Dear all at IPC,

Every Sunday we say together what is commonly called the Lord’s Prayer, which is of course wrongly named. Jesus never had to pray this prayer, it’s the prayer he gave to his disciples. He didn’t pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”. It’s both a model and a form of prayer and we are to use this to base our prayers upon. But also, Jesus tells us to pray it, “when you pray, pray this… Our Father who is in heaven…” (Matthew 6:9)

The Lord’s prayer is in many ways Systematic Theology in miniature. It gives us the equipment to live out the Christian life. This prayer controls our Christian attitudes, it enables us to face life with all its ups and downs and uncertainties.

I’ve been thinking on the petition ‘give us today our daily bread’ and each word is worth meditating on. What is immediately striking is that this request doesn’t come until halfway through the prayer. The Lord’s prayer is first of all about God’s name, God’s kingdom and God’s will. Those things are the utter priority. The Lord’s prayer forces us to speak of his concerns before our own, before we come to forgiveness and our needs.

How often my prayer life is the opposite, the concerns of my daily life crowd in, my priorities are tragically the other way round. 

This petition includes everything we need: our health, our food, our wants, our cares, our need to be sustained. It reminds us that the Lord provides, and reminds us of his overruling providence in everything. Every word is loaded with meaning. 

Give –  “What do you have that you did not receive?” 1 Cor 4:7. As we pray give us our daily bread, we are to recognise God is the generous giver. All good gifts around us are us are sent from heaven above. What we have is not earned, the home that we live in, the food on our table, the money in our bank account, the clothes on our back – all is given to us and to be received as gift.  We need to recognise the source of what we have. 

I often think of Nebuchadnezzar looking out, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:30). While the words are on his lips, the Lord humbles him and after seven years, he recognises there is a God in heaven who is to be praised and blessed forever. He sees himself as he is – a creature, who is dependent and God has given him all that he has. 

Our daily necessities are given to us by God.

Give us – I don’t think I had realised here that it is a corporate prayer – Give ‘us’

It does not say ‘me’ or ‘my’. So often I am keen to pray for me, myself and I. What patience God must have with me constantly being focussed in on myself. This petition puts me in my place, it shows me my concern should be with others. We’re even told to pray for our enemies by the Lord Jesus.

This prayer is a disciples prayer and Jesus is encouraging us here to be thinking of his disciples. It is right and fitting to pray this as a church Sunday by Sunday. Our own needs are prayed for in the context of others.

Give us today – Jesus famously said, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matthew 6:34). Proverbs reminds us,  “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring” (Proverbs 27:1). To pray give us today our daily bread recognises that we are not in control, we are mortal, limited, finite creatures. We live by God’s daily sustaining grace. It is a great reminder that we live reliant on the daily care of God and when it comes to tomorrow, we can rely on God’s daily grace then.

For the Israelites in the wilderness they were given manna daily, they had to rely on God’s fresh daily provision each day. They weren’t able to gather tomorrow’s manna today, they had to trust God would provide it in the morning.

Our Daily Bread – speaks to us of daily necessity. In our culture we know exactly what this means – bread is a slang term for money, dough is used in the same way.  It is the stuff of life. It’s not the fleshpots that the children of Israel longed for in Egypt, nor the extravagant food we see in restaurants. Jesus is speaking of Daily Bread as the basic food which keeps us alive. The bare necessities!

The whole petition tells us that the Christian life is one of reliance and dependence: we entrust ourselves to the Lord. I think this is one of our basic struggles, am I willing to live reliantly on the Lord? When I am forced to do that by my circumstances do I kick against it? As I’ve written before, dependence and reliance are coming to all of us whether we like it or not. It is just a case of whether we will learn to embrace them or be forced to.

The writer of proverbs tells us, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me,lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God”. (Proverbs 30:8-9). This is counter cultural living and it always has been. Where discontentment and envy of others can so easily creep in, Jesus is teaching us God gives us what we need and that is all ok.

He is teaching that we humans are like the rest of creation, we are as dependent as the birds who neither sew nor reap and so we are not to be overly concerned about what we wear and what we eat, what we look like (Matthew 6:32). God knows what we need before we ask it (Matthew 6:8). You can look at these physical provisions of the Lord and the prayer is certainly referring to them, but we realise that “man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).

It would be incredibly foolish of us to set our hearts on the things and stuff of this life that we are given. To seek to hold on to it. To elevate ‘give us our daily bread’ above God’s name, God’s kingdom and God’s will. Jesus is teaching us to keep our daily bread in perspective.

This is obviously a prayer for today as we will not pray this prayer in the life of the world to come because  there will no need to pray “your kingdom come” because the kingdom will have come, we will not pray “forgive us our trespasses” because there will be nothing to forgive. We will not have to pray in glory “Give us today our daily bread”, because we will enjoy abundance in glory forever at the wedding supper of the Lamb. We will feast in the house of Zion. But till then, let’s recognise that our lives are one of humble reliance on a generous God.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Your Minister and friend,