How many of you enjoy eating? We all do! I am sure. I certainly do.
Satisfying our taste buds is one of the great pleasures in life. And because it is, eating is always a great topic of conversation. Everyone loves to talk about food! In fact, if you ever find yourself in a room full of strangers, one sure way to break the ice and get people talking is to mention food.
Let me tell you a story.
A man with nine sons had a rule that Dad gets the last piece of chicken. If he doesn’t want it, the fastest fork wins. One night as all ten, eyed the final piece of chicken on the plate, a thunderstorm caused a brief electrical blackout. There was a scream in the dark, and when the lights came back on a few seconds later, the dad’s hand was on the chicken platter with nine forks sticking in it.
This brings me to my text this morning, verse 11 of Matthew 6, which says “give us, today, our daily bread”, where Jesus uses the popular subject of food to teach His listeners some very important principles of meaningful prayer.
We are all very familiar with the Lord’s Prayer. We say it so often that we don’t give much thought to it. We have learnt it the parrot fashion, and it’s over exposure has hardened our hearts to its richness.
Prayer is a conversation between God and us, whether it is in private or public. Prayer is a form of worship, and worship is also a form of prayer.
In Jesus’ time bread was used in every meal. And throughout the Bible we can find reference to bread.
When we pray: “give us today our daily bread” it is a prayer of dependency. We trust that God, our Father, is our provider.
It also means daily, not next week, not next month, bread today. It is a prayer of sufficiency.
Just before Jesus taught them how to pray at their request, people were listening to Jesus when he delivered the Sermon on the Mount. They all came from a culture that had great deal of history when it came to depending on God for their daily bread.
So when Jesus said this, I’m sure their Jewish heritage gave them all a mental flashback to the days when God delivered their ancestors from Egypt and was taken to the Promised Land.
The story of how the people of Israel had been protected from all ten of the plagues God sent to encourage the Pharaoh to let HIS people go is a reminder of God’s protection.
You remember the story of God parting the Red Sea so they could, cross on dry ground and then letting the waters come back together so as to drown the Egyptian army that was chasing them.
After seeing all that, after experiencing God’s provision and protection and deliverance, you would think these people would be willing to follow God anywhere. But, no, just like you and me they were very forgetful when it came to remembering God’s great faithfulness.
In Exodus 16:3 we find them actually complaining to Moses, saying God should have let them die where there was food, rather than bringing them out into the desert to die of starvation. God heard their moaning and groaning.
God gave them “manna” every morning. Everyday day God sent them bread from heaven for 40 years. So when Jesus taught them to pray, “Give us today our daily bread,” they remembered that their Heavenly Father had done this day after day for 40 years as he provided for the needs of His people.
And in a sense they still lived out this history because in those days it was customary to eat your daily bread in the morning, just as the nation of Israel had done in the days of Moses.
With this historical context in mind, I want to take a close look at these six words of our text. “Give us today our daily bread”. Because I think they contain four very important principles of meaningful prayer.
Firstly: They tell us that our Father God wants us to talk to Him every day.
Jesus is reminding us to speak to Our Father on a daily basis. Not only on special occasions or not just on Sundays. God wants to hear us.
He is our Father. He wants to know, how we are and what our needs are. Yes, you might say, Our
