A new perspective on “our daily bread.”
God has brought me several reminders this week not to forget that “daily beggar” attitude. This morning, I received another: a great devotional from the folks at Preserving Bible Times. Here it is, in part:
In the arid setting [that the Israelites wandered through for forty years], there are no safety nets for food, no alternative sources of supply. Without God’s daily provision of manna, this people group would have quickly perished from the face of the earth. That is the corporate historical context that Jesus intends us to evoke in our hearts and minds when we ask for our daily bread.
In this Wilderness of Zin setting, daily manna symbolizes a conscious, continual posture of always acknowledging being totally dependent on the Lord for everything. In giving us that daily bread remez, it’s as if Jesus intends us to be praying,
“Lord, please provide our community of faith with the necessities we require this day, and may we live today acknowledging our need to be totally sustained by You because we are indeed truly dependent upon You for everything.”
Importance of Bread In our twenty-first-century Western culture, we have lost the first-century significance of bread. In Bible times, bread was absolutely essential for every Middle Eastern meal. People did not have forks and spoons to eat with when they reclined to eat. Rather people used a piece of bread torn from a loaf for dipping into the various common food bowls…. Bread was the vehicle that brought food from the table to your mouth to sustain your life.Insignificance of Bread Today In Western culture today, bread has become insignificant. …When we stop for fast food, our mind and our stomach is usually much more focused on what’s between the two pieces of bun than on the bun itself. When we only have a salad for lunch as part of being weight and health conscious, often times we intentionally avoid bread. How does all this affect our understanding of what it means to ask our Father for our daily bread?
Some Implications to Consider:
• This “Lord’s Prayer”—better called the “Disciples’ Prayer”—is a prayer that the community prays for the community. In the Middle East, the community is always more important than the individual. Consequently, a person would always sacrifice personal rights for the benefit of the community. Not so in the West! Here the individual always considers himself or herself to be more important than the rest of the community. …This begs the question: What kind of lenses, filters and presuppositions are we implicitly bringing to the praying of this Disciples’ Prayer?
• The request to give us this day our daily bread is the only part of The Disciple’s Prayer that deals with material things. ... Thus when it comes to material things, Jesus is encouraging His disciples to pray for today’s community necessities, not today’s niceties or creature comforts. When you reflect on your last 100 prayers for material things, how many of them were only for daily necessities? How many were for what the community of faith needs, not what your particular individual needs are?
• Maybe we are not even praying for our daily bread any more. Could it be that we collectively feel that we are quite able to furnish our own bread? Thus, it may not even be in our consciousness that God is somehow still needed to provide us with our daily bread.
The nature of our prayers always reveal something about our (often flawed) view of God. If that is true, what might our “we-don’t-need-to-be-asking-for-daily-bread” prayers say about our understanding of the scope of God’s Providence? What might our prayers (or the lack thereof) also be revealing about us?
• There is great wisdom as well as practical guidance to be found in God’s Word in the sequence of the words and thoughts that unfold in a passage. This petition to give us this day our daily bread is not the first sentence of the Disciples’ Prayer. Note the immediate thought development context that precedes this request as recorded in Luke 11:2-4:
- First, Jesus has us start by collectively coming to our Father. That usage – a form of “Daddy” – conveys an approachable, personal Father in an intimate family setting.
- Next, we immediately acknowledge hallowed be Your name, a phrase that reminds us of God’s holy nature as well as our calling to revere and defend His Name.
- Then Jesus has us acknowledge Your Kingdom come. This reminds us that as His disciples, it is all about His Kingdom, not our kingdoms (organizations, businesses, churches, etc.). It’s all about doing “the Lord’s work the Lord’s way” – not doing our work our way.Only with those attitudinal postures in place, and with our souls continually affirming these three spiritual realities are we then in the right posture to now corporately ask for our daily bread.
Thank You, Lord, that you do provide my daily bread, even when I forget to ask and, worse yet, forget to appreciate it.
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