“11 Give us today our daily bread”
Do you think that you would be better off spiritually if you didn’t have a body? Many Christians denigrate the body. They look back at sins of lust and violence, drunkenness and debauchery and feel dirty; some wish they never had a body to begin with. They imagine that the spirit is pure but the body is corrupt. They wish they were like the angels because then they wouldn’t feel so unclean. My guess is that in this sanctuary this morning we have more than a few people who think that way. If that’s you, I want you to know that those thoughts are not from God. They are from Satan.
You wouldn’t be better off spiritually if you didn’t have a body. We do use our body to sin but there is nothing wrong in and of itself with having a body. There is something wrong with sin. God doesn’t think less of me because I have bodily functions and the angel Gabriel doesn’t. God doesn’t think less of me because I have a sex drive and the angel Michael doesn’t. God doesn’t think any less of me because I need to eat and digest and a spirit doesn’t. He created me this way.
If you think that God considers bodies to be bad, you have forgotten about Christmas. The Son of God saw nothing wrong with having a body. “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate Deity! Pleased as men with men to dwell. Jesus our Immanuel.” “The Word became flesh.”
You would not be better off without a body. God delighted to give you a body and He delights to take care of that body. God enjoys making sure His children have enough to eat. He doesn’t see that as something that is below Him. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that prayer and meditation always please the Father while you enjoying a ham sandwich brings no joy to Him.
The Father delights to give us children our daily bread. That’s the claim of this sermon: the Father delights to give us children our daily bread.
We will study this daily bread in two points. First: care. Second: contentment. We will first look at verse 11 through the lens of care. We will then look at verse 11 through the lens of contentment.
First: care. We love to show care by giving food. What happens when someone in this church gets sick? Meals start showing up. How did Peter’s mother-in-law thank Jesus after he healed her? She fed him. What did Abraham do when three visitors showed up at his house? “Quick, get three seahs of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread.” How did the father of the prodigal celebrate when his son came home? “Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate.” “Suppose a brother is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?” We show care for one another by feeding one another and feasting with one another.
God the Father shows His care for us by feeding us. Psalm 136:25, “He gives food to every creature. His love endures forever.” The fact that you will have food on the table in a couple of hours is a reminder that the Father’s love endures forever. Remember that when you sit down. Don’t be blind to the spiritual reality in the physical realities.
When God created man, His second words to him were about food. “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.”
God doesn’t give us food simply because we need it. He gives us food to enjoy. Psalm 104:14-15, “He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for people to cultivate - bringing forth food from the earth: wine that gladdens human hearts, oil to make their faces shine, and bread that sustains their hearts.” Ecclesiastes 9:7, “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart.”
The next time you enjoy a meal, praise God. Don’t pray before and after meals out of mere ritual. Pray because you recognize that God delights to provide this food.
“Consider the ravens,” says Jesus, “They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!” God makes it a point to feed the birds. We just set up a birdfeeder a couple of weeks ago and it is satisfying to see the finches enjoying what we have provided. God knows that satisfaction and He is far more satisfied to feed His children than He is to feed the birds.
How does that effect your heart? “When you have eaten and are satisfied,” said Moses, “praise the Lord your God for the good land He has given you.” Do you praise the Lord for food?
Praying, “give us this day our daily bread,” is a way of trusting that the Father loves to satisfy. “He gives food to every creature. His love endures forever.”
But this prayer isn’t only for food. The words ‘daily bread’ are a natural way to talk about what we need day by day. When you pray, “give us this day our daily bread,” you pray for what you need for today.
The Father cares about His children’s medical bills – “Give us this day our daily bread.” The Father cares about His children’s employment– “Give us this day our daily bread.” The Father cares about His children’s day – “Give us this day our daily bread.”
The Father delights to take care of His children. Sometimes He does this dramatically. Scripture records manna falling in the wilderness not so we would know that, that happened once but so that we would know that our Father does this sort of thing. He gives us our daily bread.
I imagine that a number of families in this sanctuary could bear testimony to miraculous provision. You’ve received anonymous gifts when you needed them most. You’ve seen money stretch far further than it should. That’s an answer to, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
God supplies miraculously and He supplies through regular means. He enables the earth to produce what we need. Isaiah 55:10, “the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater…”
He enables us to earn a living wage which we use to buy food and what we truly need. Your ability to work is a way God answers the prayer, “give us this day our daily bread.” As Moses said in Deuteronomy 8:18, “remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you the ability to produce wealth.”
God answers the prayer, “give us our daily bread,” so abundantly that we can share with others who need their daily bread. We must “work, doing something useful with [our] own hands, that [we] may have something to share with those in need.” He uses us to answer other people’s prayer for daily bread.
If you trust the Father, He will give you what you need. As the Psalmist said, “I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.” The Father loves to give daily bread to His children. I hope you are one of His children.
If you think the Father is only interested in sacred music, Bible reading, and prayers, your God is too small. He certainly cares about those, but He also cares about His children’s pantries. He cares about our Thanksgiving dinner. He cares about keeping us fed.
Do you trust Him? Do you trust Him with your sins but not with your daily needs? Do you trust him with your soul but not with your body? Do you consider Him trustworthy after you die but less than reliable before you die?
The Father gives daily bread to His children. George Mueller lived in the nineteenth century. He wasn’t a wealthy man, but he founded a number of orphanages and financially supported them by doing one thing. He paid for everything these orphans needed by praying for daily bread.
Here is just one account of how it happened on just one day. One of the house mothers told Mueller that they children were dressed and ready for school, but they didn’t have any food. Mueller asked her to take the 300 children into the dining room and have them sit down. He prayed with the children thanking God for the food they didn’t yet have. Mueller had been here before and God had always supplied daily bread.
Within minutes, a baker knocked on the door. ‘Mr. Mueller,’ he said, ‘last night I could not sleep. Somehow, I knew that you would need bread this morning. I got up and baked three batches for you. I will bring it in.’ Soon there was another knock at the door. It was the milkman. His cart had broken down in front of the orphanage. The milk would spoil before he could repair the wheel. He asked George if he could use some free milk. There was enough for 300 children. A remarkable coincidence? Or evidence that the Father listens when His children pray, “give us this day our daily bread”?
I have “four little children,” said Hudson Taylor, “and I never needed anyone to remind me that they need their breakfast, dinner, and supper. And I cannot imagine that our heavenly Father is less able or less willing to remember His children’s needs.” Now there are other matters to consider such as why does God, at times, let some of His faithful servants starve. That’s a real question that deserves more time than we can give today. What we are focusing on today is this general principle about care and that’s our first point: care. The Father cares for His children. This care brings contentment. That’s our second point: contentment.
When a child of God prays, “give us this day our daily bread,” he is asking for what he needs for today. He is telling the Father that he will be content with what he needs for today. You don’t pray these words thinking about tomorrow. You don’t pray these words thinking about your IRA. You pray, “give us this day our daily bread.”
Francis Chan is right, “Truth is, I think, if God just gave us our daily bread, many of us would be angry. ‘That’s all You're going to give me? You’re just going to give me enough to sustain me for today? What about tomorrow or next year or ten, twenty, thirty years from now? I want to know that I’m set up.’ And yet Jesus says just pray for your daily provisions.” Can you be content with what you need for today or do you need thirty years of daily bread stored up?
The apostle Paul knew that daily contentment was the only sensible way. “We brought nothing into the world,” he wrote, “and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.”
This is not to say that God discourages saving. Proverbs 13:11 tells us, “Dishonest money dwindles away, but he who gathers money little by little makes it grow.” Proverbs 21:5, says “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.”
Saving isn’t sinful provided you see it for what it is – a means God might use to care for you. The difficulty is that you and I are much quicker to trust savings than we are to trust God. That’s why Jesus warned us saying, “how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Where is your security - the God of daily bread or your savings account, the God of daily bread or your Roth IRA? If you had to lose one source of future income, what would it be – your job or the God of daily bread? Your savings or the God of daily bread? Which one do you think is more secure? Which gives you contentment? “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also.”
The God of daily bread is far safer than your own wealth. Listen to Jesus, “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.’” Wealth can fail you. The God of daily bread won’t.
Your bread is daily whether you know it or not. You might think you could fund yourself for decades to come. Job might have thought the same. God allowed him to go bankrupt in a day. Job’s bread was just as daily when he was poor as when he was rich. Food came daily from God in both circumstances. Do you know where your daily bread comes from? If you are a child of God, you do.
Realizing that you live by daily bread leads to contentment rather than worry. “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first His kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
Do you believe Jesus’ words? Are you content knowing that Your Father knows what you need and that all you need to do is seek His kingdom and righteousness first, or is this a promise you don’t yet trust? ‘I buy the morality stuff, I buy the life after death stuff, but this daily bread stuff is too much.’
If it’s too much for you to believe, I can tell you something about yourself: you worry about your finances. If you do trust Jesus’ words on this matter I can tell you something about yourself: you don’t worry about finances. If you are a child of God and are pursuing His kingdom, I can tell you something else about yourself – your needs have been supplied by your Father whether you know it or not; realizing that leads to contentment.
Realizing that you live by daily bread leads to contentment rather than envy. Focusing on what you don’t have leads to envy. There will always be a good deal that you don’t have. There will always be daily bread that you do have. Your contentment will depend largely on your focus.
My most vivid experience of this happened years and years ago. An elderly lady who had just lost her husband and then broken her leg was in quarantine at a local hospital because they suspected she had the swine flu. I happened to be in a pretty foul mood that day. I was frustrated with my life, which wasn’t turning out the way I planned. I was focusing on what I didn’t have and what I wanted rather than on what God had given me. Before entering her hospital room, I had to put on a mask, gloves, and gown because of the quarantine. When I went in her room I noticed her glasses and hearing aids on the nightstand. She was in quite a bit of pain with the broken leg. After I explained who I was – it was kind of hard for her to recognize me in my quarantine gear she said, ‘Pastor, the Lord is so good to me.’ One of us was acting like a fool, and it wasn’t her. From the outside looking in, I had the far better life – a working body, no pain, I hadn’t just lost my spouse, but from the inside looking out she was content with her daily bread and I was envious of what others had. Discontent with daily bread can be that ugly.
There will always be a good deal that you don’t have. If you are a child of God there will always be daily bread that you do have. Where you choose to focus determines your contentment.
I can’t eat tomorrow’s bread today. That’s worry. I can’t eat yesterday’s bread today. That’s regret. “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Do you believe the Father will care for you tomorrow? Do you believe the Father will care for you today? If you are a child of the Father, Scripture says that you’ve got proof that He will. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will He not also with him graciously give us all things?” The cross of Christ is proof that the Father will give His children everything they need. This is an argument from greater to lesser. If the Father gave us His Son, of course He will give us our daily bread.
I wonder, do you believe that? Do you believe that God the Father intervenes in history? Do you believe that God the Father intervenes in daily life? Or do you think this is a spiritual veneer covering up the real world of bills and paychecks?
Maybe you stumble over this petition because you know that bread is real. You know that bills are real. You know that needs are real, and you are coming to realize that you aren’t convinced that God has anything to do with what you consider real. You are somewhat comfortable with this talk of sin, salvation, and the Holy Spirit because you consider those to be merely ideas that really don’t matter much to your real life. Now you are faced with this command from Jesus to ask for your daily bread, for what you need for just today, and in your heart of hearts you are coming to recognize that you don’t believe that God has a thing to do with it.
If God is just an idea to you, He is not your Father. This is a prayer for children of the Father. “Our Father in heaven…give us this day our daily bread.” Or maybe you are here this morning and you aren’t seeking His kingdom. “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all (that is needful) will be added unto you.” You can’t trust His promise because you know God and His kingdom are well below your kingdom on your priority list. You hear about George Mueller and daily bread and you know that wouldn’t happen for you and you are right. God gives what is needful to those who seek Him. God gives what is needful to His children.
Do you want to be a child of the Father? Do you want to seek first His kingdom and have everything that you need supplied? Do you want to be content knowing that God will supply your needs? Do you want to live not by bread alone but by every promise that comes from the mouth of God? Pray, “God, I have tried to take care of myself for so long. I have tried to manipulate life to make sure that I’ve got enough and that my family has enough. I have tried to be self-sufficient but now I recognize that all I need and all that I have ever had comes from You. I have tried to play Your role in my life. Please forgive me. Make me Your child.”
The Father takes care of His children. If you are a child of God, you are enjoying daily bread today. When you sit down for dinner, you have food on the table because your Father hasn’t forgotten about you and He won’t. This is a prayer for God’s children. “Our Father in heaven…give us this day our daily bread.”
I have “four little children,” said Hudson Taylor, “and I never needed anyone to remind me that they need their breakfast, dinner, and supper. And I cannot imagine that our heavenly Father is less able or less willing to remember His children’s needs.” Amen.