Our Daily Bread  (Matthew 6:9-13)                                                                         2008.08.24    Pastor Bernie Chung   

There was an author who said that Matthew 6:11 is the turning point of the entire Lord’s Prayer.  What he meant was that this particular verse, give us today our daily bread, becomes the dividing line that sets the rest of the prayer apart from the first half.  The first half is about your name, your kingdom, and your will, i.e. God’s name, God’s kingdom, and God’s will.  And the second half is about us: they are our daily bread, our debts and our debtors, and preventing us from falling into temptation,

Give us today our daily bread is the fourth request.  From this particular request, we admit that we have at least one thing in common.  We acknowledge that we are not self-sufficient. Our needs may be different from each other.  But we all have needs.

People in general work hard to satisfy our own needs.  We devote our entire lives to make money, save money, spend money, and invest what we have.  I am not saying that it is bad to earn money.  Yet the more money we make especially when the more possessions we accumulate, the more worrisome and insecure we become. 

Bread can satisfy our physical hunger daily and it symbolizes our needs. We may not realize our needs and dependence on things until there is a lack of it or it is taken away from us.  One of the most traumatic experiences that people face, in our society today, is to lose a job.  Our job is just like our daily bread.  It is seemingly the security in life. It is because our job can provide what we need.  A good job also provides a sense of accomplishment and the money that we need to spend on the things that bring us pleasure. That is why those who have a good job have something that most people desperately want. 

Jesus, with the fourth petition, is teaching us how to depend on our Heavenly Father for our every need. In other words, we ought to look to God for what we need.  In fact we are asking God to provide us what we need one day at a time.  This is what we need to clearly understand.  When we bring our daily needs to God in prayer, we certainly do not mean that we live from day to day carelessly, without planning, or without a life long goal.

Our bodies need food daily, and we pray for our daily bread.  Here comes the dilemma.  Since we know that God is all knowing, that means He knows all of our needs also.  If that is true why do we bother to pray for what we need?  The answer is simple.  It is just because He knows precisely our needs.  Therefore, we can pray and ask God for the proper means that glorifies Him while our real needs are being satisfied, and not just our wants. 

I have asked myself why we need to eat at all?  Even if we need to eat, why then three meals a day?  Why one meal cannot be sufficient, and then we can do whatever we want for the rest of the day.  When I see Christians give thanks to the Lord before each meal, then I realize why.  It is not that the Lord needs us to express our thankfulness, but the meal is to remind us of our needs daily.  It reminds us of our dependence on Him.  So, if we have 3 meals each day, we at least realize our needs 3 times daily.  People of the world today, no matter how much they have, it is not enough simply because they are just temporal.  It has no eternal value.  “Give us today our daily bread” also reminds us of the spiritual needs. 

“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land —  not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.” (Amos 8:11)

In order to understand our real need, we must understand our real self.  Amos 8:11 points out that we are hungry not because we have no food, and we are thirsty not because we have no water.  It is because our spiritual thirst is not met.  Again, in Matt 4:4, Jesus reminds us that: Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. 

We are created in the image of God, our real self is not entirely satisfied until we are connected with our creator.  We cannot ignore our spiritual need.  We ought to know that we have gone astray.  If so, we need to reconcile with God.  That is the only way that our real self can be satisfied. 

The first week of each month, we have Holy Communion.  During which we are given a thin round white cracker, and a small cup of grape juice.  They cannot satisfy our physical hunger and thirst by any means.  But it is all we need spiritually.  It is because the Lord has forgiven us through His sacrifice on the cross.  The atonement is for us all.

Once we realize our dependence on God, it is time to thank the Lord for meeting our daily needs, both physically and spiritually.  May we continue to trust in Him even if the world is falling apart.  May the Lord help us to realize that prayer is not a time to give orders, but to acknowledge our dependence on the Lord.