“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”

Well this morning we continue on with Matthew chapter 6 in the Lord's Prayer and this morning we find ourselves in verse 11. As I mentioned at the beginning of last week's sermon, we're now moving away from these first three petitions that have focused exclusively on the Lord, beginning specifically by addressing the Lord as our Father who is in heaven.

Of course, this thread has already begun throughout the Sermon on the Mount to recognize the Father and perhaps we understand more of the unity of addressing our Father in heaven when we come to verse 11 in this fourth petition and see it's the Father who we seek to provide for us day by day.

But of course, we don't take for granted the fact that there are three petitions between addressing our Father in heaven and asking our Father in heaven to give us our daily bread. When we realize that the foundation of that structure is vital to understand because the Father in heaven is the one that we seek first and foremost in terms of His own name, His own glory being hallowed.

The Father in heaven that we seek to provide for us daily is one that first and foremost we seek to enter into His kingdom and having entered into that kingdom to advance that kingdom and to bring about His will so that it's on earth as it is in heaven.

This is all part of the first three petitions and as several commentators in ages past have recognized, we're praying for God's glory before we're praying for our needs. We're praying for God's kingdom before we're praying for our food and clothing.

We're praying for God's will before we're praying for our will, our desire. And so coming to the fourth petition, we have that all behind us and now we understand something else that is going to carry us to the end of the chapter.

Beyond the Lord's prayer and beyond where we're going in the following petitions, we'll find that Jesus comes back to this point. He comes back to the way that His disciples are not to be characterized by anxiety or distress, but rather have a faith that looks to the Father's faithfulness, a trust that depends upon the Father's good hand and these are all things that we'll begin to unpack here this morning in verse 11.

So again, some things we're just beginning and we'll connect I think with a lot more practical application by the time we get toward the end of the chapter. Matthew 6 beginning in verse 7, when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think they'll be heard for their many words.

Therefore do not be like them, for your Father knows the things you have need of even before.

You ask Him.

In this manner, therefore, pray, our Father in heaven, 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. Or remember that along the way, Jesus has been teaching His followers about being entirely submitted to the will of the Father.

Jesus Himself is entirely submitted to His Father's will. He says, apart from my Father, I do nothing. My words are His words. My acts are simply His acts. I complete all that He desires. And so with His followers, He's teaching them to have a certain trust upon the Father that they're able to then surrender their wills to His will.

Seek after His kingdom, whatever that cost may be in terms of their own comfort and need. They can trust the Father knows their needs, therefore they can fully surrender. They don't have to have a fight-or-flight instinct about situations in life.

They don't have to, as it were, fend for themselves, though indeed they may have to labor, and they may have to persevere, and they may have to endure, as Paul the Apostle says in 2 Corinthians. And yet we recognize that we face hard trials, some trials that we want to run away from, like when the twelve on the Mount of Olives ran away from the Lord.

Jesus was teaching them, even though they were not able to perhaps hear it as much as they were running away from all the torches and clubs, that if they had stuck around, they would have heard Jesus pray, not my will, but Your will be done.

Prayer, as we've said, should not be focused primarily on getting what we want, but on aligning our will with the will of God. That was the main point last week. Prayer should not be focused primarily on getting what we want, but on aligning our will with God's will.

Now having said that, agreeing with that in the third petition, we come now to the fourth petition, and we can say prayer does involve getting what we need. So prayer is not primarily about getting what we want, it's about God's will, not our will, but prayer is also about seeking and obtaining the things that we need.

You see how Jesus has sewn these things together between verses 10 and verses 11. Now this does not mean that God, of course, is unconcerned, aloof, complacent toward our spiritual and bodily needs when our will is to be aligned with His will.

He's the one who knows our frame. He's the one who's knit us together in our mother's wombs. We see little Isabel this morning, and we're amazed how small his sewing needle can be. God knows our frame.

He knows our weakness. He knows that man is but dust. And so in His provision, He takes into account truly what we need. Not the things we think we need, but the things we actually need. And sometimes the things we actually need are things that we have to go without, rather than things we have to obtain.

And sometimes the things that we need are things that we have to obtain and receive from Him, rather than the things that we would rather go without. All of this comes from a Father who knows our needs even before we ask Him.

That was the point Jesus made earlier. So He orients His followers to first seek God's glory, God's kingdom, God's will, all while knowing that this God is a Father who dwells in heaven, who will faithfully guide and provide for His own.

God is no derelict. God is never one who leaves the throne room to go buy that gallon of milk and you never.

See Him again.

God is the one who faithfully provides for His children. So this is the fourth petition. Give us this day our daily bread. What is daily bread? Surprisingly controversial. You wouldn't know it at first glance until you start reading through some of the commentaries.

In fact, I was telling a brother yesterday, I really appreciate scholarly modesty, because you rarely find it. If you've ever been to an academic conference, modest is not the adjective that would describe most of the transactions that take place in the Q &A sessions.

It's more like an interrogation and a grill and a world-class defense. But every now and then you do find a meek and modest scholar who's aware of what he can claim and what he can't. And when it comes to this word that we translate as daily, our daily bread, you start to realize this word is a very rare term.

It's so rare that from the very beginning, if you go all the way back to the early church fathers, they all wrestled to understand what it meant, and they had large streams of interpretation that differed in this.

And this runs really over the past 2 ,000 years, and it's all about this word daily. So we're asking the question, what is daily bread? And this scholar, he surveyed three of the major viewpoints and maybe another three variations off those viewpoints, and then he comes to his section and he goes, I don't know what this word means.

It's like, wow, usually a scholar won't be that honest. It's like, yeah, I have no idea what this word means. Some of these options sound good, but they all have some things that are a little wonky. The word translated daily is, if you want a word to impress your friends, it's a hapax.

Legomenon.

In other words, it's a word that only appears one time in Scripture. Now it appears twice in the New Testament, but it's a parallel. Luke 11 is the parallel of the Lord's Prayer, and so technically it appears once.

It's a very rare term, not just in the New Testament, but in all of ancient literature. In fact, here, in Matthew 6, is arguably the earliest appearance of this word. We have no other earlier examples of the word we translate as daily.

We find it referenced a little bit later in other works, like the Didache, which is a very early Christian writing, or in the Fathers, but whenever they use this word, they're referencing the Lord's Prayer.

And so it's a very unique, incredibly rare word. This is the unicorn word. What does it mean? Well, many have observed that within verse 11, you already have the adverb today. In other words, to say the word is best understood as daily is a little bit redundant.

It would be like saying, give us today, that's the adverb, give us today the bread for today.

It's redundant.

It doesn't really make a lot of sense. Give us today the bread for today. Maybe that's a way of emphasizing today, but the problem with that is there's a lot of other words that mean today. Why not use them?

Why this rather unique and rare term? The church father, Jerome, held it to be something like the bread needed for existence. The word is epiuson, and so you have usia, which means being, or substance, or nature.

And so Jerome said, well, the evangelist basically invented this term, and it means not daily bread or bread for the day, but bread for life, bread for existence, bread for being. Give us all that nourishes us and gives us our place in this world.

Some have taken it as a bread for the arriving day. There is a variation on the Greek there that makes a lot of sense. It's a variation on the verb to arrive, and so it would mean bread of arrival, or maybe bread for the arriving day, bread for the coming day.

That's very likely. That's in fact more recently a popular view. And you can see with that, the argument is that when you read the fourth petition in context, there seems to be a lot of emphasis about God's will being done on that great day when His will in heaven is completed on earth, or when His kingdom has arrived with such consummated glory that His name is hallowed to the very ends of the earth.

Give us the bread of that day. Give us the messianic banquet. That's something that Matthew goes into in chapter 8, the very next passage after the Sermon on the Mount, or again in chapter 26. And so a lot of ancient commentators held together the bread of the day to be a capital D day, the bread of that great day.

Along these lines they understood, well, now that bread is spiritual nourishment. So the church father Origen, going back to the third century, this is the 200s, he saw daily bread in this way. This is what he wrote, just as corporeal bread, bodily bread, distributed to the body of the person to be nourished goes into his being, so the living bread which comes down from heaven is distributed to the mind and the soul and gives a share of its own power to whoever eats of it.

You see what Origen is doing, he's connecting it to the Lord's Supper. He's saying this is the bread that's come down from heaven, this bread, this corporeal bread is taken into us and becomes a part of us.

Its own life-giving nature sustains our life. And so he connected it very early on to the Lord's Supper, and in his train followed other.

Fathers.

Tertullian and Cyprian saw this bread as the bread of the Lord's Supper, the bread that belongs to the body of the Lord that was given until that day when faith would become sight. On the other hand, you have a reaction against that.

You have a father like Gregory of Nyssa who saw verse 11 and its daily bread as just simply meeting our bodily needs. Don't read the Lord's Supper into this, this is not some supernatural spiritual nourishment, this is just Jesus saying God's going to provide for your daily needs.

Essentially Gregory of Nyssa is saying, didn't you just read on? Jesus talks a little bit later in this chapter about don't be worried about what you're going to eat or what you're going to wear. And so why are you reading so much into it, he would ask.

And then understanding daily then as just day by day. Not as a grand reference to the eschaton, to that coming day, but just day by day he'll provide for your bodily needs. And Gregory of Nyssa begins this train in some ways, it's carried on through figures like John Chrysostom.

And really you can trace these two competing views down through the remaining centuries. There's sort of been a pendulum swing back and forth between perhaps making too much out of this daily bread or perhaps making too little.

What about the rest of chapter 6, he's saying he's going to provide what you need, yes, but what about the first three petitions? He's talking about his glory and his kingdom and his will in heaven coming down to earth.

So you can see the tension. You come to the 1800s to the old Baptist scholar from the south, John Broadus, who by the way, you can find a PDF of it, an excellent little commentary on Matthew. Usually 19th century commentaries are not really worth consulting, it's kind of the best things from them have been taken into more recent commentaries.

Broadus has a commentary on Matthew that's worth reading, it's very good. And he says on this point, don't listen to the other commentaries, that's how you sell yours, don't listen to the other guys, I'll tell it to you straight.

Don't listen to the other commentaries, so many of them want to tell you it is spiritual.

Bread.

But there are many references in the scriptures to our material need. Why would we lose that meaning? And its sustaining power because we have to go on allegorizing everything, making it symbolic. It is plainly a prayer for temporal needs.

In the simplest way possible, give us our daily bread. A little child could see its meaning. A little child can feel its sweetness. And even the wisest man can find no higher wisdom than to learn in his life to pray, give me this day my daily bread.

So that's Broadus' view. So what is this tension between these two views? On the one hand, you have this transcendent view. This bread is a supernatural bread that comes down from heaven. This is a future-oriented bread.

And then you have an imminent bread. Just simply what I need to get through the day. It's presently oriented. It's the bread of my day-by-day needs. I like to be a middleman in a lot of ways. And I like the old El Paso commercial where they're fighting over soft-shell or hard-shell tacos.

And a little girl raises up and says, why not both? And when you say to me, transcendent, no imminent, no transcendent, no future, no present, I want to say, why not both? And that's what Augustine did.

Augustine, his views on this really did hold together both of these aspects. He's saying there's something about our bodily need, but there's also something about the need of our souls. And if we're talking about need, we're already talking about a condition that has happened since the fall and a promise that seeks to overcome that condition.

There is no deprivation when God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven. There is no starvation. There is no making an idol out of bread. There is no lack of adoration and thankfulness to the God who supplies.

And so he's holding both of these things together. He emphasized it's not an individual prayer. An easy thing that we do, we just make this an individualistic prayer. One of the points Augustine makes is we don't pray my bread, we pray our bread.

This is the church praying for bread. Give us our bread. We're praying as one body for bread. And therefore, we're seeking not just immediate physical nourishment, but spiritual nourishment.

As well.

And as a church, we come to recognize how dependent we are upon our Father's care. In other words, he argues, the disciple turns everything toward God. As Paul says, whether we eat or drink, we seek to glorify him.

So that even our hunger lays hold of his care. And that's how we learn to live, not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from.

The mouth of God.

When Jesus was in the wilderness, as happened a few chapters earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, is he not praying for the Father to provide for him bread? But when the evil one slithers into that desolate wasteland and says, you can command stones to become bread.

Listen, if you would just bend your knee to me, I won't abuse you and mistreat you like your father who deprives you. And where is he even? Well, I'm here. And if you bow to me, I'll give you the kingdoms of the world.

And unlike the first Adam that fell, who listened to the voice of the liar, the murderer from the beginning, who said, you're right, God's withholding from me. Jesus understood, no. The Father's not withholding from me.

You promised to give, but you'll only take, you'll only destroy. The Father's not withholding from me. Listen, you might think I need a loaf of bread right now. I'm not living on loaves of bread. I do live on everything that proceeds from his mouth.

And what was Jesus doing? Was he simply saying in some abstract sense, well, just provide for me today? Or was he doing something to bring about this kingdom and accomplish the first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer, that he would hallow his Father's name and that he would seek to establish his kingdom so that his will would be done through him upon this earth?

Well, of course, we're holding these things together. It was a very real immediate need that he prayed for his father, but it was also about the kingdom and the future and the promise of redemption. That's what Augustine is tapping into.

Both of these things are at play. And so I agree entirely with the commentary of I. Howard Marshall, a more modern commentary. He says, the food which God gives is food for the body and the soul. He gives men what they need.

And with it, he gives them a foretaste of that provision that is available in the kingdom.

Of God.

And he does this each and every day as we seek him in prayer. Well said. It is daily needs from our Father's hand, but it's also a foretaste of the kind of provision that comes with the kingdom of God.

The overturn of hunger, the undoing of the curse, where no longer will man have to find bread among thorns and thistles. No longer by the sweat of his face will he fill his stomach. The overturning of that curse now in such a way that the prodigal is not living off pods and husks, but he's come back to the Father's house where he himself says, is not my Father's house full of bread with enough to spare?

That's the image. It's food for the body and for the soul. So I want to approach this in three ways. Having established what the daily bread is, I want to talk about this in terms of need and then gift.

And then from gift to gratitude and then from gratitude to generosity. Again, going a certain way here this morning because there's a lot of practical application in the way that Jesus unpacks our daily needs by the end of this chapter.

But what I really want to get across is simply this chain of here's the daily bread we are to seek and that corresponds to our need and we receive it as a gift and we respond to it with gratitude and we react with it in generosity.

That's the chain that we're seeking to establish this morning.

So first, need.

Our daily bread corresponds to our need. Our need corresponds to our creatureliness. And our creatureliness corresponds to our Creator. Very important we understand this. Our daily bread corresponds to need, our need corresponds to the fact that we are creatures and the fact that we are creatures corresponds to the fact that we have been made by a Creator.

A creature is by necessity a dependent being. A creature derives its being and therefore depends upon the one who brought that being into place. By nature, this is the condition of all that God has made.

All that God has made is dependent upon Him. Jesus understood that. He understood that the sparrows of the air are fed by His hand. The hills of the field are clothed by His wisdom. He understood that His Father is not just the Creator that wound up the watch and let it all go, but He's constantly working.

As He says in relation to the Sabbath, My Father's always working. In other words, He's always preserving and sustaining and arranging to provide. There's only one being that is truly independent rather than dependent.

Self-existence rather than having a derived existence. Neither depending on or deriving His being from anything but Himself. There's only one being who is of Himself and that is the Lord God. Of whom the Apostle says, in Him we live and move and have our being.

He alone is pure being in that sense. Now how does this connect to prayer? I was reading Herman Bovinck, the great Dutch theologian. Oh, he is so profound on that. I would spend the rest of our time just reading Bovinck to you if I could, but I can't.

So let me just give you a snippet of how he's connecting this point to prayer. In other words, we're asking how does the fact that we are in this relationship to God as creature to creator, how does that connect our need to our prayers?

Listen to Bovinck. Creatures receive everything from God, including their being. Creatures can only exist then in a relationship of reception. In other words, to be a creature is to be in a, not just a dependent relationship, but in a relation of reception.

I need to receive. I've been made in such a way I need to receive. I am not like you, Lord. I am not self-sustaining. Unlike God, who is defined by nothing other than His own being, we are defined by our relation to Him.

We are a creature to the Creator. We are a creation of the Creator. We are defined by our relation to Him. So then what is prayer? Prayer, asking that God would give us daily bread, is simply an aspect of being a creature.

Don't super-spiritualize this. What is prayer? Prayer is just being a creature. This is the point that Bovinck is going to make. Prayer presupposes that there is a distinction between us as creatures and God as our Creator.

It is not something that we are merely commanded to do. It is the enactment of our very nature as a creature. Prayer is not just the command, this little extra. What Bovinck is saying, we are enacting the fact that we are creatures when we look to our Creator to provide.

Prayer is simply seeking that provision. Prayer then is the enactment of our nature as creatures. Prayer consists, in other words, of people who know and sense their dependence upon God. Creaturally being is simply that relation of dependence.

And prayer is the conscious confession, the calling out to the Creator in light of that dependence. We open the service with little pieces of Psalm 104, but this is the whole point of Psalm 104. And again, I can't give it in full.

I'll just give you a small part of this. All of creation, dependent upon the hand of the Creator, the provision of the One who made it, who gave it its bounds, its nature, who created it to receive, who created it to reflect and hallow before the corrosive and undermining effects of the fall.

So listen to what the psalmist does in Psalm 104. He sends the springs into the valleys. They flow among the hills and give drink to every beast of the field. The wild donkeys now quench their thirst.

By them even the birds of the heavens have their home. They sing among the branches. He waters the hills from His upper chambers. The earth satisfied with the fruit of your work. He causes grass to grow for the cattle, vegetation for the service of men, so that He can bring forth food from the earth and wine that makes His heart glad, oil to make His face shine, bread which strengthens His heart.

The trees of the Lord are full of sap. The cedars of Lebanon, which He planted, where the birds make their nests, the stork has her home among the fir trees. The high hills are for the wild goats. Cliffs are a refuge for the rock badgers.

He appointed the moon for seasons. The sun knows it's going down. You make darkness in its night in which all the beasts of the forest creep about. The young lions roar after their prey. They're seeking their food from God.

When the sun rises, they all gather together and lie down in their dens. Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening. Oh, Lord, how manifold are Your works. In wisdom, You've made this all.

The earth is full of Your possession. This great and wide sea in which are innumerable teeming things. Every fall we go to Falmouth and there's this one little section along the back of where we stay at the timeshare where if you just look quickly, you'll miss it.

But if you slow down and you just look at the water, you'll notice that there's about 3 ,000 hermit crabs teeming. It's like the whole thing's moving and you're like, oh, I don't want to walk through there.

Teeming things, small and very great. Verse 27, here's the whole point. These all wait for you. These all wait for you that you may give them their food in due season. When you give them, they gather in.

You open your hand, they're filled with good. You hide your face, they're troubled. You take away their breath and they die. They return to dust. You send forth your spirit, you send forth your breath, they're created.

You renew the face of the earth. May the glory of the Lord endure forever. May the Lord rejoice in His works. Now, this is not an amateur attempt at studying animal behavioral patterns or the migratory circuit of the stork or the generational frenzy of the rock badger.

This is a poetic description of all of creation being in this mode of reception to the creator. This mode of enacting the fact that we all are looking to you to provide our food in due season. And if you don't provide, we return to dust.

And yet you renew as you breathe upon the earth. You bring forth all of this. And the psalmist is like a poet surveying. He can be very broad. The birds of the heaven, the things teeming under the sea.

And then he's very specific. Wild donkeys, the stork, wild goats, rock badgers, young lions. Years ago when I started seminary, we had a spiritual formation course. One time we had to go to a separate class and they had brought in a professor who was talking about the significance of creation in psalmic imagery.

And it was one of these kind of weird professors that comes in, their hair is all kind of crazy, and they're all excited to talk about this thing that they've been studying for a decade. And so in the course of that, we ended up watching this sort of 20 minute video.

It was all descriptions of psalms and it was superimposed with all of this footage of wildlife. If you think of like BBC's production of Planet Earth, it was like that. A lot of slow-mo glorious imagery and background music.

It was all this grandeur. And I was sitting there, too cool for school, just sort of like, you know, I can't believe I'm paying for this. And it all ends and the professor's going,.

Oh, I could cry.

Isn't that amazing?

Looking for that same kind of mirrored reaction, I'm thinking to myself, I wanted to talk about Athanasius and atonement theory. What am I doing here? I didn't want to watch zebras galloping and hummingbirds eating orchids.

And now I'm a little older and I want to watch zebras and hummingbirds. I want to be more like the psalmist. I want to understand what I couldn't see then, but now I see very clearly. This whole world has its mouth open to you, Lord.

If you don't give, if you don't breathe, we perish. You are the creator. You are good and wise. You gave everything its bounds and its nature. And we're no different than young lions. Young lions you've designed to go out in the night and roar after their prey and come together in the morning just at the time the man is yawning and stretching and going out to do his labor in the field.

We're all just creatures. Who is like you, oh Lord? And it doesn't matter how small. Amoeba climbing up the latticework on peapods or Leviathan dwelling in the places of the deep. You provide for them all.

And that's what the psalmist is reacting to. Again, creaturely being is simply a relation of dependence. And prayer is the enactment, the conscious confession, the calling out like Psalm 104.

Give me food or I perish.

Give me my being and breathe on me or I turn to dust. You renew the face of the earth. You gladden a man's heart. You make his face to shine. You strengthen him. It is what C .S. Lewis observed. I pray because I can't help myself.

I pray because I am helpless. I pray because the need is flowing out of me all of the time. Whether I'm waking or sleeping, it is no different.

I'm depending upon him.

So my prayer is never changing God, but it's always changing me. And in a world of atheistic materialism, where the world is taken for granted, where increasingly we don't need psalms or crazy professors to make us watch Sir David Attenborough narrate wildlife.

We just need Klaus Schwab funding some research laboratory where we can grow meat. And we can all just take astronaut pills and have some sort of weird subsistence of life on some Mars colony. It's like, I'd rather return to dust, I think, than that,.

To be honest.

And in a world of materialism, in a world of... We can actually master all of the conditions that make us dependent. And that therefore erupt into vulnerabilities and create conditions like warfare because of the struggle for limited resources or vulnerable global positioning or economic threats.

And we can master that if we just get the right political and economic system. If we just get the right technology, we can actually overthrow the curse. Never again will there be famine or hunger or war or rumors of war or disease.

We'll master it all. We'll cure it all. And the Christian knows, no. I pray every day, God, give me my daily bread. There's only one who can overthrow the curse. There's one who is triumphing presently over the effects of the curse.

And his kingdom in that coming day is fixed. But between now and then, I'm made from dust and I will return to dust. My hope is not trying to master the conditions of a fallen world. My hope is in the one who will call me forth from dust and give me a glorified body and a glorified cosmos as he intended from the beginning.

And you start to realize it is wildly inappropriate for anyone but the Christian to pray for this daily bread. Because truly only the Christian can have this type of understanding and this type of relationship to the Creator.

It's not the higher power, the unknown deity of agnosticism. This is the triune Creator who's known by the Spirit through the Son to be the Father. This is the God who made heaven and earth and us in our mortal frame, the God upon whom we depend even if we're wicked and God-hating and blind to him he provides.

He sends rain on the wicked and on the just. It's not proper to pray for daily bread. It's not proper to pray at all if there is no God. Prayer is the enactment of our creaturely dependence upon him. That's the first point, our need.

The second point is recognizing recognizing not just our need but the fact that God provides makes us realize that all of his provision is gift. Gift here being defined as that which is given by no compulsion, that which is willingly, freely given.

Gift as that which meets a need that we could not otherwise provide for. The Heavenly Father, as James 1 reminds us, is the giver of all that is good. And this is how James says it in 117, every good and perfect gift comes from above.

James is helping us understand it's not just the needs that he's supplying. What he's giving us are gifts. Blessings. Things we do not deserve. Things we are not obligating him to provide. It all comes from his hand as a gift.

It's freely given by him. It's not our rightful due. We cannot shake a fist at God and say, give me what you owe me. I demand that you provide for me. And if that's true, then it means everything that comes from his hand, as James says, is a good and perfect gift.

If it's good, it comes from him.

It comes from above.

If it's not, it comes from beneath. If you recall Exodus, God was trying to teach his people this in giving them daily bread, that is, manna. He was teaching his people that not only did he rescue them out of the bondage of Egypt, out of this, as it were, typological experience of bondage to sin and tyranny under the sort of satanic ruler, but he also said, I'm going to guide you and lead you into my promise.

And along the way, I'll provide for you.

All that you need.

A cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night. I'm not going to airdrop a yearly supply of bread. And you all, like, gird your loins and run to that big crate, and you burst off the plywood and there's a map.

All right, bust out the compasses. We've all got to break up the rations for the year and figure out where we're going. That's not how God taught his people. Follow the cloud today. Here's some fire for the night.

Here's some bread for the morning. Keep following me. That was what God taught his people. The Lord was putting forth a life of daily faith. And the result was, as Exodus says, the one gathered much and had nothing left over, and the other gathered little but never had lack.

In Jesus' own ministry, it's like, I don't want to send them away. They've been with me now three days. If I send them away now, they might faint on the way back.