How do you pray “Give us this day our daily bread” in a land where you can walk or drive down to your local Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, or anywhere else and be faced with a choice of fifty different types and sizes of bread to buy? How do you pray “Give us this day our daily bread” when you can go and buy enough bread for a month and put it in your freezer at home to defrost as and when you need it?
One-way to do this is to do what some theologians and preachers suggest and spiritualise the meaning of the prayer. It doesn’t really mean the bread that we eat, they say, it means the bread of life, the bread that we need to take in each day for our spirit and soul to exist. To pray for our daily bread means that we are praying for a further experience of God, that He touches us daily and we grow spiritually through this. I think it is wonderful that we can do this and we should all pray like this each day. But I also believe that if this is all we do with this part of the Lord’s Prayer, then we are not praying it in the way that Christ meant us to.
This section of the Lord’s Prayer clearly deals with our practical needs rather than spiritual ones for Jesus went on to deal with our spiritual needs as he taught us to pray for forgiveness and protection from the evil one. When Jesus included the words ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, I think he was teaching us that God is concerned with our practical well-being just as He is concerned with our physical and spiritual well-being.
Do we really appreciate this today, we have a God who is as concerned with us having enough to eat, and with us being warm in winter and with us having clothes to wear, as He is concerned with everything else in our lives. This is what this part of the Lord’s prayer means, that God cares for every part of our lives.
But it means more than this as well. For us to pray this prayer each day or week is a conscious acknowledgement that everything that we have comes from God. Thomas was telling me the other day that they do not say grace when he eats at school. He then told me that he likes to say grace to say thank you. It is important that we do this for everything that we receive. In each of the gospel accounts of the loaves and fishes, the same words appear: “looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke them.” This is what we do when we pray this sentence in the Lord’s Prayer, we recognise that it is God who gives us all things.
It has to be said that we do not like to make this acknowledgement. We live in a world where people are encouraged to get and do things for themselves, to make something of themselves. We are respected when we do this, if we have a decent car, a decent house and plenty of money, people turn and say ‘haven’t they done well for themselves. And there are few of us who would stop them and say ‘No, I haven’t, this is all a gift from God, I have had little to do with it.
So it does us good to pray the words ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ for it reminds us that all that we have comes from God.
But this prayer means more. Jesus does not tell us to pray ‘give me this day my daily bread’. He gives us a communal prayer, a prayer that we should be praying on behalf of everybody in the world. There are so many people in our world today that would be glad even to receive a slice of bread never mind a loaf. Look at the state of people in the southern half of Africa suffering from famine. The people of the Solomon Islands where in this age of rapid transport and communications, it was nearly a week before people arrived to even assess what help they needed after the latest hurricane. When we pray this prayer today, we pray it on behalf of all those in places like this.
But to pray this prayer in this way, we must be willing to be a part of God’s answer for these people as well. Our world has more than enough food to feed everybody in it. But because the western world takes about two thirds of the available food, there are many who don’t have enough to eat. Look at one commodity in our world, that of coffee. Several years ago, the major coffee companies decided to pay less money to their suppliers for coffee beans. One result of that is that farmers in many countries in Africa have had their income reduced so that they are unable to store enough produce to feed themselves when the rain does not fall. This is one part of the reason for the current famine in Africa. Just before Christmas, it was announced that Nestle was taking the poorest nation in the world to court over loss of earnings. It was only after considerable publicity about this that they announced they would give all money received from the Court case back to the country in aid. Yet, how many Church kitchens in this country can you go into and find tins of Nescafe Coffee powder. For those of you who don’t know, Nescafe is not only one of those coffees that have helped produce the famine in Africa but it is also produced by Nestle who are showing that they care more for profit than they do for people. One group who should know about such things suggests that the company is not too particular about the age of their workforce either; they have been known to use child labour in several third world countries.
If we are going to pray this prayer and mean it, then we must be willing to take a stand on behalf of those in our world who are not able to have their daily bread. In this case, one way would be for us to purchase fair-trade coffee in our homes and Churches.
The meaning of this phrase ‘give us this day our daily bread does not end there either. Do any of you remember DVD’s coming out for sale about two years ago? The market hype for them suggested that everybody would want one of these, and that they would eventually replace both compact discs and videos. When they first came out, they were extremely expensive, as opposed to the price today, which is just very expensive. Shortly after these DVD players started selling, I heard somebody use them as an example of something in a sermon in my own church. I can’t remember what the sermon was about, but when I first heard the illustration, I do remember being shocked initially that a Christian should be willing to spend so much money on these things. It was only later that I realised that the Minister who bought and used it could well argue that this expensive new machine helped him with his work; the relaxation it gave enabled him to work better. For someone else buying it, it could easily be greed rather than need that is being listened to.
Well, in this part of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus also gave us words that speak into situations like that. Today, we could quite easily manage to live healthy lives without buying bread. We can eat rice, potatoes, cereal, even Ryvita or crisps; any of these would enable us to live without bread. The people in Jesus’ time could not do this. Bread was a part of their basic diet. Without it, it would have been very difficult to live. Doesn’t this suggest that Jesus is calling his followers to live frugally?
It is so easy to forget this in the world we live in. I mentioned a bit earlier how the world judges us by how much money we have, how big the house is, whether our children have Playstation 2 and Gamebox. In this prayer Jesus tells us to ignore what the world thinks for He tells us to pray simply for enough to satisfy our needs, not our wants, but our needs. For some of us, our needs could include a new car every year. If your job is in management, or involves a lot of travel, then such a thing could well be necessary in order for you to do that job and continue being God’s witness amongst the people He has placed you with. For some, the needs could include a larger house. Jesus was not against going to visit people with large houses, you may remember him going to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, it was there that he healed a man with dropsy, taught about the guests who should be invited, and even about where people should sit at a wedding feast. Jesus did not condemn this man for having a large house. In the book of Acts, there is an account of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, this eunuch travelled by chariot and there is no suggestion of him giving that up following his baptism.
I cannot stand here and tell you what your version of ‘daily bread’ is; neither can anybody else. It is between each one of us and God to work that out. But I must warn you of the danger of going after more than our daily bread. Jesus gave that warning when he met a rich ruler. “A certain ruler asked him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" "Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good--except God alone. You know the commandments: ’Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honour your father and mother.’" "All these I have kept since I was a boy," he said. When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was a man of great wealth. Jesus looked at him and said, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Those who heard this asked, "Who then can be saved?" Jesus replied, "What is impossible with men is possible with God."
When we begin to set our eyes and thoughts upon more than we need we become like that rich ruler, his money and possessions were more important to him than his relationship with God. Not only that, for every bit more than our needs that we take, somebody else in our world gets less than they need. When we start to think like this we are saying to God, I don’t believe that you know what is best for me, only I can know that. We are telling Him that we don’t care if someone else has to go without, as long as we can have what we want. And once we begin to do that, we only have one of two choices. Repent, and that repentance will probably involve giving up the extra that we set our eyes on. Or walk away from God and take our riches and possessions with us. The account in Luke’s gospel infers that the rich ruler chose the second option. I hope and pray that we do not do the same.
I have a confession to make now; I come from a Church that made the decision a number of years ago to stop praying the Lord’s Prayer regularly in their worship services. The view was that it was getting stale; people were saying the words without meaning them. Unfortunately, we have never started using the prayer much since then and that could well be one reason why it is so hard to get people to pray in our Church. It is not just my own Church that suffers from this problem though. I have asked several Christians how often they pray and the usual answer is either occasionally or when I need to. Here in this part of the Lord’s Prayer we have Jesus telling us how often we should be praying ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ he says. If we are asking only for what we need now, then we need to be praying each day for each day’s needs. Or if you prefer praying on a nighttime, you pray every night for the next day’s needs. If we are to grow as Christians, we need to keep our prayer life regular and often.
I think it is impossible to preach a sermon on this subject without mentioning the bread that the Israelites received from God when they were in the wilderness, so here is my mention. The book of Exodus tells us:
This is what the LORD has commanded: ’Each one is to gather as much as he needs. Take an omer for each person you have in your tent.’" The Israelites did as they were told; some gathered much, some little. And when they measured it by the omer, he who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little. Each one gathered as much as he needed. Then Moses said to them, "No one is to keep any of it until morning." However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So, Moses was angry with them.
Each day they were there, they received one day’s bread. Apart from the day before the Sabbath when they had two days supply. Obviously, some people thought they could give themselves a day off or a morning’s lie in and tried to keep some of God’s provision for the following day. And what happened, it was full of maggots and began to smell. Could it be that our prayer life is like this at times? King David said in his psalm “May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice.” But what happens when we do not pray regularly, when we try and say, I have prayed enough today for two days, don’t you think it is possible that instead of smelling like incense, our prayers begin to smell more like that day old manna.
I have saved the most important part of this sermon until last or almost last. I want you to look at just where in the Lord’s Prayer Jesus has us praying for our daily bread. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread.”
The prayer for our daily needs comes after we have spent time in worship and adoration. If we do not spend time with God like this first in our daily prayer times, then we should not really be surprised if we begin to have problems seeing answers when we pray for our own and for others needs.
To finish, I want to read you a prayer that was written by Kathy Hedge, I discovered it on a site called Sermon Central on the Internet.
“Lord, I don’t think I have ever really worried about daily bread. You have given me an abundance of bread and everything else I need. When I go to the grocery store, I get lost in all the variety, colour, and sheer numbers. I have given away boxes, a roomful of things to charity. They are things I do not need or no longer want, and still I have more than enough. You have allowed me to have things far in excess of daily bread – of what I truly need to live.
And yet I am still hungry!
Sometimes, I fear the things I have. They steal my best time and energy by crying for my attention: Buy me! Eat me! Wear me! Upgrade me!
And so, I am hungry because I am feeding my greed and not my soul.
How much is enough, Lord? How much is too much? What can I live without? I don’t want too little, for fear of becoming bitter and anxious. Nor do I need too much, lest I turn complacent and blind to the needs of others.
Give us this day our daily bread.... I need bread to stay alive, but without the Bread of Life, I will never truly live.
Teach me contentment, Jesus. Show me a way of true delight in the things of this earth, without mad cravings to own or control. Increase my hunger for you and for the things of your Spirit.
May I never desire anything – a tasty meal, a beautiful dress, even a cosy home – unless you are in the desire, helping me to be grateful and generous.
O Jesus, give us yourself!
