Give us this day our daily bread
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– Give us this day our daily bread
(NIV)
I’ve broken out of our series on Revelation again as it is Harvest Sunday to look at something that may be more relevant to what we are thinking of today. I appreciate that I could have spoken from (NIV)
1Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
We could have seen from this verse that the curse in Eden has been more than reversed. Instead of a garden with two people we have a city with multitudes, with people from many nations. As one author says: The glory of the age to come is necessarily portrayed by means of imagery belonging to the present age. The healing leaves indicate the complete absence of physical and spiritual want. The life to come will be a life of abundance and perfection.
But that passage is for another time 😊.
We pray the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday and probably in between as well so I’d like to look at something that is so common place that is may be easily missed and in particular one verse that is very relevant for our harvest Sunday. Verse 11 – “Give us this day our daily bread”
I appreciate that this is diving into the middle of the prayer but hopefully you will forgive me. But worse than that it is diving into a passage without any context, so first I must put it in it’s setting.
The Lord’s Prayer is found both in Luke and Matthew, I’m particularly looking at it as it’s found in Matthews gospel so that is the context I’m interested in. The end of chapter 4 says how Jesus went around preaching, healing and proclaiming the good news and that large crowds followed Him.
Chapter 5 starts:
Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them. (NIV). – Hence why it is called “the Sermon on the Mount”. So we have this crowd of people, ordinary people – like you and me, Drawn to listen to Jesus. Sitting on the side of a mountain taking it all in. In fact at the end of the passage in chapter 7 it says that the people were amazed at his teaching as He taught as someone with authority.
Jesus gave some teaching on prayer and then shared a framework for prayer that we could personalise, and use as a guide.
I don’t know if you watched “The Great British Sewing Bee” when it was on. For those of you who missed it 😊 it was a sewing program! The contestants would be asked to make various garments, the judges would then come along and decide how well they had done. Some weeks a model would walk on and they would be asked to dress her often with a particular theme or material. Other weeks they would have a tailors dummy to put clothes on. The at the end of the challenge there would be a row of tailors dummys and a row of contestants on stools behind. The judge would walk along looking for straight seams, a good fit, zips that worked – could you imagine what would happen if they came to one and it was just the dummy – “well I thought it looked good as it was!” That’s what we can be like if all we do is repeat the Lords Prayer as it is all the time. We should try and use the prayer as a framework putting our personal prayers on it.
Firstly then we have in the Lord’s Prayer what you could call Godward focus:
“Our Father who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be your name,
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”
Then comes this change of direction, the first of the manward focused petitions. “Give us this day our daily bread”.
I don’t know if you are like me when you go for a walk on the beach – you see a shell or a pebble, you pick it up and examine it. Sometimes you can see the sun through the shell, or something sparkles in the pebbles. You look at it turning it round and round – we can do the same here with this small phrase – hold it up to the light. Scratch it a bit, look a bit closer. Even a cursory inspection highlights a few things.
Firstly, it starts with “Give” – no please or anything, just give almost maybe a demand. Then it says “us” this isn’t a prayer just for me. Next we note that it’s a daily pray for a daily need and finally it asks for bread – a very basic request, not caviar – bread. So let’s try and unpack these things that we’ve spotted.
Max Lucado has written a book called “The Great House of God: a home for your heart”. [I’m not sure whether Livingstones can order it for you but I’d certainly recommend any of his books, good heart-warming devotional stuff. ] – In this book he uses the rooms of a house to teach on the Lords Prayer – and this passage is the kitchen J
Come into God’s kitchen ask for some food, receive and be thankful. So why doesn’t the prayer say something like: “if you’re not too busy any chance of some food”, or “if there’s anyone there can I have something”. I think the reason is that the prayer is like a journey, a path. We’ve recognised that God is our Father, worshiped Him, declared that we will strive to bring His kingdom to earth… so now we are in His house, in His kitchen asking for some food, some sustenance to do those things.
Max Lucado says: The prayer’s next three petitions encompass all of the concerns of our life. “This daily bread” addresses the present. “Forgive our sins” addresses the past. “Lead us not into temptation” speaks to the future.[1]
Give us this day our daily bread – The petition can be taken in at least two ways. Firstly, at the physical level, actual bread, the physical things that we need to live. Or, secondly, the Spiritual, Jesus is the bread of life, at the communion table we eat the bread as a reminder of His death and resurrection. Some of the early commentators before the reformation thought that Jesus couldn’t be taking about physical bread, it had to have a spiritual meaning as it’s main focus. But I think we miss something if we brush past the prayer for physical bread… I don’t need to pray that I’ve got a job, a pension and Supermarket and a freezer – I’ve always got bread. J
Let’s go back to that mount where Jesus is teaching, sit down and look around. Who do you see, what are they like. There’s day workers the same as Jesus mentioned in a parable living each day hoping to get picked to work in someone’s field. Shepherds hoping that they can get a good price for their wool, carpenters, and builders – workers, the poor, maybe some beggars. None of them thought when they heard this prayer that it was a prayer for food to magically appear on their tables. It was a prayer to be picked by someone to work that day, a prayer that rain or drought wouldn’t destroy the crops. It was a prayer that recognised that however food got to the table it was provided by God.
The reformer [Martin] Luther had the wisdom to see that ‘bread’ was a symbol for ‘everything necessary for the preservation of this life, like food, a healthy body, good weather, house, home, wife, children, good government and peace’,2 and probably we should add that by ‘bread’ Jesus meant the necessities rather than the luxuries of life.[2]
Last week I was away with work. Breakfast was provided, lunch was provided and we went to a restaurant for dinner. When there was a buffet lunch the need wasn’t too little food it was too much. I was reminded of the passage from the book of Proverbs:
(NIV)
7 “Two things I ask of you, Lord;
do not refuse me before I die:
8 Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
give me neither poverty nor riches,
but give me only my daily bread.
9 Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
and so dishonor the name of my God.
So praying this reminds us of how fortunate we are, and hopefully moves our focus to others:-
The prayer starts “Give us”, a prayer that at least encompasses the church family. In fact James says:
(NIV) What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. [3]
So this is a prayer not just for our family, but for our Church, the persecuted Church, the poverty stricken church, the prosperous church. It is praying for the food bank, for the child you sponsor – for all that can be included in “us”.
“Give us this day our daily bread” Daily – this is an interesting word. The Greek word is epiousios and it doesn’t appear anywhere else in the bible, in fact it doesn’t appear any where else![4] It’s thought that it could have broadly two possible meanings. Firstly, it could be linked to time; bread for today, or bread for tomorrow. Bread that I will eat in the next 24 hours. Secondly, it could be linked to quantity; My daily portion of bread. Whichever it is, the meanings overlap to some extent, the truth is still that we are expressing our daily dependence on God. This word may small and not fully understood but I think it is the key to the whole prayer! How often should I recognise that God is my Father – Daily. How often do I need to come and ask forgiveness – daily, and how often do I need to come and ask for the smallest, most mundane type of provision – Daily!
“Give us this day our daily bread” – I touched on the meaning of bread earlier, that it can have both a physical and a spiritual meaning. Certainly part of this petition is a remembrance that Jesus is the bread of life, as part of the lords supper a reminder of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Possibly even a reminder that today we eat plain old bread, but one day when Gods will is done on earth as it is in heaven and His Kingdom is fully come, there will be another meal – The marriage supper of the lamb, when the us will be all of Gods people.
Let’s remember then that Lord’s Prayer is meant to be a framework that we fill in. So as we are sitting in God’s House, in His Kitchen, at His table, eating His food we can open up to Him, as you would to anyone else sitting at their kitchen table. Open up your heart, ask for forgiveness and strength for the future.
Let’s pray.
[1] Lucado, Max. The Great House of God: A Home for Your Heart. Dallas: Word Pub., 1997. Print.
2 P. 147.
[2] Stott, John R. W. The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (): Christian Counter-Culture. Leicestershire; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1985. Print. The Bible Speaks Today.
[3] The New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011. Print.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiousios