thank you for your word, even for a simple petition like this, which even a young child with us this evening would be able to give that the common sense understanding and meaning. And we pray that as we have meditated upon it tonight and chewed on it thoroughly, that you will help us always to be truly grateful for your provision of our daily bread, of our material needs, and to use the strength that it imparts, the clothing, the housing, the education, the work that you give us, to live holy for your glory. Deliver us, Lord, from idleness and also from wastefulness. and as wise stewards, help us to learn to share our bread with others. But more importantly, Lord, let us not leave here tonight without realizing and acting upon our need of Jesus Christ himself, stretching out the arm of faith to claim him as our own personal savior, and to receive from Him, spiritually speaking, that bread of which, if a person eats, he or she will live forever. We ask it in thanksgiving for the Lord Jesus who taught us this prayer and who came to give His life for our salvation. Hear our prayer and dismiss us with your blessing, we pray. In Jesus' name, Amen.