The Lord's Prayer: Give Us Today Our Daily Bread (Matthew 6.9-11)
This sermon was preached on July 28th, 2024.
Prayer is a remarkable thing. The ear of God is bent toward us. Jesus even tells us to come to God in boldness, that if we ask we will receive. That nothing is impossible with prayer.
I’ve heard way too many preachers use these verses to tell people they basically have a blank check to ask God for whatever they want. Name-it-claim-it pastors tell us to claim whatever we want and, if we truly believe strongly enough, they will be ours. After all, won’t that prove that God loves us, if he gives us the best stuff? I saw a clip recently of a well known preacher talking about how he had the largest house in the state of Louisiana and it was exactly that. God showing off how much he loved this guy.
And yet when Jesus taught his disciples to pray—when he gave specific words about how to pray as a follower of his—he taught us pray something very different. “Give us today our daily bread.” Not “give me today our extravagant wealth.” Not “give me today the biggest house.” No. Our daily bread. This morning we’re exploring exactly what it means to pray for our daily bread, and what Jesus is guiding us into as he teaches us to pray this way.
Daily Bread
First, where does this language of “daily bread” come from? It can sound like an odd one to us—it’s not like we have a place we go every single day for bread.
It’s a term that is rooted in Israel’s history—specifically in the time after the Exodus when they were sustained by God in the wilderness. This first generation of the kingdom of God, having been brought out of slavery in Egypt, were being led by God to a promised land where they would be settled and live. But in the in-between time, they were in a temporary place where they couldn’t farm, couldn’t harvest, etc. Where would they get food?
In the wilderness, God miraculously provided for them every day. They would arise and gather what was called manna. We don’t know exactly what it looked like—in fact the Hebrew word for manna literally mean “what is it?!” The Bible describes it as white in color, tasting like honey wafers. It was thin and not dense. To the point that the people had to collect it early in the morning because the sun would cause it to melt away.
But whatever it was, it was a daily way for God to provide for his people and a daily reminder that they were his people, cared for by him, provided for by him. Every morning they’d go out and gather the manna, which was the size of coriander seed, grind it and bake it into a bread. If they tried to gather more than what they needed for that day, it would rot away. All of them were to go out and gather enough for that day, and there was enough for everyone.
To eat of this manna was recognize in a very real way that you were carried along and provided for by God every single day. It was also to recognize that what God provides for his people is meant to be enough for everyone, and if there wasn’t than something was seriously wrong.
This is the biblical background to the imagery of “daily bread.” We don’t live like that, and neither did the people Jesus was speaking to. So what could he have meant in teaching us to pray this way? Should we expect manna from heaven to start up again? There were a few points that Jesus was making.
All good gifts we have come from God. This was more obvious to the Israelites in the wilderness, but it’s no less true for us. We are sustained not by our own efforts, but by the intentions of God. To realize this isn’t just to say that the bread we need comes from God—it’s to recognize that we are creatures made to find our nourishment in him. So we can stop trying to look into ourselves for what we need. We can look to him. We are empowered by our Father as his children, and he provides the means for us to walk in our calling/mission.
And God is not tired giving. He delights in it, and gives even to his enemies. As James 1.17 teaches us: every good gift comes from the Father in whom there is no shadow due to change. Meaning his intentions for you do not change.“Bread” doesn't just mean food. To pray for our daily bread is to bring before God the ordinary, day-in/day-out concerns of our lives. Health. Safety. Employment. Ends to meet. The physical needs of our physical existence. Of course, this includes food, but think of “bread” as a term that stands in for all the things we need to live in this world. God isn't just concerned for the big stuff and leaves the rest up to us.
God does not disdain our ordinariness (and neither should we). I think some of us have almost a fear of being ordinary. An idea that life will only be worth living if it is extraordinary at every moment. It’s what drives ambition so often—the idea that we need to “make something of ourselves.” That we have to win, whatever.
At its root, I think this desire for the extraordinary is rooted in an idea that who we are in our ordinary isn’t something worth caring about or loving. That we have to have that ambition to achieve because then we can be convinced that we’ve earned admiration or love. And we allow that bleed over into our thoughts about how God feels about us.
We hear the gospel that we are loved because God has decided to love us. That he has a love for us completely separated from us earning. But we really think that if we can achieve something then we can feel assured of his love. As Steve Brown has written: “Our culture of ambition has only two speeds: either win or quit. But perhaps our ambition to win is a hunger to be noticed—maybe even a lifelong, unarticulated hunger to be noticed by a father, to hear him say “well done. You did it.” But that’s not why he loves you. You don’t have to win, but you also don’t have to quit. You only have to quit performing, quit imagining his love is earned.”
God does not disdain you and your ordinariness. He isn’t waiting around for you to achieve something. We can pray for our ordinary needs, our daily bread, and not think he begrudges it. You are not a distraction from the ‘more important’ stuff he has going on. You and your ordinary life are an essential part of it.We pray for ordinary things because God’s giving to us is tied up in his kingdom purposes. The idea of the Kingdom of God is a big one. And when we think about the kingdom of God coming in this world, we tend to think of big deeds. But what if the kingdom of God arrives in our world in ordinary ways? Surprising ways? And what if praying for our daily bread needs isn’t a distraction from this great mission of God, but is the very essence of it all?
What if I can get an angle that all the ordinary things of my life are not a thing separated off from God and his kingdom, but essential parts of it? If we can do that, we’ll move beyond this idea that only the time I give to the church or a mission trip belong to God. But rather we’ll gain the truly life-changing perspective that “All the blessings we enjoy are Divine deposits, committed to our trust on this condition, that they should be dispensed for the benefit of our neighbors.”
We know this because of where Jesus teaches us to pray this. Before we get to praying for our own needs here, we have already prayed for God’s name to be hallowed and for God’s kingdom to come and will be done on earth as it is in heaven. They are not separate things, but intimately joined together. Jesus doesn’t want us to pray for God's kingdom apart from praying for our daily bread.We pray for our daily bread. Not ridiculous wealth. Why? Life is not just about accumulation of stuff. We are not asking for ridiculous abundance, and the christian life should not look like a dragon hoarding treasures. Gold is just shiny dust. Money is just numbers on a page. A car is just metal, plastic, and rubber joined together. They’re fine, but they are not ultimate. They’ll pass away and rot and rust. So we don’t store up treasures here. As Jesus himself says in Matthew 6: 19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
What does it mean to store treasures in heaven? It means to put what God has given to us to use for his eternal purposes. Not to hoard, but to see our daily bread stuff for the glory of God and good of others. Not to accumulate ridiculous wealth. Not to see as ‘blessed' the man who has the most stuff.
Give Us. Not Me.
I read a book recently by an author named Brian Matz, and he wrote: "Near the end of my junior year of high school, my grandparents bought me a car. It was a used car, but only a year or so old. I had never owned anything so valuable in my life. I did what I could to protect the car from dents and scratches on the outside and from my friends' dirt-crusted shoes on the inside. One day, witnessing how neurotic I must have been about the car, my pastor and friend Dale Swanson asked me, "Whose car is it?" I told him that it was mine, of course, to which he replied, "No. The car belongs to God. And God might need to give a ride to someone with dirty shoes.”
This quote hits an important thing that Jesus is driving home in teaching us to pray give us our daily bread. Not “give me.” This is true of the entire Lord’s Prayer, in fact. It’s the prayer of a community, not an individual. This is Jesus showing us that we cannot think about our lives and our stuff apart from thinking of each other. This means at least a few things worth mentioning:
We never pray alone. And we ensure that others never pray alone we pray not only for our daily bread but for other’s to have what they need as well. And that prayer, praying as Jesus has taught us, transforms our hearts and actions.
There’s another aspect as work when we are taught to pray for our daily bread. And it’s to recognize a hard truth—that we live in a world where there are many who do not have their daily bread—and this is in part because someone else has more than their daily bread. So for us to pray that we have our daily bread is a justice issue. We are asking God to give to all of us what we need, and having our turns turned toward that concern—that all have what they need.
This stretches us some, for sure. Because it’s inconvenient to see the reality of the disparities in outcomes, particularly when you can't do anything about it right away. But it’s real, it's there, and the question is what is our posture, our attitude when we see it. To continue what Matz wrote:
Nothing we have belongs to us. It all belongs to God. Why did God provide me a car (arguably something I did not need) when so many others have no car at all? Maybe God gave me the car so that I might use it to bless other people. Or more generally, why has God allowed things to be distributed to people unequally? Some people have more than they need; others have less than they need. Some people have the capacity to earn more income than they need; others are unable to make ends meet no matter how many hours they work. Some people are nimble with technology; others find the constant changes, software updates, and ever-new social networking tools exhausting. Some people are accepted into just about every university and hired at just about every job to which they apply; others find the education and employment landscapes impenetrable. Schools are better in some neighborhoods than in others. Churches are nicer in some neighborhoods than in others. Road and infrastructure are better in some regions than in others. Farmers in some parts of the world are paid not to grow certain crops; farmers in other parts of the world struggle to get their harvest to market before it spoils. In Western cultures food banks for the hungry are regularly stocked; in other parts of the world the hungry die from malnutrition and disease.
At some point, Christians need to ask themselves what might be responsible for these disparities. Few disparities can be traced to a strong versus a lagging work ethic of individuals. Few can be traced to a society’s topographic variations, climate difference, or geographic disparities. At some point, we must admit that we have built a society that produces disparity. We have done things that ensure that some will prosper at the expense of others, and we have given our tacit approval to the continuation of this disparity.”
So back to what I said at the beginning. The idea that the ear of God and the heart of God is turned toward us has been used by preachers to justify calling upon God to give us incredible wealth. Houses. Cars. Designer clothes. The thought is “the genie in a bottle has given us one wish, I’m going to use it for myself.”
But what if we began to pray and to think in what Jesus is teaching us here? I have God’s ear, and I’m not going to waste my time asking for these frivolous selfish things that don’t last. I’m going to appeal to God on behalf of us, not just me.
What if we look to our lives and what God has given to us—then looked around at the broken and unjust world around us and said: “i’m going to think about what I have in the terms that Jesus teaches and shows us? And I will not turn my eye and heart away. No. I’m going to join my heart and my life to these other people that God has placed in my life, to see our good as inherently tied up with each other.”
That’s what we are being led into. I know it’s not easy. I know it’s a big calling, and our “I work hard for I get” mindset fights against it. But how can we stare at the reality that our God abounds in generosity and kindness and decide to live a different way?
This morning God is inviting us to enter into his generosity. As receivers and as givers. May we listen to the call of his Holy Spirit, and hear the calling to pray “Give us today our daily bread.” And he will answer this prayer and begin the transformation of our hearts to follow him in generosity.