Reading: Exodus 16:4-5, 15-18; Matthew 6:11; Luke 11:3
Listen Link: www.lcepc.org then look for “sermons” tab
"Give us today our daily bread." How basic is that? Jesus instructs us to include in our prayers a request for food as basic and simple as bread. But our nutrition savvy appetites immediately spring into action and defend our cravings for more!
"Oh no, Jesus! We need more than bread! Didn’t you also say, “man shall not live by bread alone?” We need fruits and vegetables and dairy and proteins! Bread isn't even that good for you with all those carbs and gluten! But, there it stands, "give us this day our daily bread." No more, no less; and not even with butter.
However sometimes one piece of bread means a lot. A story is told of an orphanage that housed many refugee children who had lost their parents to the Holocaust, during WWII. These children had endured much suffering and tragedy in their young lives, and many of them had experienced some starvation before being taken in. The children thrived under the care of the staff and appeared to be recovering as well as could be expected.
At night, however, all the children would begin crying inconsolably. It was discovered that giving each child a piece of bread to hold while they were falling asleep, calmed them down and assuaged their fear of facing starvation again. The children were well fed during the day, but they needed the comfort of knowing that they would have at least something to eat tomorrow. Bread, without butter, was all they needed to be reassured that they would live another day. The children’s cries were very like our prayer, “Give us some bread, daily bread. We depend upon you to meet our basic needs. We cannot help ourselves.”
For this line in our prayer pattern I want us to think about 2 kinds of bread. Our Daily bread is Physical. Our Daily Bread is Spiritual. But first, let’s notice another plural pronoun. We pray for “our” daily bread. I should not just pray that I get enough to eat. That is selfish again. But if we pray for our daily bread it helps us remember that life itself is something we share. In addition, the act of eating is best when it is shared with another. Table fellowship and hospitality are significant and meaningful, both physically and spiritually. We are healthiest when we are together. If you know someone who usually eats alone, think about inviting them over. That’s a great way to share the love of God with someone who may also need to hear the gospel.
Ok so daily bread is physical food. That’s obvious. It’s bread! To a starving person, bread is enough. To a poor person, a day's pay for a day's work is sufficient. For the travelers in the wilderness, daily rations of manna and quail were enough. Back in the days of no refrigeration people went to the street market every day for fresh food, for daily bread. When did we learn that wasn't enough? What would our prayer life be like if we still had to trust our Father to truly give us our daily bread because we couldn’t stockpile all kinds of food in our refrigerators and freezers only to end up throwing so much of it away when it passes its expiration date? What would our walk with Him look like if, every day, we had to trust Him to meet our needs?
When we pray, “give us today our daily bread,” let’s do so remembering that God supplies all that we require. If it were not for God’s gracious hand of provision making it possible for us to find food or grow food or even just to eat food using teeth and gums designed by Him and kept healthy by Him, we would quickly waste away.
On more than one day, famous orphanage manager and prayer warrior George Mueller had his little charges sit down to an empty table at mealtime. There they gave thanks for what God was about to provide. Then there came a knock on the door. One time it was a milk delivery man, back in the days of fresh milk on a horse drawn cart. He announced that his cart had broken. He wouldn’t have time to deliver all of it and it would spoil unless, he was wondering, would anyone in the house like some free milk?
Another day it was a bread wagon. God always provided for those orphaned children as George Mueller literally prayed for daily bread every day. Is it possible that the poor know something about their heavenly Father that we do not? Is it possible that our many blessings of provision have obscured our view of the true giver of all blessing? At least if we give thanks before a meal, that table grace is acknowledging that indeed God is the One who has answered our prayer for daily bread.
How sad for us if we think that we are self-sufficient. We are not. How conscious are we of giving God the credit for the job that we have that enables us to pay the bills and put food on our table? When we are in lack, is our first appeal to Him to meet our basic needs? He is the source of all good things, directly or indirectly. And what if God has blessed us so we have more than enough? Are we the means, that God wishes to use, to bless our brothers and sisters who are in need? Am I willing to share? Am I the answer to another person's prayer for daily bread? Is that another part of His Will being done on earth as it is in heaven?
One way we can heighten our awareness and show our trust that God will meet our daily needs is when we plan to give our regular offering to God. The tithe of ten percent of our income is what God suggests should be the basic starting point of trusting him to meet our needs. To some people that sounds like a lot. And maybe that’s the point. Instead of keeping all that we can in case we need it, trusting God to provide for us enables us to be more generous.
Perhaps you are afraid you may not know how your needs will be met if you give so much away to God. But God does know how he will meet your need. I have never met a tither who is sorry he did it. I have never met a tither who is stingy or broke. I have met plenty who have nearly miraculous stories to tell of God’s provision. I have met plenty who are joyful and thankful because they see that God is worthy of our trust. And I am happy to testify that Kathy and I are among them. God does give daily bread.
I understand that people don’t like taking blind leaps into the unknown. The idea of tithing can feel like that. But genuine faith is not blind. It is the element of trust that relies only partly on the unknown, only after gathering as much knowledge as possible in order to be confident in your faith. It’s like how you decide on sitting in a chair. You see the chair, know the chair, and can see and test its sturdiness to some extent. What you don’t know is how comfortable it will be to sit in it until you’ve done so. But once you decide to try, at some point during the act of testing that chair you shift all your weight to the chair and now you have real faith that it won’t let you fall to the ground.
You can do something similar with tithing. You could just sort of take a blind leap, give 10% and hope for the best. But that's not the Christian version of faith. So, first of all, you have our testimony that God really does provide. That should be encouraging at least. But, second of all, it’s even better to understand financial planning, so you could see how much you can freely give without fear. If you’re not a tither, and you’re financially stressed, there are resources available, so we could help you with that. Of course, when you’re tithing, you’re giving to your church, and you have to be able to have faith in that institution to be responsible too. That’s why the books are open to you. The Session and Trustees and I are accountable to you.
Daily bread is literally physical food. It all comes from him and this prayer acknowledges that. Jesus illustrates this himself a little later in his sermon on the Mount when He talked about the birds of the air, just a little while after he taught his disciples to pray the Christian’s prayer. We jump from the prayer in Matthew 6:11 to these words in Matthew 6:25-26, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Daily bread is our physical food. But that’s not all! Daily bread is our spiritual food too. It is the Word of God. When George Mueller had his orphan children sit down around the empty table to pray, he was giving them the spiritual food of learning to trust in God for everything. When Jesus faced temptation in the wilderness after he was baptized, he was praying. After 40 days of fasting he was very hungry. That’s when satan challenged him to provide for himself. “Turn these stones into bread.” That is, bread for his physical body. But Jesus quoted Scripture saying, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Jesus maintained that, as important as physical food is, God’s Word has even more life in it as we obey it.
In John 1 we learn that Jesus is the Word of God, the Word was God and the Word was with God in the beginning. In John 6:29-35, Jesus who is the Word of God says, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” So, they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
When they said, “always give us this bread” they came very close to praying the line of our prayer we are looking at today. They also were asking the right person. They didn’t believe Jesus was God, but it really was God they were talking to as they prayed for the living bread Jesus told them about. Also, they thought they were asking for physical sustenance. But the true bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world is really our spiritual food, the Word of God, Jesus Christ our Lord. He said so when the very next thing he told them was, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” This is the Word of the Lord.
This is the bread of spiritual food that we ought to pray for daily. One good way of receiving that kind of daily bread is daily devotions. That’s why one our favorite devotional resources is called, “Our Daily Bread.” We typically sit down to three meals a day for physical food, but often spend only five or ten minutes a day for our spiritual food. It takes discipline to pursue our spiritual food because our enemy the devil is very good at distracting us from our most important life-giving sustenance. To combat this, our Christian ancestors early on developed a set of regular times during the day to stop for prayer.
Called the Canonical hours or the daily official prayers of the Church, the schedule was developed out of the Jewish tradition of stopping to pray at regular set times during the day. The canonical hours stemmed from Jewish prayer. In the Old Testament, God commanded the Israelite priests to offer sacrifices of animals in the morning and evening (Exodus 29:38–39). Eventually, these sacrifices moved from the Tabernacle to Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
During the Babylonian captivity, when the Temple was no longer in use, synagogues carried on the practice, and the services (at fixed hours of the day) of Torah readings, psalms, and hymns began to evolve. This "sacrifice of praise" began to be substituted for the sacrifices of animals. After the people returned to Judea, the prayer services were incorporated into Temple worship as well. The miraculous healing of the crippled beggar described in Acts 3, took place as Peter and John went to the Temple for the three o’clock hour of prayer. In Act 10: 9, the decision to include Gentiles among the community of believers, arose from a vision Peter had while praying about noontime.
Early Christians prayed the Psalms (Acts 4:23–30), which have remained the principal part of the canonical hours. They prayed seven times a day! So, while I really hope that we all at least have our daily quiet time, it probably is a good idea for all of us to think about praying more than once a day. As I was working on this message, I felt convicted about that myself, so I found an app called “daily prayer” that provides morning and evenings readings and prayers to pray. Now besides my regular morning devotions, I’ll get reminded to pray again in the evening, and some prayer material is provided for me to start with. That’s a baby step, 2 regular times a day. Give it a try.
This is a ritual. Rituals are not automatically bad. Another word for ritual is, “health habit or routine.” Daily routines are good for us. It’s only legalism if the idea gets around that you have to do it or you’re not a good Christian, or, you think you’re better than others because you do it and they don’t. It’s certainly not that God will like you better if you pray more often. It’s just a simple fact that a regular diet of healthy spiritual food is good for the soul.
We need it more than physical food. And it is the devil’s greatest triumph that he has gotten Christians to think that they don’t need much prayer. The truth is, the devil doesn’t care how busy you are with loving people or serving God or how much you go to church, as long as you don’t pray. But when you pray, that’s when the devil trembles! It is in prayer that you grow in grace and Christian maturity because you are well fed on God’s Word. That’s when you can stand firm in the armor of God and resist the devil so that he must flee from you.
One of the interesting things about our daily breads is how the physical and the spiritual are connected, or compliment, each other. Have you thought about fasting yet? When Jesus fasted in the wilderness, he forsook physical food because he was hungering and thirsting for righteousness. We can skip physical meals in order to focus on spiritual food, spending time with God. Daily Bread is spiritual food that we read and meditate on in our hearts and obey. But there is one more thing. Our daily bread is also to do God’s will.
Listen to Isaiah 58:6-9. “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.”
Isn’t that interesting? Here is proof that fasting is not merely “no physical food.” And it is not religious gymnastics to show off how super religious you are. Fasting is the spiritual food of prayer and loving service. In John 4:31- 34, right after Jesus has had a conversation with the Samaritan Woman the disciples show up and they know Jesus hasn’t had any breakfast yet, so they say, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”
That is such a key passage to understand this line of the prayer. We need to understand how spiritually nourishing it is to do God’s will. It really satisfies. And really, we do already know this. How many times have you heard someone testifying about a time of ministry to those less fortunate and who said, “I thought I was going to bless them. But they blessed me!” When we give to others out of otherish love we experience what this saying really manes, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Doing the will of God by showing the world his love really feeds our souls in a wonderful way that Jesus knew about and wants us to know about too. Learn it by doing it. Loving other people with a generous heart is really one of the most life-giving ways to experience what Jesus means by the abundant life he provides. When you’re loving other people, you’re fully alive!
“Give us this day our daily bread” means keep us alive today with necessary physical food. We depend upon you O Lord. It also means, give us more of Your Spirit Jesus, the Word of God, the Bread of Life, our even more necessary spiritual food. Give us this day our daily bread. Give us a chance to really live by loving our neighbors today with the active, giving, generous love that comes from your Spirit in us all while we trust You to provide all our needs.
Listen Link: www.lcepc.org then look for “sermons” tab
"Give us today our daily bread." How basic is that? Jesus instructs us to include in our prayers a request for food as basic and simple as bread. But our nutrition savvy appetites immediately spring into action and defend our cravings for more!
"Oh no, Jesus! We need more than bread! Didn’t you also say, “man shall not live by bread alone?” We need fruits and vegetables and dairy and proteins! Bread isn't even that good for you with all those carbs and gluten! But, there it stands, "give us this day our daily bread." No more, no less; and not even with butter.
However sometimes one piece of bread means a lot. A story is told of an orphanage that housed many refugee children who had lost their parents to the Holocaust, during WWII. These children had endured much suffering and tragedy in their young lives, and many of them had experienced some starvation before being taken in. The children thrived under the care of the staff and appeared to be recovering as well as could be expected.
At night, however, all the children would begin crying inconsolably. It was discovered that giving each child a piece of bread to hold while they were falling asleep, calmed them down and assuaged their fear of facing starvation again. The children were well fed during the day, but they needed the comfort of knowing that they would have at least something to eat tomorrow. Bread, without butter, was all they needed to be reassured that they would live another day. The children’s cries were very like our prayer, “Give us some bread, daily bread. We depend upon you to meet our basic needs. We cannot help ourselves.”
For this line in our prayer pattern I want us to think about 2 kinds of bread. Our Daily bread is Physical. Our Daily Bread is Spiritual. But first, let’s notice another plural pronoun. We pray for “our” daily bread. I should not just pray that I get enough to eat. That is selfish again. But if we pray for our daily bread it helps us remember that life itself is something we share. In addition, the act of eating is best when it is shared with another. Table fellowship and hospitality are significant and meaningful, both physically and spiritually. We are healthiest when we are together. If you know someone who usually eats alone, think about inviting them over. That’s a great way to share the love of God with someone who may also need to hear the gospel.
Ok so daily bread is physical food. That’s obvious. It’s bread! To a starving person, bread is enough. To a poor person, a day's pay for a day's work is sufficient. For the travelers in the wilderness, daily rations of manna and quail were enough. Back in the days of no refrigeration people went to the street market every day for fresh food, for daily bread. When did we learn that wasn't enough? What would our prayer life be like if we still had to trust our Father to truly give us our daily bread because we couldn’t stockpile all kinds of food in our refrigerators and freezers only to end up throwing so much of it away when it passes its expiration date? What would our walk with Him look like if, every day, we had to trust Him to meet our needs?
When we pray, “give us today our daily bread,” let’s do so remembering that God supplies all that we require. If it were not for God’s gracious hand of provision making it possible for us to find food or grow food or even just to eat food using teeth and gums designed by Him and kept healthy by Him, we would quickly waste away.
On more than one day, famous orphanage manager and prayer warrior George Mueller had his little charges sit down to an empty table at mealtime. There they gave thanks for what God was about to provide. Then there came a knock on the door. One time it was a milk delivery man, back in the days of fresh milk on a horse drawn cart. He announced that his cart had broken. He wouldn’t have time to deliver all of it and it would spoil unless, he was wondering, would anyone in the house like some free milk?
Another day it was a bread wagon. God always provided for those orphaned children as George Mueller literally prayed for daily bread every day. Is it possible that the poor know something about their heavenly Father that we do not? Is it possible that our many blessings of provision have obscured our view of the true giver of all blessing? At least if we give thanks before a meal, that table grace is acknowledging that indeed God is the One who has answered our prayer for daily bread.
How sad for us if we think that we are self-sufficient. We are not. How conscious are we of giving God the credit for the job that we have that enables us to pay the bills and put food on our table? When we are in lack, is our first appeal to Him to meet our basic needs? He is the source of all good things, directly or indirectly. And what if God has blessed us so we have more than enough? Are we the means, that God wishes to use, to bless our brothers and sisters who are in need? Am I willing to share? Am I the answer to another person's prayer for daily bread? Is that another part of His Will being done on earth as it is in heaven?
One way we can heighten our awareness and show our trust that God will meet our daily needs is when we plan to give our regular offering to God. The tithe of ten percent of our income is what God suggests should be the basic starting point of trusting him to meet our needs. To some people that sounds like a lot. And maybe that’s the point. Instead of keeping all that we can in case we need it, trusting God to provide for us enables us to be more generous.
Perhaps you are afraid you may not know how your needs will be met if you give so much away to God. But God does know how he will meet your need. I have never met a tither who is sorry he did it. I have never met a tither who is stingy or broke. I have met plenty who have nearly miraculous stories to tell of God’s provision. I have met plenty who are joyful and thankful because they see that God is worthy of our trust. And I am happy to testify that Kathy and I are among them. God does give daily bread.
I understand that people don’t like taking blind leaps into the unknown. The idea of tithing can feel like that. But genuine faith is not blind. It is the element of trust that relies only partly on the unknown, only after gathering as much knowledge as possible in order to be confident in your faith. It’s like how you decide on sitting in a chair. You see the chair, know the chair, and can see and test its sturdiness to some extent. What you don’t know is how comfortable it will be to sit in it until you’ve done so. But once you decide to try, at some point during the act of testing that chair you shift all your weight to the chair and now you have real faith that it won’t let you fall to the ground.
You can do something similar with tithing. You could just sort of take a blind leap, give 10% and hope for the best. But that's not the Christian version of faith. So, first of all, you have our testimony that God really does provide. That should be encouraging at least. But, second of all, it’s even better to understand financial planning, so you could see how much you can freely give without fear. If you’re not a tither, and you’re financially stressed, there are resources available, so we could help you with that. Of course, when you’re tithing, you’re giving to your church, and you have to be able to have faith in that institution to be responsible too. That’s why the books are open to you. The Session and Trustees and I are accountable to you.
Daily bread is literally physical food. It all comes from him and this prayer acknowledges that. Jesus illustrates this himself a little later in his sermon on the Mount when He talked about the birds of the air, just a little while after he taught his disciples to pray the Christian’s prayer. We jump from the prayer in Matthew 6:11 to these words in Matthew 6:25-26, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Daily bread is our physical food. But that’s not all! Daily bread is our spiritual food too. It is the Word of God. When George Mueller had his orphan children sit down around the empty table to pray, he was giving them the spiritual food of learning to trust in God for everything. When Jesus faced temptation in the wilderness after he was baptized, he was praying. After 40 days of fasting he was very hungry. That’s when satan challenged him to provide for himself. “Turn these stones into bread.” That is, bread for his physical body. But Jesus quoted Scripture saying, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Jesus maintained that, as important as physical food is, God’s Word has even more life in it as we obey it.
In John 1 we learn that Jesus is the Word of God, the Word was God and the Word was with God in the beginning. In John 6:29-35, Jesus who is the Word of God says, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” So, they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
When they said, “always give us this bread” they came very close to praying the line of our prayer we are looking at today. They also were asking the right person. They didn’t believe Jesus was God, but it really was God they were talking to as they prayed for the living bread Jesus told them about. Also, they thought they were asking for physical sustenance. But the true bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world is really our spiritual food, the Word of God, Jesus Christ our Lord. He said so when the very next thing he told them was, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” This is the Word of the Lord.
This is the bread of spiritual food that we ought to pray for daily. One good way of receiving that kind of daily bread is daily devotions. That’s why one our favorite devotional resources is called, “Our Daily Bread.” We typically sit down to three meals a day for physical food, but often spend only five or ten minutes a day for our spiritual food. It takes discipline to pursue our spiritual food because our enemy the devil is very good at distracting us from our most important life-giving sustenance. To combat this, our Christian ancestors early on developed a set of regular times during the day to stop for prayer.
Called the Canonical hours or the daily official prayers of the Church, the schedule was developed out of the Jewish tradition of stopping to pray at regular set times during the day. The canonical hours stemmed from Jewish prayer. In the Old Testament, God commanded the Israelite priests to offer sacrifices of animals in the morning and evening (Exodus 29:38–39). Eventually, these sacrifices moved from the Tabernacle to Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
During the Babylonian captivity, when the Temple was no longer in use, synagogues carried on the practice, and the services (at fixed hours of the day) of Torah readings, psalms, and hymns began to evolve. This "sacrifice of praise" began to be substituted for the sacrifices of animals. After the people returned to Judea, the prayer services were incorporated into Temple worship as well. The miraculous healing of the crippled beggar described in Acts 3, took place as Peter and John went to the Temple for the three o’clock hour of prayer. In Act 10: 9, the decision to include Gentiles among the community of believers, arose from a vision Peter had while praying about noontime.
Early Christians prayed the Psalms (Acts 4:23–30), which have remained the principal part of the canonical hours. They prayed seven times a day! So, while I really hope that we all at least have our daily quiet time, it probably is a good idea for all of us to think about praying more than once a day. As I was working on this message, I felt convicted about that myself, so I found an app called “daily prayer” that provides morning and evenings readings and prayers to pray. Now besides my regular morning devotions, I’ll get reminded to pray again in the evening, and some prayer material is provided for me to start with. That’s a baby step, 2 regular times a day. Give it a try.
This is a ritual. Rituals are not automatically bad. Another word for ritual is, “health habit or routine.” Daily routines are good for us. It’s only legalism if the idea gets around that you have to do it or you’re not a good Christian, or, you think you’re better than others because you do it and they don’t. It’s certainly not that God will like you better if you pray more often. It’s just a simple fact that a regular diet of healthy spiritual food is good for the soul.
We need it more than physical food. And it is the devil’s greatest triumph that he has gotten Christians to think that they don’t need much prayer. The truth is, the devil doesn’t care how busy you are with loving people or serving God or how much you go to church, as long as you don’t pray. But when you pray, that’s when the devil trembles! It is in prayer that you grow in grace and Christian maturity because you are well fed on God’s Word. That’s when you can stand firm in the armor of God and resist the devil so that he must flee from you.
One of the interesting things about our daily breads is how the physical and the spiritual are connected, or compliment, each other. Have you thought about fasting yet? When Jesus fasted in the wilderness, he forsook physical food because he was hungering and thirsting for righteousness. We can skip physical meals in order to focus on spiritual food, spending time with God. Daily Bread is spiritual food that we read and meditate on in our hearts and obey. But there is one more thing. Our daily bread is also to do God’s will.
Listen to Isaiah 58:6-9. “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.”
Isn’t that interesting? Here is proof that fasting is not merely “no physical food.” And it is not religious gymnastics to show off how super religious you are. Fasting is the spiritual food of prayer and loving service. In John 4:31- 34, right after Jesus has had a conversation with the Samaritan Woman the disciples show up and they know Jesus hasn’t had any breakfast yet, so they say, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”
That is such a key passage to understand this line of the prayer. We need to understand how spiritually nourishing it is to do God’s will. It really satisfies. And really, we do already know this. How many times have you heard someone testifying about a time of ministry to those less fortunate and who said, “I thought I was going to bless them. But they blessed me!” When we give to others out of otherish love we experience what this saying really manes, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Doing the will of God by showing the world his love really feeds our souls in a wonderful way that Jesus knew about and wants us to know about too. Learn it by doing it. Loving other people with a generous heart is really one of the most life-giving ways to experience what Jesus means by the abundant life he provides. When you’re loving other people, you’re fully alive!
“Give us this day our daily bread” means keep us alive today with necessary physical food. We depend upon you O Lord. It also means, give us more of Your Spirit Jesus, the Word of God, the Bread of Life, our even more necessary spiritual food. Give us this day our daily bread. Give us a chance to really live by loving our neighbors today with the active, giving, generous love that comes from your Spirit in us all while we trust You to provide all our needs.
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