“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”

Well this morning we continue on with Matthew chapter 6 and 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.

Well 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. Oh 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 could 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. And 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 it. It'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 it's 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. It's 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.

The 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's 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're 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.

You see? 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 behavioural 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. I remember years ago when

I started seminary, we had a spiritual formation course. And we had one time where 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, you know, it was one of these kind of weird professors that comes in, their hair is all kind of crazy and, you know, 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, you know,

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.

So, oh, I could cry. Isn't that amazing? Looking for that same kind of mirrored reaction,

I'm just, you know, I'm thinking to myself, I wanted to talk about Athanasius and atonement theory. You know, what am I doing here?

I didn't want to watch zebras galloping and hummingbirds eating orchids. 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 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.

Do we have any food? My disciples come with these pitiful baskets, a couple of fish heads and some crusts.

That'll do. That'll do. Everyone ate their full.

Few baskets left over. It was just enough for that day. That's how God provides.

It's a picture of his covenant faithfulness. Deuteronomy 8, recounting this says, the Lord humbled you. He allowed you to hunger so that he could feed you with manna that you did not know.

Not even your fathers knew. And why did he do that? So that he would make you know that man does not live by bread alone.

Seek me, he's saying. Don't seek bread, seek me. I'm the one who gives bread. Look around you.

Do you go out of your way to feed every squirrel you drive past? Do you feed every sparrow that flies, swoops down in front of your windshield?

No, you don't feed any of them and yet they're all fed. Look to me, the creator, the sustainer, the provider.

Don't look first and foremost to bread. It's a picture of his covenant faithfulness. Paul says, my

God shall supply all your need. Not because he's like a dad like one of us who's kind of wringing his hands.

All right, I gotta, how am I gonna make ends meet this way or that? God's not resting his hands in that way. What does Paul say?

My God will supply all your need according to his riches and glory. He made it all. What's it to him?

He doesn't give them manna because the kitchen's running dry. This is all I could come up with today.

He gave them that daily allotment so that they would learn something about themselves, something about their flesh, something about this world and something about him.

And that has not changed. He's still teaching his followers that same lesson of trusting him as a provider day by day.

That is what it means to have a life of faith. Fear not little flock,

Jesus says. It is the father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Just leave the kingdom aside.

Just notice what Jesus is saying about how the father gives. Fear not, it's the father's good pleasure to give.

I can only begin to understand that now that I am a father. Because you get to my age and no one's giving you

Christmas gifts. You just give Christmas gifts. You get a crayon drawing for a birthday present.

That is really nice. No offense taken. But it doesn't last in the fridge very long.

But you realize as a father, you just have pleasure to be able to give. And Jesus says, well you do that poorly.

You being evil know how to give good gifts to your children. How much more the heavenly father?

He delights to give to his children. And as a good and wise father, he won't give them that which would spoil and destroy them.

As a wise and perfect father, he gives them what they need faithfully day by day out of the abundance of his goodness and richness.

He gives it, in other words, as a gift. The father doesn't give out of angry reluctance.

He's not like me and I lose track of time and I'm going, oh you guys haven't eaten for 10 hours. Whoops. The father doesn't forget.

He doesn't get caught up in other things. He's not aloof or distracted. And when we come and we say again day by day, father give me more bread.

He's not full of anger. He's not somehow, you know, I can't believe it.

You're coming to me for more again. Do you know how old this is getting? Do you know how tired I am from you asking me that's not who the father is.

His provision is given as a gift and he delights to give good gifts. You think of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.

If you read it, it's so colorful. A child as he was, poor Oliver, he was desperate with hunger, reckless with misery.

He rose from the table and advanced to the master with his empty basin and spoon in his hand and said in a somewhat temerous voice, please sir, more,

I want some more. Now the master was a fat, healthy man. I love the 19th century fat equaled healthy.

Don't you love that? Master was a fat, healthy man. But he turned very pale.

He gazed in stupefied astonishment at this small rebel. And he clung for support to the counter.

You would come to me for more? The assistants were paralyzed with horror.

And Oliver unwitting spoke again, please sir, I want more. So the master raised a ladle to aim a blow at Oliver's head and began to shriek.

He said, I'm gonna beat him now. That's not how the Lord deals with his children when we come day by day to say, please master, please

Lord, I need more bread for the day. Please Lord, I need more.

And day by day we ask him and how does he react? With pleasure he gives it like he's giving a gift.

Because the master we come to is not a reluctant master, not an aloof master, he's the father in heaven who already knows what we need before we even ask.

And so that to the believer, our father, it's not just some empty title. It's a recognition that I'm a child dependent on him.

And I trust him like a child trusts his father. I know he'll care for me. I know he loves me.

I may not understand all of his workings or why we're going in the directions we're going or why he's doing the things he's doing.

But I know he cares for me. I know he provides for me. Therefore I trust him. We're assured that we belong to him as his children.

This is confirmed and sealed by the Holy Spirit. He knows our necessities and needs in life. And without stretched hands, he provides for us.

And again, as we come to the end of this chapter, we see that Jesus is reminding his disciples of this. He wants to banish all earthly anxiety from their following God.

And so we labor for daily bread. This is not folding our hands and becoming complacent.

We labor for our daily bread. We plan for our needs. Proverbs has a lot to say about laboring and planning.

But nonetheless, Jesus is showing us here in Matthew 6 that however we labor, however we plan, we are always seeking the faithful gift that our father in heaven provides.

Now the response to that is next, gratitude. Thirdly, gratitude. Need, gift, gratitude.

Martin Luther, in his small catechism, says when we pray this petition, give us our daily bread,

God only intends to make us grateful for his gifts. That's beautiful. When we pray in this petition, give us our daily bread,

God only intends to make us grateful for his gifts. What he means is that when we ask

God for bread, we intend to thank him for providing it. There is no prayer coming from need, recognizing a gift that comes from his hand that doesn't then return gratitude.

God says of his own people of old, I filled them with bread and then they forgot me.

I was sustaining them as I sustain all things and rather than entering into my worship, with less burdens and stress, and being free from the shackles of idolatry, that they actually went after other idols.

They forgot me. And so Luther is right to say, we pray this with the intention that we would become grateful.

In other words, gratitude is the response that arises from a need being met with a gift.

The response is gratitude. We pray for bread from a father who gives us much more than bread, which means there ought to be a lot more gratitude.

We're not living, subsistent, you know, rations of croutons. That's not how God provides for us, right?

As he provides generously, abundantly, so our gratitude ought to be generous and abundant. That's where we're going next.

And this faith that asks for him to provide is a faith that also praises him with gratitude.

Some of you have probably seen the old painting. It actually is a photograph, but it's been painted so many times of an elderly bearded man sitting at a table with his hands folded and he's praying.

And there's a little loaf of bread and what appears to be a very thick Bible off to his other side.

And he's sitting there with his eyes closed, praying over a little loaf of bread. And the photograph is entitled Grace. And it was photographed in the early part of the 20th century by Eric Enstrom.

And it became this viral sensation across the country. It really captured the simplicity of depending on God to provide daily bread.

And so it was grace. In other words, was it the grace of prayer? He was praying grace?

Or was it the grace of having received daily bread? That bread came as a gift, as grace.

Now, what's not known about this story and what's less popular than this image is that after its success, a

Christian bookstore owner started a contest to try to make a compliment. You know, like we have this picture, we need something else to go next to it.

We need something to compliment it. And so they started this nationwide contest to submit a photograph that would compliment this picture of grace, this man praying with a loaf of bread underneath his folded hands.

And the winning photograph was a man named Jack Guerin. He remembered his mother.

And he thought, you know, that old man reminds me of my grandmother's brother or some relation.

And so that's why he thought of it. And you know, my grandmother's so faithful. And I just can't think of her but being at a table, reading scripture in between moments of prayer.

And so he asked his grandmother, would you be willing to sit for a picture and I'm gonna enter you into this contest? And he took this picture and it depicts this old woman with her little spectacles on and she's seated at a table and there's no bread in sight, but there's the word in front of her.

And with a very serious but pleasant look on her face, she's looking at the word.

And the title of that was gratitude. Grace, gratitude, that was the compliment.

Gratitude belongs to grace. The bread at the table, that's a gift that's meeting our need.

How do we respond? Thank you, Lord, thank you, Lord. Not just thank you,

Lord, all right, next. But even after the table's cleared, thank you, Lord.

I don't just want bread that you provide, now I wanna eat words that come from your mouth.

Gratitude, a recognition my time is in his hand as much as my bread is in his hand.

And he faithfully provides both. You know, when you understand that as he gives us our bread, so he gives us our days, you begin to look at life through a lens of gratitude.

It's sad, isn't it? Isn't there this rumor? I hope it's not true. But there's this rumor among service personnel in restaurants and diners and so on that when they see people praying before a meal, they seem to be very devout people, they're expecting a pretty lousy tip at the end of that service.

It's like, oh, great, they're holy. Ergo, they're frugal, ergo, I'm getting a lousy tip.

May it never be. Gratitude is this picture of, I just have to respond out of the fact that I'm amazed that you still faithfully provide for me.

And I so easily take it for granted and I don't want to. And it's not just the bread now that I have gratitude for, it's everything.

There's a Jewish prayer that, I don't know when it began in Jewish practice, but it's still used today.

It's called the Modeh Ani. Which is simply in Hebrew, I give thanks to you.

And it's the prayer you recite when you wake up in the morning. You wake up in the morning and I thank you,

Lord, for giving me breath and renewing my life. In other words, the prayer is viewing death as sort of this micro experience, sleep as this micro experience of death.

You know, I sort of became disconnected and darkened and now you've opened my eyes and given me breath and given me light and I thank you,

Lord. Recognizing every day is this microcosm of a whole lifespan coming from death to life back to death.

And so the prayer begins in the morning. I thank you. What a way to wake up. Thank you.

Starting your whole day not with give me, give me, give me, give me, but thank you. Thank you.

Gratitude. Like the Israelites gathering manna in the morning hours knowing that that was going to be how

God provided for the rest of the day. And perhaps they were always surprised for those first few weeks to open the tent flap and see manna around them.

But eventually it's just, they don't even break conversation. They're just reaching out the flap and grabbing manna.

Yeah, so anyways, today I think we should head west. No, thank you.

Thank you. Again, because of this word daily, it can be understood as the coming bread.

Some would argue that really the Lord's prayer is fit here to be a morning prayer. And when we're praying in the fourth petition, we're saying, give me today the bread that is coming.

The bread that is, in other words, coming as this day has just begun to dawn. And it's already orienting to the fact,

I'm thanking you for what I don't even have in front of me because I know you're going to provide it. You've heard the story of George Mueller, I'm sure.

You've heard that name, that man, who lived throughout the decades of the 1800s and ran an orphanage in Bristol that by the time he died in his 90s had cared for over 10 ,000 orphans.

You should realize in the 19th century, there was no welfare system. There was no care for orphans. You stole or you starved or you found someone that was willing to take you in and care for you.

And that was George Mueller. Now, some would say this was erroneous, and I'm not saying this is the model for such a ministry, but he was adamant for his own conscience, his own conviction,

I will never make a pledge drive. I will never solicit donations to the orphanage.

I will pray for God to provide and trust him. And though he went to dozens of countries and bore witness and testimony and tried to encourage others to get involved in orphan care and care for the poor, he never once made at any point, any part of his message an appeal for help.

You wouldn't know what they needed. It was all tight -lipped, and yet year by year, they were always provided for.

And the most famous example, if you've heard anything about Mueller, you've probably heard this story, is one morning he awoke to the news that the orphanage had no food in the cupboards.

The pantry was empty and you've got 300 kids on that particular morning that aren't gonna have any food. Now, this would throw us all.

Mueller, he'd been here time and time again. I was reading his journals this week. I can't tell you how many journal entries began something like,

August 3rd, 1844. I begin this morning with one farthing in my pocket.

Let's see how the Lord provides today. That's it. He would just write it all out.

I am broke -broke this morning. Let's see how faithful God is. So what did he do on this morning?

He had all of the 300 children come in to sit at the various dining room tables, and he said, let's thank

God for the food that he'll provide. They didn't have anything. The kids are going, we don't smell anything.

We don't see anything. He's teaching them something, isn't he? He's teaching them something. And it wasn't long after that prayer, as they're all sitting there, you can imagine a chorus of young boys' stomachs growling, 300 stomachs growling, and eventually there's a rap on the door, and a baker says,

I don't mean to intrude, but I couldn't sleep last night. I had such a strong compulsion that I needed to bake for you and for your orphans.

I have all these deliveries that are about to come. And it wasn't long after they were feeding on all those baked goods that another rap on the door, and it was the milk truck.

And the axle had split and crashed, and the dairy worker said, all this is gonna spoil.

There's no point in trying to deliver it. So why don't you just have it? Give it to your orphans. We may not have to feed 300 mouths tomorrow.

That's immaterial. The point is we're always praying with faithful acknowledgement and heartfelt gratitude.

And what I'm saying is, we're not going to be George Mueller's caring for 10 ,000 orphans across the century.

I imagine, God bless you if you're called to that. We're all called to have the same faith and the same gratitude as George Mueller, just by virtue of being a

Christian. And the last point, if we have something of that faith, something of the

Psalm 104 understanding that every creature has its mouth open for you, waiting for you to provide.

Every creature is deriving not just food for the day, but their very being from Him. Every creature has the nature that you've ordained, the providence that you've designed, the purpose that you've accorded.

Everything depends on you. Everything. And if we recognize with faithful acknowledgement that that Creator is the one who's providing, and that provision is not reluctant, it's not angry, it's not tiresome, and it never fails, it's given as a gift with great pleasure and delight.

And that gift is then received with heartfelt gratitude, with a response of it never being seen as mundane, but learning how to taste the maple in maple syrup, how to see the citrus in the orange juice, every aspect of what

He's made, adorning the fact that He is a faithful provider and a wondrous artist, a magnificent Creator.

And so out of gratitude comes this abundance, this excess. And that's the last point, generosity.

As I mentioned, Augustine drew attention to this plural, us and our. And he makes a big point of that.

We don't pray, give me today my bread. We pray, give us this day our bread. And Augustine realizes part of the reason we pray that is we may be the means of providing someone else's bread in that day.

So I can never just pray, give me what's mine. I must pray, give us our, and then realize

I'm in a position to be part of this. Because I've got a bakery, or I've got a broken milk truck, and they need bread and milk.

And so when we pray in this way, give us today our daily bread, we're open to realize that God is going to steward

His provisions for us in a way that we are meant to reflect His own giving, His own generosity,

His own faithfulness. So we realize it's a privilege then. God intends for His people to reflect

His own generosity. I've told you in years past,

I'm sure, about an old deacon at First Baptist who had a neighbor who was just this crotchety, angry neighbor.

And God blessed this poor deacon who just seeked to be a good man and a good neighbor and to help this man who was sort of confined to his house, and therefore the property would be overgrown and all that.

Or in the fall, it would just be full of leaves. And then it would be a mud pit in the spring, and he'd never be able to shovel or ice.

And so this deacon took it upon himself, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna bless my neighbor. And when you're thinking about that, what do you imagine?

If you have this little movie reel playing in your mind, you imagine this neighbor going, oh, I'm just so touched.

How would you do that for me? Because you're a Christian? Tell me about Christianity. Can I come to? You start going in that direction.

So he starts mowing this man's lawn dutifully every two weeks. And every now and then, this angry voice comes out from the window, you missed a spot over there.

It's like, what? It's, he does a grocery run for this guy. You know, he brings all these things, not even being reimbursed.

He's just, I guess I'm just gonna eat this. The phone rings, he must be so moved to tears, he wants to thank me.

You got the wrong brand of tomato sauce. You gotta be kidding me. You're on your own.

He's just like, all right, Lord, you can take this guy anytime you want. The point is he, however much his flesh might have reeled against that, he had to recognize, boy,

Lord, this is how you give to me. And that's harsh in gratitude, but there's no worse in gratitude than ignorant neglect.

And I can go too long, Lord, where I don't even acknowledge you. I don't see from your hand,

I see from my hand what I'm going to eat. God intends for us to so recognize our need, his gift, with gratitude, that it has to overflow in generosity.

And that's why we pray, give us this day our daily bread. And this generosity can't be reduced to simply a monetary amount.

We're not thinking of what God gives if we reduce it to a dollar sign. That's what our modern society wants to do.

Everything has a price tag. I was reading a book with a brother this week. You know, today, as it's said, we all know the cost of something, the cost of everything, but we know the value of nothing.

You know the price tag of something, but you don't know what it's worth. And when God calls us to live generously, it's not just about the dollar amount.

It's whatever he's given you, whatever gifts, whatever resources, whatever relationships, whatever time. God expects his people to be generous.

That gratitude must overflow. And so when we pray for daily bread with this in view, we're not just praying,

God, give me my bread to get through this day. We're saying, God, give me bread like a gift that I see and respond to as a gift with gratitude.

And give me enough bread that it's not just for me, that it's our bread. Help me to steward this and bless others with all that you've given me.

Because I recognize it's not mine, it's yours. It's from your hand. I have no right to it.

I didn't make it. Maybe I earned it by my labor and in a meaningful way

I can say it's mine, but you made it and you made me and you gave me breath and I thank you even for the morning that I can go out and labor.

Even that is a gift. And so Proverbs says there's one that scatters and yet increases.

And then there's one that withholds and tends toward poverty. God would have his people be a scattering people.

He'll give you daily bread, but he'll give you a lot more than just a meager ration if you intend to scatter it. What could

George Mueller do with a bakery full of croissants if it was just for him? So he'd never get that.

He'd never get the excess. It wasn't pride that drove him to not ask. I think he just enjoyed so much seeing the presence of God.

Seeing answers to prayer. It's why in his journals he recorded every answer to prayer. It's like, oh,

I thought maybe after year one I'd start asking, but I'm gonna keep this going. I kinda like the fact that God just answers.

It built up his own faith. When he was discouraged or if he was tempted to be full of anxiety, he could then open up his journal and he could thumb through 100 pages and realize, how foolish of me to think

God won't provide. Look at every single thing he's done. Why would he fail me now?

So there's a call to live with an open hand. Now, of course, scripture rejects laziness and waste. Scripture never condones a man folding his hands and reducing himself to poverty so that he has to live on the generosity of others.

Scripture never condones that. There's some situations that are beyond the will and desire of men that put them in that position.

Scripture certainly allows for that. And with that in Deuteronomy 15, if there's any poor within your gates, any of your brethren, do not harden your heart, open wide your hand,

God commands. And why is this pleasing to the Lord? It's pleasing to the

Lord because this is how God is. His hand is open wide all of the time. Even to his enemies, even to those who curse him and spitefully use him, his hand is wide open.

God loves a cheerful giver, Paul says in 2 Corinthians, why? Because God is a cheerful giver. He delights to give good things to his children.

That's why he loves when his children also delight to give good things to others. And that's why, and that's where we can begin to learn it is more blessed to give than to receive.

So, as Paul says to the church at Thessalonica, his desire is that each would, with quietness, work and eat their own bread, and that's certainly true.

But within and beyond that, that is meant to overflow in generosity toward others. So that others can begin to understand what it's like to receive a gift they didn't earn.

What it's like to express gratitude. And to hear from the one who shared it, oh, don't thank me, thank

God. Thank God who provided all of this for me. Thank God who gave you breath and life, and you had your whole being from him.

Thank him, I'm just a vessel, don't thank me. I don't wanna be in the limelight of this, thank

God who gave to me so that I could give to you. So we recognize, brothers and sisters, daily bread that we pray for is for our bodies and for our souls.

It's for our provision and for our sanctification. It's for our needs and for our hope, our future hope.

It's for our body and for our soul. It's the body that Jesus is concerned about when he gives his own body for us.

It's not some wispy, ethereal theological symbol that Jesus gave, it was his flesh, with hair follicles and pores and organs, that's what he gave.

And that's what he's concerned about when he won't send the crowds away, because he's concerned about them being hungry. And that's how he cares for you as his children, not in some symbolic, ethereal, theological way, but as real, as concrete, as earthy, as him splitting bread among his disciples and crumbs clinging between his fingertips.

As earthy and concrete as that is how he seeks to give you his bread. It's as concrete as our bodily hope.

Praying for daily bread is not some pious activity for a monk in northern Spain, it's not some abstract domain for a dogmatician, it's not the speculation of philosophers, it's the daily prayer of daily disciples who depend on him every day to provide.

We see our need, we see his gift, we respond with gratitude and react with generosity.

And if you understand the daily bread of Matthew 611 in this way, you'll pray like the disciples, Lord, give us this bread always.

And so I close, until that great day when there'll no longer be the need to receive our bread between thorns and thistles, or from the sweat of our own face, fill our stomachs, when, in other words, the curse of Genesis 3 is finally dissolved in the fullness of redemption.

And on that day, there'll neither be hunger, nor famine, nor thirst, nor sorrow, nor sin.

It will be as God intended, and we will be as God intends for us to be. But until then, as Octavius Winslow says, until then, we have

God's promise. And until then, we have God's precept. And until then, we know our limit.

And we have our exhortation, and with our desire, we have our prayer. Our promise is, your bread will be sure,

O Lord. Our precept is, be content with the things you have. Our limit is, God will supply all of your need.

Our exhortation is, having food and clothes, with these, we will be content. Our desire is, neither poverty nor riches,

Proverbs 30. The prayer is this, give me today my daily bread, amen?

Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word.

Lord, bless us with this faith, with this response. With the gratitude that actually hallows your name, and advances your kingdom, and carries out your will on this earth.

Forgive us, Lord, that technology, and society, and the world, and our own flesh, and the evil one, make it so easy to have our fill and forget you.

To see from our own hands all that we have, and not see it from your hand. To receive it as something we have to clutch, and seize, and lay hold of, rather than something that is freely given, to a creature who is simply receiving what you provide.

May we, on the one hand, Lord, look at the green grass that grows, or the oil that comes from the vineyard, or the birds with their mouths open, for the springtime feed, or the thirsty soil after a winter thaw, or the wild donkeys in the mountainscape that quench their thirst, or the stork that builds its nest high in the fir tree.

May we see that, in one sense, we are no different than they, for we are all creatures dependent upon our creator.

And yet, in every sense, we are different than any other creature, for we alone are your image bearers. To not just receive from you, but to give of you.

To not just receive what you provide, but to steward all that you have given, so that we might serve you and glorify your name, advance your kingdom and bless our neighbor, and bring many that are dwelling in darkness and hate you, though they receive every gift from you, even their own breath.

That we might bring them out of that domain of darkness into your light. Thank you that you are good, you are wise.

Thank you that, though I don't know every need of my brother and sister in this room, I do know that you are faithful to provide, as you always have been.

For you cannot change, and you are the same yesterday, today, and will be the same forever. And therefore, we are not consumed.

We thank you, Lord, and we pray for the mercy and the faithfulness to pray with sincere gratitude for you to give us, even this day, our bread.