Sermon for CATM – March 13, 2011 – The Lord’s Prayer: Give Us Today Our Daily Bread
Here is another version of the Lord’s prayer in paraphrase from the Message by Eugene Peterson. Let’s read it together:
Our Father in heaven,
Reveal who you are.
Set the world right;
Do what’s best— as above, so below.
Keep us alive with three square meals.
Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others.
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.
You’re in charge!
You can do anything you want!
You’re ablaze in beauty!
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Sometimes it helps to look at passages of Scripture that are very familiar to us from a slightly different angle.
Let me ask you this: If I were to ask you what you need to live, what would you say? [Necessities, essentials for living] [Shelter, food, clothing (in Canada for sure), housing; ][community? Love? Belonging?]
Shelter, food, clothing, housing.
These things are what we can’t get along without, they are essential actually to being human.
Love, belonging, community. These things are perhaps not what are most critical if we were to create a hierarchy of needs, but we understand that without these things, we might be alive, but we will not live very well.
We’re into our third look at the Lord’s Prayer in our current series on prayer. We’re teaching on prayer because there is perhaps nothing so vital in life for our spiritual well-being than prayer.
We’ve actually taught a lot of prayer over the years, especially in the course we run annually called “Prayer as a Way of Life” which many of you have been part of.
We’ve seen so far as we’ve looked at the Lord’s Prayer that prayer begins with praise. It begins with worshipping God as He is revealed in Scripture: Our Father in Heaven, whose very Name is hallowed.
The Greek for ‘hallowed’ is not a noun, not a static thing or an abstract idea. It is a verb, ἁγιάζω (hagiazō). When we worship God, when we live our lives in a way that is loving and pleasing to Him, we are hallowing His name. As we gather here and sing praises and worship we are hallowing His name. We need to cherish Him and love Him and honour Him for who He is!
Before we come to God with our wants and our wishes, we need to come to Him with our worship!
All the elements of true prayer are found in this prayer that Jesus gave us to model our prayers on, what we call the Lord’s Prayer. So…what is prayer? How do we pray? Why do we pray? Is it ok to pray for ourselves?
What should our focus be when we pray [Kingdom]? How does my private, personal prayer relate to your private, personal prayer? All good questions that we will hopefully unpack as we continue through this series.
Today we’re looking at Matthew 6:11 Give us today our daily bread. That’s 6 little words that might not seem like they amount to much, or might seem very plain, but they actually challenge us in some pretty powerful ways, if we let them.
And as brief as this verse is, we can look at it up close
Give us…
I want to be independent. I want to be self-made man. I want to provide for my family. The human ego, the male ego wants independence and self-sufficiency.
Jesus, here in the Lord’s prayer, reminds us of our total dependence on God. We come to God with our hands out. Our posture is not to be one of bold self-reliance.
It is that of a child who at a gut level knows both that he exists under the loving care of his or her parent, and that he NEEDS his parent for the necessities of life.
We come to God with hands out, not unlike a beggar might who relies on the benevolence of goodwill of those who pass by. But you know, a child who is cared for rarely if ever thinks much at all about the fact that they are being cared for.
My children Jared and Elia, when they were young, never wondered if they would eat; they wouldn’t think to themselves, “Dad is cooking dinner…I wonder if he’ll feed me”.
So while we’re called to ask God in prayer for our daily bread, the bread of our necessity, the bread that suffices for each day, we’re called to do so with deep trust in who God is, not while anxiously wondering if we’ll eat.
Just a little later in Matthew chapter 6, Jesus says: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”
God cares. God knows. God walks with us and with our loved ones. So the choice is to worry or to pray. Do we worry if God will give us what we need? Or do we pray, trusting that God will give us what we need? The more we understand Who God is the more we will trust Him. That trust extends in every direction imaginable.
For parents, part of our job is to prepare our kids for life. That means that as they grow we give them more responsibility and independence.
That is a recipe for worry, because we know, as adults, just how scary the world can be. So we’re faced daily with this dilemma. Do we worry or do we pray. Do we put our energy into fretting or do we put our energy into prayer.
My son gave me permission to tell this story: Friday night our son Jared, who is 19, was walking home from a friends in the wee hours of the night, walking up Bayview toward Eglinton. He was mugged.
The mugger brandished a knife and took his money, looked at his cheap cell phone, laughed and gave it back to him and was about to see what else he could steal when a family in a car just happened to park right beside where they were standing. The mugger ran off, scared by the notion of being seen by more people who could report him. Jared’s ok.
As a parent we can worry. We can do that! Anyone here have any problem worrying enough about life? We can worry, or we can trust and pray for our needs…food, clothing, shelter…and safety…God cares for us. Amen?
…This Day…
Do you believe that God is here, now? Some of us will say ‘Yes’ and mean that without a doubt. Some of us will say ‘Yes’ and mean that will a little doubt. Some of us here will hope this is true. Some of us here will doubt this is true at all. Some of us perhaps, if we do not have faith in God, will confidently assert that God is not here.
Our particular opinions of course do not shape or create objective reality. If God is here and I believe He is not here, that doesn’t change the fact that He’s here. It just makes me particularly out of touch with reality.
The same goes the other way of course, but as a person of faith in a community of faith, our experience and the Holy Bible and our personal and collective faith tells us that God is, indeed here. We’re not alone.
And this little segment of our passage today tells us that God is present in the ‘now’. We can ask Him, right now, to provide for needs, right now.
You know, a lot of folks who believe in God in a very general sense but who reject the Bible or who reject Christian faith in particular…these folks are sometimes referred to as ‘deists’…a lot of these people believe in the ‘Watchmaker’ God.
They believe that God or a divine being created the universe and set it in motion, like a watch maker makes a watch.
And of course once a watch maker makes the watch and sells it or gives it away, he or she has nothing more to do with the watch. The watch once wound just keeps time by itself.
Some of you who are old enough might remember the old Timex commercial: “It takes a licking and it just keeps ticking”.
So in a sense some deists believe in the eternal absence of God. That He is not present now and it doesn’t matter if He’s present now because He set everything in motion and the world, frankly in this opinion, doesn’t need Him.
Of course the Bible says the opposite. When Moses asks God to tell Him His name so Moses can report back to the Israelites what God has said, God says to Moses Exodus 3:14 "I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites”.
So God is here with us, today, this day, now. And we can ask Him now to supply our needs for now. Sometimes we might find it hard to believe that the almighty God and King could concern Himself with our daily bread. But…He does. His heart is that big. His love is that limitless.
Notice that Jesus doesn’t say to ask: “Give us this day a year’s supply of food”, or “Please would you guarantee that 10 years from today I will have food”. We’re called to live in the now.
Now is where God is present to us, now is also where we are most present because, you know, today is quite hard enough for us to manage, thank you very much. And today is when we need to trust God, to place our hope and our confidence in Him. And we do this one day at a time.
…Our…
When Jesus was asked by the disciples to teach them how to pray, He used “our” instead of ‘my’. Why is that? [We are community, we each receive and should each be invested in the ‘bread’ of others]
You know in Canada we’re at a little bit of a disadvantage in understanding this passage. North America in general is a deeply individualized part of the world.
When most North Americans thinking about improving their life, they think about improving their own situation for themselves and their families.
Other places in the world instead of being very individualized are more collective in their thinking.
I was speaking with a mission staff member recently who had just returned from Mozambique in south eastern Africa.
She had been back here in Toronto for just a few days after having been in Africa on a short-term mission trip where she served in an orphanage for about three weeks.
And she was having some trouble adapting to being back here after being in Mozambique.
I asked her what she was finding it hard to adapt to. She said that over there in Africa everything is about relationships.
You’re surrounded with your friends and family. Everything is done together. There is a deep knowing and being known that is just part of the culture.
She said that back here, she has friends and family, but they’re spread out all over the city, all over the country. She rarely sees those she’s closest to. The loneliness of our ‘me-first’ culture takes a toll on us that we’re not even aware of.
So for us, the “Our” in the Lord’s Prayer is, perhaps, a little challenging. One of the challenges then is that my daily bread is related to your daily bread.
If I get my daily bread and don’t care a wiff about you getting your daily bread, I’ve got a problem I might not recognize.
If I see that my daily bread is related to your daily bread, and I’m learning that when God teaches us to pray He teaches us in the plural…our…then the question becomes ‘how big does that ‘our’ get?
When we pray for our daily bread, are we also praying for the daily bread for those in Syria fighting for democracy and against oppression? The men, women, children, babies and elderly whose access to food to limited or not at all because of the war?
What about the other nations in the Middle East that are in the middle of a massive civil upheaval?
And are we called to pray for those in Japan who’s world has been rocked by that massive earthquake and tsunami, who are living under a huge threat as right now, as I speak, Japanese engineers are trying desperately to keep at least two nuclear reactors from melting and spewing deadly radiation?
You see how one little word, “Our” creates some challenges for us, some real questions we need to think about.
You know, it’s this type of question that has led Christians to create organizations like World Vision, Habitat for Humanity, which exist to help all of humanity find a better way forward in the name of Jesus Christ.
And it was what is behind that that little word, “Our” that inspired Hallelujah Davis to create Yonge Street Mission, which we are a part of.
So that little word, “Our” is precisely why you are sitting where you are right now in this church. Cool, huh?
,,,Daily Bread…
So here’s the substance of what Jesus asks us in this verse to request from God. Not luxuries. Not a new car. Not that new smart phone. Just the basics.
If you watch a lot of Christian TV other than Huntley Street and the like, you’ll get the impression that God wants you to be filthy rich and to have every excess known to humanity in exchange for a little faith and a contribution to the ministry. I separate Huntley Street because it is actually quite an excellent show that consistently has good, Biblical teaching.
But a lot of Christian TV from south of the border promotes a toxic and heretical gospel of prosperity that we do well to avoid at all costs. The Scripture we’re looking at today is a prayer for our needs, not a prayer for our greeds.
Daily bread. Simple stuff. The necessities of life. Food, shelter, clothing.
“Hang on”, you might say. I earn my food. I pay for my shelter. I bought the clothes on my back. That, apparently, is not a new way of thinking.
Deuteronomy 8:17 says “You may say to yourself, "My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me." 18 But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.”
In other words, “You perhaps have the ability to provide for yourself or your family, but where do you think the ability came from? God is the One who gave you that ability! God is the One who blesses you with good health so that you can provide for your family. Or God is the one who enables the government to give support as needed.
And God is the One who blesses the company you work for so that they can pay your salary. We must never forget that everything we have and everything we need comes from God.
So, there you have it,
Give us today our daily bread.
Six little words. All kinds of slightly veiled challenges. May we continue to pray as Christ taught us to pray.
May we in humility embrace our dependence on God. May we daily come to God understanding that He knows us and loves us and cares for our needs this day.
May we remember one another in our prayers, and to pray for the needs of humanity around our suffering globe. And may our passion be that His Kingdom would come, both that Kingdom that we await upon the return of our glorious Saviour Jesus Christ…
And that Kingdom that Jesus says is within us, seeking expression through us, through lives lived in humble dependence upon our gracious Heavenly Father for all our needs. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
