Daily Bread

DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

 DAILY BREAD

Matt 6:9-13

9 "This, then, is how you should pray: "'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, 10 your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us today our daily bread. 12 Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.'

NIV

Here we have a request for daily bread. Much has been composed by our scholars of old regarding the meaning of the Greek word that has been translated bread. The point is, however this is not about a loaf of flour and water mix. True, this does represent a request for our daily needs being given to us by God. It demonstrates our dependence upon God for our daily supply or provisions. This is in opposition of us relying on our own abilities to provide for ourselves. Although we do in essence do just that by working for a paycheck which provides us with our homes, cars, food and other luxuries of life which we so desire to obtain. It could be that we get trapped into thinking we are the reason for what we have or don’t have. But here we are told to remember that we should ask God for our daily portion. This would imply we should not be so concerned about the future that we store up our resources for a rainy day or rather our old age. We are told over and over in different ways throughout the scripture regarding the danger of storing up for tomorrow, yet many Christians do exactly that, invest and store up by becoming partners with the world, in order to gain enough resources for their retirement, so they can sit back, take life easy and enjoy the golden years. Yet here we are told to ask for our daily bread, not weekly, monthly, yearly or enough to store up for the next day, week, month or year. The Jews would have been more than familiar with the story of God providing daily manna from heaven to understand the meaning asking God for our daily bread, that which sustains life. Yet within all this Jesus may well have been giving us an even greater insight in this daily bread. So we journey to the Gospel of John to see this meaning.

John 6:30-35

30 So they asked him, "What miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our forefathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written: 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'" 32 Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world."  34 "Sir," they said, "from now on give us this bread." 35 Then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.

NIV

We have a daily need for Jesus in our lives in order to sustain us. We would die without Jesus as our daily portion. This would imply that although we could say the “sinners prayer” confess our sin, accept him as Lord and Savior, then go about living the same life as any non-believer, suppling our own needs, we would die, if not physically, certainly spiritually. If we are just giving God lip service declaring our trust in him, not only for salvation, but for everything which sustains our lives, then we truly are in the process of spiritual death. We need Jesus daily. We need the bread of life each and every day, as God provided the bread from heaven for the children of Israel in the wilderness, we need Jesus each and every day as we travel through the wilderness of this world. As the wilderness did not provide any source of food for them and they needed the manna, the bread from heaven, this world does not provide anything for us which sustains our life. We need the bread from heaven, the true bread of life, Jesus. We cannot store him up, we cannot rely on yesterday’s spiritual experience, but we need our daily experience with Jesus. If we are fed only once a week on Sunday morning surely we are in a death spiral. We need a daily feeding, a daily experience with Jesus. This could look like a daily time set aside to read the word, to ingest the word, to seek out truths for our daily life as a believer. This could look like a time set aside for meditation and prayer, seeking his will for our daily life in this world. In every way, this will always look like daily time with Jesus. He is the sustainer of our lives. There is also something here in the word “give”. This Greek word means to bestow, to bring forth, to deliver, and to give. This means we cannot earn it, we cannot get it ourselves, and we must ask him to deliver it to us, to deliver the bread of life on a daily basis. This implies that we in and of ourselves cannot even understand the bread from heaven, Jesus, the word. He provides the Spirit who leads us into all truth. This could mean that in all our study, all our educational endeavors into the scriptures, we can only understand it, by the power of God, the Spirit. The proof of this is in those men who were what we called “revelation preachers” They had not attended bible colleges, in fact there were not many to attend, but they were revealed the truth by the revelation from the Spirit. Today we may have lost that portion of our daily bread and become dependent on men to teach us a form of the truth, their form of the truth. The fact is all we need is Jesus, our daily bread.