Oct. 30, 2016 Afternoon Service Beatitudes Part 16 by Pastor Josh Sheldon

The Lord’s Prayer and Daily Bread as Dependence on God

Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive you your trespasses. Our text this morning is there in verses 10 through 11.

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, and then give us this day our daily bread. Now the idea of give us this day our daily bread actually flows pretty smoothly if you think about it from your will be done.

Now, how is that? That's because these words are a confession of our complete dependence on God. For anything we have, anything we will have in this world, in the next, it makes no difference. Today for our immediate needs, or tomorrow for needs that we don't even know we're going to need yet.

Give us this day what you, Father, know we shall need. Give me today all I need for what lies ahead according to your good and perfect will and knowledge. There's nothing in the Bible that insists we ignore yesterday in our preparations for today.

In other words, we can plan things. Several Proverbs not only commend good planning, but they make it imperative. The ant's wisdom in storing up food is highly praised. A good man leads an inheritance, which of course requires planning.

And yet, what do these verses teach us? Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and then flowing very neatly, give us this day what you, Father, know we need from this day in accordance with your good and perfect will, which we just prayed you, Father, would accomplish in us.

Most of us have saved or are saving for retirement, that sort of thing. So we're doing that so we'll have some resources when we're too old to work. We're going to college or trade school as a way of good planning.

As we prepare ourselves to make a living. I've arranged our finances so that if the Lord should take me before he does my wife, she'll have the most that I'm able to arrange for her with what we have available.

It's just planning. And we pray, give us this day our daily bread. It's not as if there's nothing we put in front of it, no contingencies that we make. We can plan. But if I should meet Christ and Sue stays behind, and he asked me why I used up all I had and left her nothing, and I then replied, well, Lord, we're trusting you for her daily bread, and now that I'm gone, we're just going to leave it in your hands.

I think he'd be none too pleased. So let's not read this verse somehow that it denies plans for tomorrow or anything like that. In fact, in a little bit, Jesus will say, therefore do not be anxious about your life, what you eat or what you will drink.

He doesn't say not to work. He doesn't say not to plan and save. He says don't be anxious. So give us this day our daily bread. Bread is what we call synecdoche. A synecdoche is just a figure of speech where a part stands in for a whole.

In Psalms, for example, you read about the horse, singular, well that stands for an entire army. It's a synecdoche. It's a synecdoche. So here with bread, it stands for all the needs of the coming day, not just that loaf of wheat that we bake and eat.

It stands for our needs for the day that's coming. It literally says something like, the bread for the day to come, give us today. For us, it means something. Lord, you give me all I need for today, whether food to break my fast and my hunger and give me strength to work or clothes to cover my nakedness so I can go to work.

I depend on you for it all. And this is the message this morning. This is the message this morning is our utter dependence upon God. Then when we say your will be done, your will be done, and I count on your will today for all I need.

I think these two come together very, very neatly. Many, if not most of Jesus' listeners back then when he first said this, were laborers. They were field hands. They got paid at the end of the day, and they got just enough to meet the needs for that day.

That was when they got their coinage, that would buy dinner that night or breakfast the next morning for themselves or the family. The dependency Jesus has in mind, I think, came very easily to them, much more so than to us.

When they went to work, they left bare cupboards behind. When they came home, they had just enough for one more day. The Lord may have blessed you with enough that your daily needs come without any stress or drama, and for most of us here, that's exactly the same case.

But the question is not whether we're being good stewards. It's whether we're being independent. The question is whether we're feeling independent of God. In Deuteronomy 8, verses 2 and 3, we read something very important about what it means to be dependent upon God and why God arranges things this way and insists that we feel this utter abject, if you will, dependency upon him.

And you shall remember, this is Moses speaking for God to Israel, the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these 40 years in the wilderness, that he might humble you. Why did God lead them the way he did?

That he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you, there it is again, he humbled you and let you know hunger and fed you, excuse me, and he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

Now Jesus taught us when that last verse there answered his first temptation, that its compass is much wider than just food. As I said, bread's a synecdoche. Bread stands in as a part for the whole. It stands for all our needs.

God's will communicated by his word, not food, but his powerful word is the reason we live. And so now we can circle back to Matthew 6 .11 where we ask for our daily needs. Well, why is that? Why does God insist that by prayer we acknowledge that everything we have is from him?

Deuteronomy 8 .2 and 8 .3 repeat that lesson twice, I just read it. And if you read the history of Israel, in Numbers 11 you find the people weeping. They're actually weeping. They're away from their enemies.

The Egyptian army has been destroyed. They're seeing the cloud by day, the pillar of fire at night, and they 're not seeing God. And they're weeping. Now, I'm not going to read the whole text. It's a bit long.

But it seems that the problem is that they've had enough of God's bread. They've had enough of manna. They wanted meat. They wanted fish and garlic and leeks and all the rest. We remember, they said, we remember all we had in Egypt that cost us nothing.

Why were they weeping? They'd been slaves. They'd been dependent on the Egyptians for everything. And now they had to rely on God. Now they had to rely on God who they couldn't see. Now they had to rely on God to fulfill His word, send the bread every morning.

They didn't have a cupboard they could go to before they went to bed. Open it up, say, well, there's tomorrow's breakfast. Close it back and go to bed comfortably. They had to go to bed trusting in total dependence upon God that He would that day give them what they needed for that day to come.

I think they wept because of the humility required to be that dependent. I think that's got to be a big part of it anyway. That they saw that they couldn't do anything for themselves, that they had to rely on an unseen God and trust Him morning by morning.

And I think there's few things in the affairs of men that will more quickly elicit tears, whether they're outward literal tears or an internal angst, than pride ruining humility. If we think of God in the Old Testament as stern and judging, and in the New Testament in Jesus as a kind and forgiving God, I think we do a great disservice to the Scripture and to ourselves.

In Matthew 6 .11 Jesus tells us to pray to God for all our needs. As Paul tells us, go to God and He will supply your needs in Christ Jesus. But you have to go to Him, you have to count on Him and rely upon Him and be subject to Him.

Ask for bread enough for the day ahead, for clothes enough to allow us to go into public, for the job that we had yesterday to be here today, for the bank that processes our paycheck to not collapse when our pay is deposited.

I think that's what this prayer means. It doesn't mean that we absolutely know Bank of America will be there. But as the check is being transmitted we say, Lord, if it is Your will and You know I need this, I pray that You would supply this and it would all work and I would have the resource to take care of myself and my family.

It's such a prayer as give us this day our daily bread. It makes no sense if it doesn't come from a humble spirit. It's not a humble spirit, it's just words. It's just a false platitude. If Israel couldn't see the manna until the day broke, and we can see it in our cupboards before we go to bed, then I would suggest to you that our case is harder than theirs.

They knew they had nothing until God sent it, piece by piece and family by family. But we with our refrigerators brimming, with our shelves stocked with Safeway right down the road, Google's just a phone call away, do we with all this?

Can we with all this? We have to pray for this nation the way we just did. Let's remember that the material wealth, just the sheer stuff that we have is beyond anything any nation has ever seen in history.

Do we know our dependence? I think it's so easy that we transition into what I have provided, the great warning to Israel. When you go into this land and you see these houses you didn't build, you see these crops you didn't plant, you see these armies that actually you didn't defeat, you've done all this, don't say in your heart, look what I have accomplished by my power.

Don't forget it's the Lord God. How hard it is for us compared to them. They knew they had nothing until they saw it. But we depend on God the same as Israel was required to. We must. I mean, do we say with Psalm 123 verses 1 and 2, Isn't this what it means to go to God for our daily bread?

To look to him as a handmaid to her mistress and just look until he provides. Psalm 121, the first five verses, I'll read them all. Can we say he who keeps the church? Will neither slumber nor sleep. You know, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

We read that some weeks ago. We make the same breakfast as they do, which we bought with the same money they used, earned at the same job that they go to. We all do the same things. We get the same benefits.

So what's the difference? When we say give us this day our daily bread, what's really differentiating us from anyone else? That we look into a cupboard full of food, a refrigerator full of stuff, and even as we're cracking the eggs, we'll eat each moment.

The difference is we can say, give me today, Lord, what you know I need. Thank you, Lord, for this breakfast I'm eating now. May it strengthen me for what your will has in store for me this day. Give me what you know will be best, and I'll thank you for every good and perfect gift in the name of your son, Jesus.

And confessing that if God doesn't want that refrigerator to keep the food cold and that egg to be there in the morning for the breakfast or whatever we eat, or come back at the end of the day and eat, then it won't be there.

This is the mindset, and I think this is a mindset that improves us in one area that's so hard for us, which is humility. And I think for us, again, how difficult it is, how much prayer it takes. Look at this prayer that Jesus gives us and really think on these words.

Don't just let them go by too fast. Your will be done, we pray. Your will be done on earth. In other words, in me, right here in this place, on earth as it is in heaven. And then give us this day our daily bread.

Let this give us a reminder of the dependency that we have on God for everything. Let's have this be a reminder to us of the humility we must have before God. That except that he wills it, we don't have our next breath.

Except he wills it, we don't go home this evening. Let us find ourselves expressing only heartfelt acknowledgement to God of our abject dependence upon him. And he's a good God who provides for our needs.

Not one of us has gone hungry. We're not going hungry now. God does provide for everything. God is good to his people. Let us not take it for granted. Let us not be presumptuous. The warning from Israel, I think most of you are familiar with that, I didn't go back and read it, where he warns them, don't think you did this.

Don't think it was the power of your hand that provided all these things because it was God. It was God who knows what they need. It was God who knows what we need, what you need this day. And it's God who, if we have it, provides it.

And if he doesn't, we know that that's for our good, amen? I think that as we look rightly upon just these couple of verses in this prayer, if we don't let them pass by us too fast, it will improve our gratitude and it will improve our sympathies and I think it will make us much more that humble and dependent and obedient people that Christ would have us to be, amen?

Christ the True Bread and the Lord’s Table

Well, God more than feeds us the bread of sustenance. He gives us the true bread. In John 6, 35, of course, I say these words to prepare us for the Lord's table before us. He says, I am the true bread of life.

Whoever comes to me shall not hunger and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. And when the Jews joined their forefathers in their complaining, the Lord said, I am the bread that came down from heaven.

Jesus is the true bread of God from heaven. If you ate manna, you lived another day. If you drank from a rock, your thirst was quenched for another day. We have before us the symbols of Jesus Christ, of the true bread, the bread that the manna could only foretell but could never actually be, the living water which rocks could only make us long for.

We have here by the Lord's command his table, the true bread from heaven, Jesus Christ. Bread and wine are reminders of this. Because of the resurrection here reminded us he lives forever. Because of the resurrection, our justification in him is secure.

Because of the resurrection, we know that one day we will be like him. All this reminded to us here. Thinking of tomorrow's 499th anniversary of Luther's theses, here's something he wrote about faith.

Because I call the faithful to this table. I call those whose faith is in the eternal, living son of God who died for your sins, born of the virgin, raised on the third day for your justification. I speak of by grace you've been saved through faith.

And this not of yourselves, it's the gift of God. With that idea of faith and the faithful and who should partake here. Martin Luther wrote, the soul would like to live forever, not to be damned but to have a gracious God and not go to hell.

To satisfy this, we need the spiritual food and drink that are supplied when the Holy Spirit says, if you do not want to die or be damned, then come to Christ. Believe on him, hold to him, eat this spiritual food.

Of course, he meant to have faith. He didn't mean the elements themselves. He's speaking of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and his sacrifice. Because of his broken body, which is this bread, because his blood was spilt, which is this wine, because of these things, he died.

We spoke this morning of why he died. He died for our sins. As Peter put it, for Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.

So I ask you, as we prepare to serve these elements, do you believe this? Is this your life? This faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, God's eternal beloved son, in whom and by whom and only through whom can we be accepted to God?

Completely exclusive of our own works, of our own effort, of our own righteousness, but his and his alone. Do you believe this? Have you, by faith in the work of Jesus Christ on the cross and that alone, do you know by that that you've been brought before God?

Have you, in obedience to his command, been baptized upon a testimony, a public testimony of your faith in him? Are you joined to, are you seeking to join a church where the gospel is preached, where discipline is exercised, where the scripture is obeyed and proclaimed faithfully?

This defines, in my opinion, who should come to this table. If this is you, we would have you with us. You're invited by the members of this church. If this is not you, we would ask you to refrain and we're glad that you're here with us.

With that we will, did we have a hymn? Okay, we have a hymn and then we will partake of the elements.