Give Us Our Daily Bread

All right, Matthew chapter six.

If you have a Bible or an app, open it up.

We're looking at the Lord's Prayer.

Specifically, verse 11.

Give us this day our daily bread.

We'll be working though, 9 through 11 together to understand it in context.

Matthew chapter 6.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

Here's what I want us to kind of start with before we dive into the passage too deeply.

Were we left to ourselves, any praying we did would both start and end with ourselves.

For our natural self-centeredness knows no bounds.

Let me say that again.

Were we left to ourselves, any praying we did would both start and end with ourselves, for our natural self-centeredness knows no bounds.

That's pastor and theologian J.I.

Packer, who went home to be with the Lord, skillfully describing exactly how we pray when no one's instructed us differently.

Left to ourselves, the natural shape of our prayer becomes a list with our name at the beginning and our name at the end, treating God as some cosmic manager to process our requests.

Here in Matthew 6, Jesus, in his grace and mercy and love for his followers, actually teaches his disciples a better and more faithful way to pray.

Last week we saw Jesus address this tendency we have, where we think prayer is a means to earn or get God's attention, to get him to see us or to get him to hear us by the eloquence or longevity of our prayers.

And as a remedy, Jesus doesn't just put forward some new method of praying.

He's not just telling us a new practice to instill in our everyday life.

No, Jesus actually helps us to transform our very understanding about prayer.

That we are already fully seen and fully known by our Father.

That's what transforms prayer.

It's only after this shift in understanding that Jesus then hands his disciples a prayer that starts nowhere near the one who's praying their desires.

It starts nowhere near themselves, but with the greatness and glory of the Father.

You see, look at the very model of the prayer.

It's only after his name, his kingdom, his will have gone first.

Can give us come from the proper place?

And where does this request begin?

Where does the give us start?

Well, with the simple and ordinary daily plea for bread.

So, what does it actually take to ask for this simple, ordinary sustenance and have it be a right and faithful request to the Father instead of Packer's assertion of a self-centered one?

It's what I hope we discover this morning together.

So, to really understand the request, give us this day our daily bread, we have to go back to the beginning of the prayer because there's something about the very nature of the prayer itself.

The prayer refuses to start with us.

The prayer refuses to start with us.

When we look through verses 9 through 10, before Jesus ever teaches his disciples to ask for anything, he teaches them to address someone.

Our Father is the very beginning of this prayer.

And then there's these three requests that follow that address.

Before ever there's some self-centered or selfish concern brought before him, something for themselves to gain.

What does he declare?

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done.

It's only then in verse 11 does Jesus finally turn to them with, give us.

There's something intentional about that.

There's something formative that's happening in that specific sequence.

Our particular needs are meant to be asked for as a means to our Father's glory.

Our particular needs in this life are a means for us to our Father's glory.

It's never an attempt to bend his will toward ours.

That's how we commonly see prayer, right?

If we can just get God's will to somehow align to ours or bend to ours and give us what we're actually asking for, then our hearts will be content and happy and satisfied.

But that's not the nature of the prayer.

It's to align ourselves with the pursuit of his glory, not to try and bend his will toward our self-centeredness.

This order isn't incidental.

What we see from Jesus Himself, it's divine instruction for his followers.

You cannot rightly ask give us until you first sincerely desired his name, his kingdom, his will.

What we also see in this is that the prayer doesn't even allow our personal request to ever be alone.

Our personal requests in this prayer are never alone.

Look closer at the words themselves.

Every time this prayer addresses God, it's in the singular.

It speaks to Him alone.

It's your name, your kingdom, your will, each singular, each solely fixed on the one true and eternal Father.

But every single time that prayer turns to the ones who are praying, the language shifts.

And what does it shift to?

It shifts to something plural: our, us.

Give us our bread, forgive us our sin.

Lead us not into temptation.

You see, this is something important for us to understand.

Jesus does not allow us to pray for my bread.

There's no room in this prayer for my needs, my bread, my wants, my desires.

There is no room for self-centeredness in true prayer.

It's always our us.

And so even a man locked in a room, the type of prayer that Jesus refers to just three verses earlier, cannot open his mouth to pray without being drawn into a family's communal needs.

The grammar refuses to let this be some type of transaction between an individual and his supernatural resource.

It draws the entire family of God into the request.

And so this means for you and I, we can be alone in a room praying, seeking, but you cannot be alone in the us of this prayer.

It demands that our eyes at some point lift up and look at the needs of those around us.

Because the very heart of this prayer demands that you might be an answer for someone near you.

Our Father, give us our daily bread.

But this request is strange in nature, right?

It's a really strange request for a very simple thing.

We see this in verse 11.

Let's look at the verse itself.

Give us this day our daily bread, that word translated daily.

It's almost unheard of anywhere else in Greek literature.

I'm not just saying the New Testament, I'm saying Greek literature.

This word is almost undiscovered anywhere else.

Biblical translators have wrestled with it for centuries.

The great reformer, French theologian John Calvin, he interprets it as continual.

Others, they've heard it in something closer to the bread that belongs to the coming day.

That's odd, right?

It's clumsy.

It has this kind of forward-leaning nature to the phrase, but it doesn't quite settle into anything.

It's not enough for today, nor is it enough for forever.

And that strangeness in the translation, it's not something for us to figure out right now.

It's something for us to understand its heart intention.

Because this is not a request for a lifetime supply.

Whatever this word means precisely, it does not mean give me enough bread that I never have to ask you again.

In the very nature of the word, it calls us to daily come back to the hand of our Father.

Give us this day our daily bread.

It draws us back to Him, to the one who knows us, to the one who knows what we need before we ask, to the one who sees us before we ever try to make a scene to be noticed, to our Father who loves us.

Now, once these three petitions for God's name, kingdom, and will have been spoken, it's right for us to ask, well, why bread?

Why bread is the next thing after the glory and majesty of God?

Bread.

Of all things.

Why not forgiveness of our sin?

Wouldn't God be more concerned about that?

What about delivering us from the evil one?

Wouldn't God be more concerned about that?

Why bread?

Theologian reformer John Calvin, he saw something worth focusing our attention on here.

Reflecting on why Jesus placed a request as ordinary as food ahead of a request as weighty as forgiveness, he writes.

Bread is the first step.

Not because it's the most important thing in this prayer, but because it's the smallest thing.

It's the most obvious thing that you and I take for granted every single day.

It's the most obvious form of dependence that every one of us needs to practice before we can actually trust the Father with anything of greater substance.

You think you can actually trust God for the forgiveness of your sin and the redemption of your soul if you can't trust him for lunch?

What one is more reasonable to request?

And yet it's tempting to treat this line as the small one.

Many of us, we said it without blinking an eye or without giving it much thought just moments ago.

The one you rush past your way to something that sounds more spiritual.

But refusing to bring your ordinary needs to God is not humility, it's arrogance.

Refusing to bring the most simple and mundane aspect of your existence before the throne of grace is not humility, it's arrogance.

Paul warns the church in Colossians that man-made rules about denying the body don't actually make you more spiritual.

It doesn't actually restrain sin in your members, it just relocates it somewhere else.

Pretending that your most basic need is beneath God's attention does not make you more spiritual.

It makes you dishonest.

It makes you dishonest about your actual need for Him and the provision of His hand.

To ask God for bread and mean it is to admit that you are not self-sufficient down to the most mundane and ordinary details of your life.

Here's what we have to grasp: it's the exact same dependence that forgiveness requires, applied to something small enough that you can ask for it every single day.

So this is the shape of the request by the time it reaches verse 11.

It comes after these three petitions that have fixed our eyes on someone greater than ourselves.

And it comes wrapped in this strange word that keeps us returning to ask again tomorrow, which means that the real question this verse puts to us isn't, do you believe God can provide bread?

Almost everyone in this room believes that in some abstract sense.

The real question is whether you actually know the Father well enough for that belief to shape your very life, even how you pray.

You see, the request for our bread is only right when it flows from the knowledge of our Father.

The request for our bread is only right when it flows from the knowledge of our Father.

We've already named the danger.

Left to ourselves, any praying we do starts and ends with ourself.

And out of every request that you could bring to God, bread, your needs, our basic physical needs, it might be the one most naturally bent toward your own self-serving.

Our own selfish prayer.

It touches our flesh, our comfort.

If any line in this entire prayer was going to develop into self-interest pursuit, it would be this one.

But the request fails to become selfish once you actually know who you're asking.

A father.

You see, this prayer isn't about a transaction.

It's not, can I get him to give me what I need or want?

This prayer is about dependence through relationship.

Think about this for a moment.

A son who asks his father for bread isn't diminishing their relationship into simply what he can get from him.

No, he is displaying how his very life is sustained by his father's hand.

That request honors the father.

That request glorifies the father because it shows the dependence of a child who loves him.

You see, he's depending on someone that he belongs to, that he's in relationship with, that he has a covenant with, and that dependence doesn't compete with his father's honor.

It displays it.

Every time a son is fed by a father's hand, every time a son is the receiver of the provision of a loving father, that loving care becomes visible to the world.

It's a glorious thing.

Rightly ask.

The request doesn't serve the one asking, it honors and glorifies the one being asked.

Our Father, give us this day our daily bread.

That's what the knowledge of the Father does to this petition.

It doesn't shrink it, it doesn't diminish it.

It doesn't all of a sudden become self-seeking.

It still is perfectly aligned to and driving forward the pursuit of the glory of God for all creation to see.

It moves the asking from self-interest into trust so that the same request that could have been selfish becomes instead an act that honors the very Father it depends on.

Which is exactly why this line, give us this day our daily bread, is harder to pray honestly than it looks at face value.

We say, give us this day our daily bread.

And if we're honest, the words often move out of our mouth faster than our hearts can trust it.

It just becomes ritual, routine.

We say it out of habit, long before we say it out of confidence, that the Father behind it will actually come through.

Or even scarier yet, that we really even need him to supply it at all.

You see, the request for our bread is only right when it flows from the knowledge of our Father.

And if we can't yet pray this line freely, with full faith and trust and dependence, it's because we don't yet know him as well as we think we do.

You see, we ask for our bread wrongly because we have too high a view of ourselves or too low a view of God.

We ask for our bread wrongly because we have too high a view of ourselves or too low a view of God.

We don't usually rebel against this request.

It's not like we're refusing to ask this in rebellion or stiff-necked posture.

Most of us we say it without a second thought.

The real problem is what we actually believe about the one we're asking for while the words are leaving our mouth.

See, a right request for bread was never able to be removed from a right knowledge of the Father behind it.

Holy, enthroned, good.

The very things this prayer names before it ever reaches bread.

Your name hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done.

If we lose the pursuit or the genuine confidence in any one of those things, then the request that follows cannot come from our heart rightly.

And so the sad truth is that some of us pray these words without actually believing we need Him to answer it at all.

Well, we're competent enough.

We provide for ourselves well enough that the asking has become ritual instead of genuine dependence, it's become routine instead of a child's heart's cry.

Others, we pray the very same words with this true and desperate need for an answer from someone.

But we doubt that the father behind the request will actually come through when we need him.

You see, there's these two postures before us, but they share the exact same route.

We ask for our bread wrongly because we have too high a view of ourselves or too low a view of God.

Let's look at the low view of God first.

Many of us in this room, we're anxious because we have too low a view of our Father.

Here's the root of fear and anxiety.

You don't have the confidence that you have the proper resources to get you out of the circumstance you're currently facing.

So, what does that say about your view of God?

The anxious heart is one who doesn't know the character of the Father and doesn't trust that he owns the cattle on the thousand hills, that all of creation is subject to.

To his very word that he has every means necessary to get you out of any circumstance you face, including the hell which tries to entrap and enslave your soul.

It's too low a view of God.

And look how Jesus playfully addresses anxiety.

You gotta love Jesus, right?

Because one of the things that cripples some of us, I think Jesus addresses in some of the most playful ways.

Why are you so afraid?

Why are you so afraid about what you'll wear tomorrow?

Don't you look at the flowers?

They're adorned in beauty.

Solomon didn't even have the glory that these flowers do.

Won't your father care for you?

Or why are you worried about what you're gonna eat?

These birds?

Look at the birds.

Don't you think you're more important than a bird?

Then why do you care?

Why do you worry?

Why do you fear?

Picture the person praying, give us this day our daily bread while lying awake, trying to devise some type of plan for how they can get their own needs met.

The mortgage is due in a few days.

That check, it's not going to clear until the 15th.

I gotta figure out and I've got to discover what I can go without in the next few days, or the sacrifices I need to make just so that I can get by.

They've already imagined the things that they would need to go without just so they can make it through tomorrow.

That's just what an anxious heart looks like.

Fear.

Fear awake at one in the morning, trying to discover a self-accomplished solution for the lack that waits them in the morning.

Israel knew this fear firsthand.

This is the wild thing about anxiety.

It has plagued the heart of man since the beginning.

In the wilderness in Exodus, God delivered bread for his people miraculously, every single morning, exactly enough for that day.

No more.

And some of them, some of them couldn't leave the bread on the ground in the wilderness.

Exodus 16, 20 tells us that in the wilderness, when they tried to keep a second day's portion stockpiled in their tents, the Lord cursed it.

It says that it bred worms and stank.

Think about what God was trying to teach his children.

I'm gonna care for you exactly the way you need it every single day.

But they didn't trust his character.

So they tried to stockpile tomorrow's bread.

They couldn't believe the same God who fed them today would still be feeding them tomorrow.

So they tried to secure with their own hands in anxious toil what they were only ever meant to receive from his.

That's the anxious heart.

I'm going to provide for myself because I don't trust you'll provide for me.

It isn't unbelief in God's existence, it's unbelief in his character.

Whether the Father who fed you yesterday can be trusted to feed you again.

And no amount of hoarding, no financial surplus, no stockpiling in your cupboard ever actually settles that fear.

This is the temptation, this is the trap.

You cannot have enough to actually satisfy that fear.

Some of you are anxious and your bank accounts are full.

Your cupboards are full.

Your stockpile of stuff is overflowing and your heart is still anxious because it was never about what you possess.

It's about him.

Do you trust that he is a father who loves you as his child?

It was about whether the father handing it out can actually be trusted tomorrow.

That's the hard issue.

Others of us, though, we're self-reliant.

We're arrogantly self-reliant because a high view of ourselves has replaced a right view of our Father.

So let's picture this person praying the same words.

Give us this day our daily bread.

But this person hasn't actually wondered where the next meal's coming from in decades.

It's kind of magical, right?

The direct deposit, it lands on the 1st and the 15th of every month, like clockwork.

The cupboard stays full from Amazon subscriptions.

Mana lands on your front porch by Kroger Delivery.

It's a miracle.

And the thing is this you're not being reckless and greedy.

You're not being fearful and anxious.

You're just competent.

You know how to manage your budget.

You're disciplined.

You know how to work hard.

You're self-sufficient and responsible.

And that competence has gradually become the very reason you really don't even need to ask God for anything.

Moses warned Israel about this exact heart drift before they ever even crossed into the land that God was giving them.

Warning the Israelites once you've built houses and your herds multiply and your silver and gold multiply, watch yourself, he says.

Deuteronomy 8.17, the words of Moses, beware lest you say in your heart, My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.

Listen to the words.

It's not, I stopped believing in God, I became agnostic, I became an atheist.

No, I stopped needing him.

That's the self-reliant heart.

It's amnesia.

It's amnesia driven by your own accomplishments and successes, deceiving yourself, and forgetting that it was the hand of God doing all of the providing in the first place.

It was never your own.

And it doesn't just insulate us from God.

This is the thing about a self-reliant hand.

It doesn't just insulate us from God, it insulates us from one another.

Because you know what the self-reliant hand is rarely ever aware of?

The absence of bread in the homes of his brothers and sisters.

Our heads down, we're working hard, we're making sure that we're cared for.

But we rarely lift that head up to see that other people are in need around us.

You see, when we don't believe that we have to be dependent on anyone else but ourselves, we're gonna fail to observe the ways that our brothers and sisters in community depend on us.

Remember, the heart of this prayer is that you might be the answer to some of this.

It abandons the us of this prayer.

Since a man who's never needed to ask for bread rarely thinks to ask whether his neighbor has any either.

Two postures, same route, both needing the same savior.

Because here's the good news about Jesus.

Jesus perfectly held the Father in view.

Jesus perfectly held the father in view.

Let's go to the wilderness temptation of Jesus.

For 40 days, Jesus is journeying through the wilderness, being tempted by Satan, starving, not eating, suffering, being tempted.

He's hungry in a way that you and I have never been before, and really can't even imagine.

Right?

Some of your tummies are grumbling right now, and you've already ate breakfast.

And you're gonna eat chicken wings in like 30 minutes.

For 40 days, Jesus went without.

And here's the reality of the wilderness.

Jesus faced both temptations to be self-reliant by his own hand and to have an anxious heart that doesn't trust the character of his father.

You see, Satan said to him, Jesus, command these stones to turn into bread.

Command these stones to become loaves of sustenance for you.

Here in Jesus, the God man was complete power to provide for himself.

The self-reliant hand was before him.

The one who spoke creation into existence could speak to a stone to make it a meal.

No waiting on the Father required, no trusting and depending on him to provide was necessary.

And here also was the anxious heart.

Every reason in the world a starving man could question and doubt the very character of his father that he would come through in this moment for him.

But Jesus refused both.

Jesus refused both.

He did not provide for himself through self-reliance.

He did not doubt that provision would come from his father in anxiousness.

He simply looked at Satan and said this man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Here's something we've got to understand about that statement.

He's quoting Moses there.

He's quoting Moses.

Think about this.

Just a few verses before what we just read, where Moses warned the Israelites about an amnesia of God's provision in their life, Moses said these words Man shall not live by bread alone.

Jesus quoting him to the devil himself.

So here's what we see.

Where Israel forgot, Christ remembered.

Where Israel doubted, Christ trusted.

Where Israel was deceived about their own prosperity, Christ depended on the Father.

And that righteous obedience by grace through faith becomes ours, even in the presence of our failure.

Where we grasp in self-reliance, where we doubt and anxiety, Christ trusted all the way through the hunger, all the way through the suffering and temptation until the Father sent angels to minister to him.

That obedience wasn't a performance for us to imitate.

This isn't some moral story to try and get us to try harder.

No, that obedience was righteousness earned in place of our failure, credited to us, the very ones who failed this test of the wilderness every single day.

You and I were plagued with self-reliance.

We're plagued with anxiety because we don't have a right view of the Father, of which we simply come daily and say, give us our bread, because we're living for your glory.

But Jesus never failed.

Jesus perfectly held the Father in view where our view kept failing.

And his perfect trust in him becomes ours.

Not because we finally trusted well enough, but because he did on our behalf.

Think about the extent of which the Father will go to display and demonstrate his love for his children.

Not only will he give you bread for your belly, this natural sustenance, but by sending his own son and having him hang on a cross for our sake, he gives us the bread of heaven for our very souls.

Do you want to know if God will provide for you?

He will bankrupt heaven to provide for you.

Every resource that is his is yours.

Because you're his child, because he's a loving father, because he desires you to come to him and say, Dad, I just need bread today.

How could we ever doubt his hand?

How could we ever doubt his hand?

But praise God by the Spirit.

You and I, in Christ being transformed, we can ask for our bread because we rightly know our Father.

That's the Spirit's work in us.

Conformity to our elder brother, the perfect son, who loves and knows the Father and holds him in perfect view.

The Spirit's work in us is to conform us to that, to Him.

Because Christ has already secured our place in the Father's house.

We're free to live the way Israel was always meant to live.

The way they were meant to live in the wilderness.

We are called and equipped to live in the Father's house, gathering today's portion while trusting tomorrow's Father.

Every morning, God gave enough.

Every morning, not more than they needed, not less than they needed.

Exodus tells us what happened when the people actually gathered as they were instructed to by Moses.

Whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack.

And so enough, look at this.

Enough was never determined or measured by the amount of things in your possession.

Enough was always measured and determined by the character of the God supplying it.

You need to hear that.

Enough was never determined by the stockpile.

Enough was always determined by the character of the Father.

Not a lifetime supply secured once and then forgotten.

Not a fearful hoarding against a father who might fail you.

But this prayer invites us to a daily return, a daily gathering, a daily give us.

Asked by people who no longer need to secure tomorrow for themselves.

And so the self-reliant hands and the anxious heart, they can both come humbly and boldly before the Father on the exact same terms.

Because it's Christ's perfect view of the Father has become the sure and solid ground that we stand upon.

That's what it looks like to actually pray our Father and our bread as one request instead of two competing instincts.

So, church, let us not just adopt a new method of praying, but let us be transformed in a new understanding that even the most simple and mundane thing of asking God for bread comes from the glorious knowledge of His majesty and holiness and his unrelentless love for you.