Series: Pray Like Jesus - The Lord’s Prayer
#3: “Give us this day our daily bread…”
Matthew 6:11 (NIV) and Matthew 6:25-26,31-34 (NIV)
By John Gill ~ March 12, 2023
Children often misunderstand the meaning of words, don’t they? Pastor John shared this story about saying the blessing before meals when he was a little boy. At that time he was not very fond of salad, and he couldn’t understand why they had to pray: “God is great, God is good, lettuce thank him for this food….”
I’m sure you’ve heard stories about kids misunderstanding the Lord’s Prayer. One child thought God’s name was Howard. “Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name….” Another child thought God must not like trains because the prayer recited each week said, “Lead us not into Penn Station.” And another was wise beyond her years when she prayed, “Our Father, who art in heaven, How’d you know my name?”
As we continue our reflections on the Lord’s Prayer, this week we come to the third petition: “Give us this day our daily bread.” You’d think the meaning of this request would be obvious, wouldn’t you? It seems pretty clear and unambiguous. But maybe not. The truth is, throughout the history of the Christian church, there has been a great deal of confusion about what this phrase, “Give us this day our daily bread” is really referring to.
There have been some who identify the ‘daily bread’ we ask for with the bread of the Lord’s Supper. They say we can commune with Christ every day through the bread of Holy Communion and that Christ is our daily bread.
Another interpretation says that the word ‘bread’ is not literal but symbolic. Instead of physical food (bread with butter on it), it refers to spiritual food – the Word of God that feeds and nourishes our souls. As an ancient manuscript put it, “Give us today, for food, the Word of God from heaven.”
Another explanation suggests that the bread we pray for is the mystical bread served at the Great Heavenly Banquet. Jesus himself once said, “Blessed is the one who shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God.”
We may not agree completely with these earlier interpretations, but they all have some merit and can enrich our understanding of what we mean when we pray for daily bread.
There was also some confusion over the meaning of the Greek word we translate as ‘daily.’ It appeared only in Matthew so there were no other uses to compare. Then in the early 20th century the word was found on a papyrus fragment that turned out to be a shopping list. The word was a reminder to buy supplies of certain foods for the coming day. So this part of the Lord’s Prayer can be translated as: “Give us the things we will need to eat for the coming day.” As plain and simple as that.
But just like with the first two phrases of the Lord’s Prayer, there is much more here than meets the eye. When we pray, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ what exactly are we saying?
First of all, we are saying that God cares for us as whole beings: body, mind, and soul. God is just as concerned with the needs of our physical bodies as he is with the state of our souls.
Often, we tend to think that the ‘spirit’ is good, and the ‘flesh’ is evil. In fact, in the early church there were groups that taught just that. They didn’t believe in the doctrine of incarnation, arguing that God would never pollute his divinity by taking on sinful human flesh. They insisted that, because Jesus was divine, he couldn’t have been born physically, nor could he have died physically.
After a lot of hot debate, the early church declared these teachings were heresies, and to counteract them, the church wrote the creeds that we still say today.
The teachings rejected by the early church were a contradiction of what scripture tells us. Over and over in the Gospels, we see Jesus’ concern for the physical, as well as the spiritual well-being of people: He healed people when they were sick. He fed them when they were hungry. He made the blind see and the deaf hear. He raised the dead to life.
And of course, God’s ultimate confirmation of the basic goodness of our human bodies is that he did choose to become human himself. As we read in Philippians, “Though he was in the form of God. . . . he emptied himself by taking the form of a slave and by becoming like human beings.” (2:6-7) In coming to us in human form, God blessed both the spirit and the flesh as being good. “Give us this day our daily bread” shows God’s concern for the needs of our whole being, soul and body.
This prayer also teaches us something else – that we should live “one day at a time.” As we heard, the real meaning of this passage is for God to grant us the food we will need for the coming day only. This is also what we heard in our scripture reading earlier: We are not to be anxious for tomorrow, but to trust God to provide for our needs day-to-day.
Maybe, Jesus is alluding to the experience of the Israelites in the wilderness. Remember how God sent manna from heaven – providing bread for their needs, but for only one day at a time. Remember also that the people tried to hoard their food, gathering more than they needed for one day, only to discover that it would spoil. In that story, God was teaching his people to rely totally on him to provide their daily needs. Maybe here Jesus is saying the same thing to us.
There is an ancient rabbinical saying: “He who possesses what he can eat today and says, ‘What shall I eat tomorrow?’ – is a man of little faith.” If that is true, then “Give us this day our daily bread,” is more than a plea that we not go hungry; it is a statement of profound trust and faith in the reliability of God to provide for all our needs.
To pray this part of the prayer also gives God proper respect. It reminds us that God is the ultimate provider and that all our blessings flow from his love and grace. We may plant a seed, but its life and growth come from God. Contrary to what we may like to believe, we are not self-sufficient. We are dependent on God. To pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ is to put our trust completely in God.
This part of the Lord’s Prayer also acts as an illustration of how prayer works. If we were to pray this prayer and then sit back and wait for bread to fall from the sky into our mouth, we would certainly starve. This petition reminds us that prayer and work go hand-in-hand – when we pray, we must also work to make our prayers come to pass. Yes, the manna fell from heaven, but people still had to go out and gather it. God gives life to seeds, but we have to plant and cultivate the seeds.
There’s a story that illustrates this truth. There was a man who came into possession of a patch of soil which was filled with weeds and rocks. He worked very hard to clear away the stones and to get rid of all the weeds. He fertilized the soil and planted a flower and vegetable garden which produced the most beautiful flowers and the finest vegetables anyone had ever seen.
One day, one of his religious friends came by his garden and said, “It’s wonderful what God can do with a bit of ground like this, isn’t it!”
“Yes,” replied the man who had worked so hard. “But you should have seen this piece of ground when God had it all to himself!” (Dick Sheppard)
God’s bounty and human toil work together. The grain which God provides is a miracle, indeed. But it is not yet bread. For us to have our “daily bread,” requires some effort on our part.
It is this way with our prayers as well. We must be willing to work in partnership with God if our prayers are to be answered. As William Barclay wrote, when we pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ “we are recognizing two basic truths – that without God we can do nothing, and – that without our effort, God can do nothing…for us!”
Finally, this petition reminds us of the corporate nature of our existence.
Just like we saw two weeks ago, in the Lord’s Prayer we are not selfishly praying only for ourselves, we are also praying for others…. We don’t say “Give me this day my daily bread,” but “Give us this day our daily bread.” In other words, we cannot be satisfied to have our needs met if others must go without.
The truth is, the problem of hunger in our world is not that there isn’t enough food to go around; there is more than enough food to feed everyone. The problem is with the distribution of food. Some have their ‘daily bread.’ Others do not.
In the play entitled Panic by Archibald MacLeish, a woman is listening to a news bulletin on the radio. It was telling about the problems of the Great Depression in America and the massive unemployment and hunger that resulted. Struck (convicted) by the realization that she had plenty to eat while others were starving, she cries out to God: “FORGIVE us our daily bread!”
God wants us to see to it that everyone has their daily bread! That’s the reason we, as a church, collect so much food for the less fortunate in our community. It’s why volunteers from this congregation go every month to prepare meals for the homeless at Hope Place. It’s why we provide meals each month for Palmetto House. It’s why we collect food to stock the cupboards of families living at Family Renew Community. It’s why we provide food for “Feed a Family” bags and the Food Pantries of Halifax Urban Ministries, Hinson Middle School, and others. It’s why we are staying after worship today to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that Halifax Urban Ministries will distribute. (By the way, you are encouraged to do that if you aren’t involved in Sunday School this morning.)
It’s why America, as a nation established on the values of faith, has created a safety net with various programs designed to ensure that no one in our country should ever go to bed hungry. Admittedly, those programs may not be perfect, but at least we as a society are trying to follow the teachings of Jesus.
We do all these things because we cannot pray “Give us this day our daily bread,” unless we see to it that everyone has enough bread to eat! In the Lord’s Prayer, we not only pray that we may receive our daily bread, but that we may share it, as well.
Give us this day our daily bread. There is much more to this simple phrase than meets the eye. When we pray this petition, it is a recognition of our dependence on God, body and soul. It is an affirmation of the partnership between God and you and me in answering our own prayers. And perhaps most profoundly, it is a commitment on our part that we will strive to make this petition a reality – not just for us alone, but for all of God’s children.
The grace that many of learned to say as children captures the spirit of this petition beautifully.
“God is great, God is good!
Let us thank him for our food.
By his hands we all are fed,
give us, Lord, our daily bread.” Amen.