“Our Daily Everything”
Matthew 6:11
April 5, 2009
Bill Hybels begins his book Too Busy Not to Pray with these words: “Prayer is an unnatural activity. From birth we have been learning the rules of self reliance and self sufficiency. Prayer flies in the face of such deep seated values…. It is an assault on independent living. To people in the fast lane determined to make it our own, prayer is an embarrassing interruption. Prayer is alien to our proud human nature. Yet somewhere, someplace we all reach the point of falling on our knees, bowing our heads and fix our attention on God and pray.”
In Matthew 6, Jesus in His “Sermon on the Mount” teaches us how to pray. For those joining us for the first time, we’ve talked about how the “Lord’s Prayer” was never given to us by Jesus so we could mindlessly rattle it off and move on; in fact, when you read His set-up to the prayer, we find that the way so many people use it is exactly, perfectly, directly the opposite of what Jesus intended. It’s not a prayer so much to recite in rote fashion as it is a model for how we ought to pray, the elements that good praying ought to include.
So far, we’ve said that to pray effectively:
• I must recognize the power—and the point—of prayer.
Prayer isn’t about me, first and foremost; it is an act of worship, which is by definition about God. That’s why Jesus spends time telling us how not to pray, and how not to worship; if we do anything we do to glorify ourselves, we are misguided in our praying.
• I must approach God rightly.
There is a reverence we must attach to the name of God; when we invoke His name, we do so with seriousness. “Taking God’s name in vain” isn’t first and foremost about “cussin’”; it’s about taking His name on our lips without the appropriate reverence in our hearts and minds.
• I must have God’s priorities as my own.
I don’t begin praying with a laundry list of my needs, but I begin my praying with a determination that God’s character, kingdom, and cause are more important to me than anything else.
Today, we discover that to pray effectively, I must recognize that ultimately, the Provider of my needs is God—and that I am needy!
This petition is about our physical lives. When thinking about the needs of our bodies, we can err on either side of the equation. Life is about far more than the body—contrary to what our TV shows and magazines and media would have us believe sometimes. Diet books abound. Exercise videos litter our shelves. Magazines glorify the physically beautiful and ignore the ugly. TV programs and movies accent the importance of looking and living fit. It isn’t really a stretch to say that Americans have come to worship the physical body.
But at the same time, God created our bodies and declared them “good”. And those bodies need to be sustained; they are the temples of the Holy Spirit, and God expects us to use our bodies to glorify Him (I Corinthians 6). The upkeep of our bodies is an important thing!
I’m indebted to Dr. John MacArthur for today’s outline; the outline is his, the sermon is mine; if the sermon were his, it’d be a lot better!
I. The Substance of our Petition – “Bread”
Fair question: why do we need to pray for bread? Many Americans—present company of course excluded…ahem—could stand to do with less bread than they currently consume. Karen brought home some leftovers from the speech tournament, including bags of delicious dinner rolls, etc. Praying for bread last week would seem superfluous in the Harvey household, wouldn’t it? We can hear this request coming from an Ethiopian Christian or a Cambodian believer, but really…we live in America, right? If we were only praying about the food we eat, we can think of prayers that might be at least as fitting:
• “Give us this day the grace to push away from the table.”
• “Lord, help us stop wasting so much food.”
• “Give us the grace to eat broccoli, and not simply French fries and Twinkies.”
• “Give the starving in Sudan their daily bread.”
Famously, we’ve lived through a couple years of drought in Georgia (pretty much ever since I’ve lived here). On our worst, most pessimistic day, did any of us seriously worry, “I fear I’ll starve”? “The land of plenty”? How about, “the land of wretched excess”? Want to have an eye-opening experience? Ask a missionary about shopping at Publix instead of shopping in a foreign country. We have dozens of varieties of fruit snacks, for goodness’ sake—contrasted with shopping in most foreign countries, where your choice of meat might be whatever type of animal was most recently slaughtered locally. So when we come to this part of the prayer, we can sort of just skip on by, right? Wrong!
Martin Luther points out that this prayer for “bread” encompasses symbolically all of the things that we legitimately need for the preservation of our lives. Prayer for bread signifies prayer for all legitimate needs. We need food, of course, but there are so many other things that we need. And yet, this is a prayer for necessities. It is not a prayer for luxuries. Funny how Americans have redefined “necessities” these days… In an article entitled Things We Can't Live Without: The List Has Grown in the Past Decade, the good folks from the Pew Research Council discuss the results of a poll taken in 2006, comparing it with a similar poll taken in 1996, distinguishing in the minds of Americans what they rate as “necessities” compared with what they rate as “luxuries”. I’ve reproduced the form on the screen, but note one interesting thing: every item listed was considered a “necessity” by more Americans in 2006 than it was in 1996. Every item went up. Some items that Pew Research didn’t even think to put on the list in 1996 had come, ten years later, to be considered necessities by a significant percentage of Americans, topped by the cell phone, which almost half three years ago considered a necessity (and undoubtedly in the ensuing three years, it’s more than half now). According to us, most of us simply cannot live without microwaves, TVs, and air-conditioned vehicles. Even 1/3 of us can’t make it without cable/satellite TV! Frankly, we’d be smarter if we tossed our TVs!
But when we pray for “daily bread”, we acknowledge this: every good thing we have comes from a gracious God. And so this is more than a request; it is an affirmation of faith, recognizing that apart from the gracious hand of God, we lack at the most basic level what we need to exist, and yet acknowledging as well that He is the Giver, the Sustainer, the Provider of all our needs. Which leads to our second point:
II. The Source of the Granting of our Petition – “God”
Remember the context of this prayer: “Our Father”. When we pray for our daily bread, it is as children asking a father to meet legitimate needs. What kind of father, if his child asks for a fish, will give him a rock, Jesus asked. God is love, and He desires communion with us; He’s not some celestial ATM machine, dispensing what we need mechanically at our request. He is Father…and that makes all the difference in the world.
Every person on earth, whether he understands it or not, is dependent upon God for everything. When things are going well in our lives, we tend to think we’ve gotten where we’ve gotten, and accomplished what we’ve accomplished, as a result of our brains or talents or efforts. But behind everything is the Source: God.
Here’s what God said to the people of Israel through Moses, as recorded in Deuteronomy 18:
11 “Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, 12 lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, 13 and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, 14 then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, 15 who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, 16 who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. 17 Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ 18 You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day.
I’ve been on an atheist website this week; one of my new favorite Christian apologists had been invited to post a piece there defending Christian faith. And he argued his points, and then the atheists shot back with theirs. One of the points of contention was the argument the theologian made about God being the best explanation for the origin of the universe—boy, did that set ‘em off. And yet, when all the scientists have made their observations, figured their calculations, and hypothesized their theories, there remains mystery, the unexplainable, the need for faith either in the chance machinations of an unplanned universe populated by eternal matter, or faith in a timeless Mind Who designed the universe and everything in it. Slice it how you will: it comes back to this type of choice. The Bible picture is that the universe exists and holds together because there is a God Who is back of it all—and that is a far more intellectually satisfying proposition for me than the idea that the complexity of everything we experience is explained as a cosmic roll of the dice. Please watch Ben Stein’s movie “Expelled” if you haven’t yet.
And note that God provided for man prior to His creating man; in Genesis 1, we read that the plants and animals were already around when God created Adam and Eve. God provided ahead of time for His people—and if we are His people today, He still will!
III. The Supplication of our Petition – “Give”
This word recognizes need on our parts. Think about this: we hear people spoken of as being “creative”; some are artists, others musicians; I’m a writer of sorts, and people like this are labeled “creative”. Fact is, I’ve never created a thing in my life, nor has any musician or artist or software engineer or architect. No…we are all arrangers and re-arrangers. Man cannot create a thing; he can take what has been created by God and rearrange it in interesting ways, to be sure. But for us to have, God must give, because we create nothing.
Here’s a telling mark for the child of God: how aware am I of my utter need for God? The old hymn says, “I Need Thee Every Hour”; the new chorus says, “I’m desperate for You”. Lack of praying as we ought to pray betrays our self-confidence, our misplaced belief that we are sufficient in ourselves.
I have a confession to make: I am a “spiritually-violent” man. Say what? Well, a friend of mine speaks in conferences all over the country, often at denominational gatherings, sometimes denominational meetings for more liberal church groups. At one such gathering, my friend was taken aback at the continued use of the term “spiritual violence”. Huh? Here’s the definition: spiritual violence is “any attempt to make a person believe he is sick, sinful, or unworthy of God’s love.” I guess that makes me spiritually violent, because apart from Jesus Christ, every person is spiritually sick, utterly sinful, and while not worthless, unworthy of God’s love. Excuse my spiritual violence, but you need Jesus! When I pray, “give”, I am acknowledging my spiritual need. Next, note
IV. The Seekers of the Petition – “Us”
Only the follower of Jesus Christ can pray this prayer or make this particular petition, because relationship forms the basis of prayer. Why does God have any obligation to those who are not His own? Why should He give us anything? It is surely this: we are His children by faith in Jesus.
It’s not that we are helpless; it’s rather that we understand that the strength and abilities we do have to provide for our needs come exclusively from the hand of God. Everything we have and everything we need comes from the hand of God. And God is committed to His children, to meeting our needs in a way He does not feel the same commitment to others in the world. Consider Psalm 37:
Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. 4 Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart… 25 I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread.
It’s interesting—and sad—that the greatest cause of famine and disease in this world is not a lack of resources. Every nation on earth with proper technology has the resources to provide for its own people—and yet, for instance, India is a poverty-racked nation, with thousands starving and diseased. Why? Blame can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the false religion espoused by the majority of the Indian population: Hinduism. Does that sound harsh? Study that faith, its presuppositions, its doctrine, its understanding of the individual and his place in the cosmos; Hinduism places astonishingly little value on human life, as human life is simply one stage in the cycle of reincarnation, and disease and suffering necessary elements in the process. To attempt to interfere with such is to interfere with one’s karma and thereby do spiritual harm. This is why the answer to suffering in the world isn’t more technology or foreign aid, at least not at root, but rather the gospel of Jesus Christ.
But notice: just as we are instructed by Jesus to pray, not “My Father”, but “Our Father”, we are also urged to pray, “give US…” We are not merely individuals with little concern for others; no, we are people in community, people who need each other, people whose relationship with God in Christ is indelibly colored by our relationships with other people. Why do some of us sit around tables on Sunday morning? Because we believe that the other people who are part of Red Oak church are important to our experience of God, that we need each other to understand and worship and know God as fully as we ought. Jesus is urging us that our praying not be selfish, even as we ask God, legitimately, to meet our needs; we ask Him to meet the needs of others as well.
But God knows what we need, according to Jesus in Matthew 6:8—so why do we have to ask? Question: do you know, as a parent, that your kids love you, or as a spouse that your spouse loves you? Is it sufficient merely to hear this once? No…we are in relationship, and relationship requires communication, and communication sometimes involves the appropriate repetition of things already known, not so much to inform, but to reinforce. I don’t tell Karen I love her because she doubts it, but because she needs to hear it and I need to say it. God doesn’t per se need our prayers, but we need to communicate to Him, even though He knows us better than we know ourselves. I don’t want my kids to only come to me when they are in need; I want them to converse with me, to demonstrate their love for me not just because of what I provide for them, but because they genuinely love and care for me.
V. The Schedule of God’s Provision – “Daily”
In antiquity, many laborers were paid daily for their work. A few days’ illness could spell real trouble, if the family in question were living week-to-week, or even day-to-day. And yet, we live in a different age, and in a different country, the “land of plenty”. What’s the point of “daily”, then? It is surely this: we need to remember that God meets our needs on a daily basis, that we need to rely on Him every day to meet our needs. It is lifted up as a virtue to be “self-sufficient”, and we can certainly understand that able people ought to pull their weight, work with their hands, and provide for themselves a living; surely all of those are preferable to depending on the government or on others when we have it in our power to provide for ourselves. That said, not a day ought to go by when we fail to recognize that our very breath, every necessity of life, is provided by our God.
Sometimes Christians, if we’re not careful, try to live out our Christian experience on the basis of yesterday’s capital. What’s God doing in your life right now? How’s He changing your attitudes, altering your perspective, refocusing your priorities, cleaning up your speech, humbling your pride, and molding your character right now? In saying, “daily”, Jesus reminds us that the life of the Christ-follower is to be one of daily submission, daily request, daily faith.
When we, as God’s children by virtue of faith alone in Jesus Christ alone, have acknowledged Who God is, “our Father” on the basis of relationship, yielding ourselves to not only praying, “Your will be done on earth as in Heaven”, but also committed to doing it, we have full liberty to expectantly come to God and pray, “Give us this day our daily…everything”.
Applying It
• The Approachability of God
Our God is an approachable God Who cares for our true needs, as a loving Father.
• The Need for Gratitude
Does gratitude for God’s provision characterize our lives, or does grumbling over what we don’t have?
• The Need for Contentment
Contentment: are we content with the “daily bread” that God provides, or are we frustrated by the “daily filet mignon” He may not? Luke 12:15 – “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions”. Lack of contentment is not condition-specific; there are filthy rich folks who never have enough, and there are poor-as-dirt folks who are plenty content, because the issue isn’t the state of my bank account, but the state of my heart.
• My Concern for Others—and Their “Daily Bread”
If we are praying for “our” daily bread—are you praying for the “daily bread” of more than simply yourself?
TalkAbout
• How can we strike the right balance between asking God for our “daily bread”, and selfishly concerning ourselves exclusively with “our needs”?
• Look down the list of “Applying It”. Which of these do you find most difficult, and why?
