And now do please keep your Bibles in hand and turn with me this time to Matthew’s gospel, chapter 6. We continue our meditations on Sunday mornings on the teaching of Jesus on the important subject of prayer as we’ve been surveying His teaching on this subject in the gospel records. And we’ve been slowly making our way, for the last several weeks, phrase by phrase, through the Lord’s Prayer, and we’ve come today to the fourth petition, the fourth request of the Lord’s Prayer – “Give us this day our daily bread.”
You may remember from a few weeks ago we said that the Lord’s Prayer follows the same pattern established by the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments focus on our duty toward God, and then the last six commandments our duty toward our neighbor. Jesus summarized the Ten Commandments, these two tables of the Law, when He said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and all your mind and all your strength and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” These are the two parts of God’s Law. And what the moral law articulates as Christian duty, the will of God expressed in obligations, the Lord’s Prayer translates into Christian devotion as we ask for the grace we need that will enable us to do all His holy will. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us there are no duties commanded in the Law of God that we ought not to pray for the grace to perform. Obedience is always the fruit of God’s grace at work within us, to will and to work for His good pleasure.
And given that structure – love to God first and then love to neighbor – the fourth petition clearly serves as the hinge, the pivot point in the Lord’s Prayer, between prayers focused on God and His glory and His will and His kingdom, and prayers focused on ourselves and our needs and the needs of our neighbors. And as such, standing at the nexus, the hinge of the Lord’s Prayer, the fourth commandment teaches us some vital lessons about the Christian life and about our priorities for prayer more broadly. I want to highlight five of them this morning. First of all, this fourth petition teaches us that life is embodied. The fourth petition speaks to physical needs, to bodily needs. Life is embodied. Secondly, it teaches us that life is a gift – “Give us this day our daily bread.” It is all gift from the grace of God. So life is embodied, life is a gift. Thirdly, life is shared – “Our Father, give us this day our daily bread.” Something we pray for in common, not only for our own needs but for the needs of our neighbor. Fourthly, this fourth petition teaches us that life is momentary; that is, though we ought to plan wisely and make provision for the future, none of us know the span of our own lives, so we pray mindful of today’s needs – “Give us this day our daily bread.” And then finally, this prayer is a prayer that teaches us that life is modest. It is modest. We are not praying for riches or power or prestige. What are we praying for? We are praying for bread. There is a modesty here for the basic staples and necessities of life we are being taught to pray.
So there’s the outline. Do you see it? Life is embodied, life is a gift, life is shared, life is momentary, and life is modest. Before we begin to unpack all of that, let’s pray and then we’ll read the Scriptures together. Let us pray.
Holy Spirit, we pray for Your work now amongst us that You would give light to our understanding, that Your Word now before us might burn within our hearts, and that we may see more of Christ in His glory and sufficiency to save. For we ask this in His name, amen.
Matthew chapter 6. We’re going to read from the ninth verse. This is the Word of God:
“Pray then like this:
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
Amen, and we praise God that He has spoken in His holy, inerrant Word.
It is sometimes said that the fourth petition, “Give us this day our daily bread,” is something of an anticlimax right here in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer. After all, the first three petitions, they really soar, don’t they? We begin with the wonder of our adoption into the household and family of God. We address the Almighty, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as Abba, Father, our own Father; our Father in heaven. And then naturally we move on to adoration – “Hallowed be Your name.” We bend our knees before Him and we adore Him, mingling our voices with the angels and with the Church triumphant around the throne in ascribing glory to the name of God. And then we bow before Him as our King, praying that His saving dominion might reach as far as the curse is found – “Your kingdom come.” And then as we confess His sovereign prerogatives, we acknowledge they take priority above our own and we join our Savior Himself in praying, “Not my will but Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” And then having scaled the heights, having soared above the clouds, suddenly in the fourth petition we are back to earth with a bump. “Give us bread.” It’s an anticlimax.
I actually went looking for examples of literary anticlimax that maybe I could use as an illustration at this point in the sermon. I discovered in my search that anticlimax is also the name for a genus of snail, which for me at least was sort of an anticlimax in itself! “That’s just perfect,” I thought! Here I am in search of Shakespeare and all I find are snails. I want Melville; I get mollusks instead. We’ve been talking about God, His praises, His kingdom, His will, and now we’re talking about bread. It’s jarring, isn’t it? It’s also brilliant, rhetorically brilliant, to make the next thing for which we pray not the forgiveness of sin, not the overcoming of temptation, not deliverance from the devil, but daily necessities, bodily needs. To put something this mundane, this ordinary, this apparently trivial at the absolute center of the Lord’s Prayer sandwiched between these two titanic themes – the glory of God on the one hand and the Christian’s conflict with sin and Satan on the other hand – to structure the prayer that way is genius because it anticipates and provides correctives for a number of blind spots and misunderstandings to which we are far too prone. And Jesus here, by structuring the prayer in this provocative way, makes sure we do not miss the lesson, the first of which is to remind us that life is embodied.
Life is Embodied
Life is embodied. And that isn’t nearly so obvious as it may first appear. Of course life is embodied. That’s virtually a definition of natural life, isn’t it? We have bodies! But we need to realize that we live in a time where our bodies have never been more routinely disrespected and stripped of meaning or authority. The essential me, the real you, our culture tells us right now, has very little to do with biology. Your true self is something you discern for yourself, and then if the identity you claim does not comport with the configuration of your anatomy, well then we are told you should feel completely free to remake yourself as you please. Physiology is malleable and plastic and exerts no authority over us as we search for identity. That’s what our society is saying. So men may “transition” or women may “transition” into the opposite gender. Or they may even claim to identify as neither male nor female and so seek to modify their bodies to mirror some sort of new non-binary identity, whatever that might mean.
Of course there are even more pervasive, though less obviously radical expressions of this same pervasive trend, this growing disregard for embodied life. Think for example about social media, the various social media platforms we’ve all had to become much more familiar with over the course of the pandemic. I think we ought to be truly grateful for these technologies that have allowed us to maintain some semblance of connection and communication and fellowship amidst lockdown and distancing and all the rest that we have had to come to terms with. But haven’t we also seen these same technologies become substitutes for real community? They leave us operating online in a virtual life as disembodied selves, as mere minds. And that means that the self that we project online needn’t look or reflect anything of the truth about who we actually are. It’s a persona that we are invited to create. It’s a kind of neo-Gnosticism that says the real you is who you make yourself into.
But the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer calls us to focus not on the abstractly spiritual, not on minds, not on emotions even, not on sin or Satan, not even on salvation. In the fourth petition we focus on the basic needs of the human body. Let that sink in for a moment. God is concerned about the basic necessities of your body and He invites you to talk to Him about that stuff, about the mundane, daily needs. Some of the early Church fathers were actually rather scandalized by the whole idea, all the way to the point in fact that they could only handle the fourth petition by spiritualizing what Jesus was saying. He must mean the bread of the Word, or He must mean Jesus Himself who is the Bread of Life. He can’t mean bread for our bellies, surely. It can’t be that mundane. But that’s exactly what He does mean, because bodies matter to God. Bodies matter to God. Christians are not Gnostics. We are not dualists. The body is not a prison from which we are seeking escape. Our bodies are essential parts of what make us human, and the fourth petition reminds us God cares about our bodies as well as our brains.
After all, it is in our bodies that we will fulfill the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. We hallow God’s name with our lips and all the works of our hands. We serve in the advancement of His kingdom as we take the Good News across the street and around the world so that Paul will sing, “How beautiful are the” – what? – “are the feet of them that bring good news.” We submit to the will of God when, like Jesus, even though our flesh, our bodies shrink back from suffering, we say, “Not my will but Yours be done.” The Christian life is an embodied life. That’s why Paul will call us in Romans chapter 12 verse 1, in view of God’s mercies, to offer “your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Spiritual worship involves the offering up of your flesh, your hands and feet and eyes and lips and ears, to the praise and service of God.
Bodies matter, do you see, which means by the way we need to resist the idea that the real self has nothing to do with our bodies, that our anatomy carries no intrinsic authority in defining who we are. Genesis is talking about bodies, not chosen gender identities when it says, “God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” And there are other implications here as well. “To pray this fourth petition,” writes J.I. Packer, “is to accept one’s body as part of God’s good creation, to act as it’s steward and manager and gratefully to enjoy it as one does so. Thus we honor its Maker. The Bible opposes all long-faced asceticism. Well did some rabbis teach that at the Judgment, God will hold against us every pleasure that He offered us and we neglected.” Did you hear that last phrase? Let me say it again. Isn’t it striking? “God will hold against us every pleasure that He offered us and we neglected.” God made our bodies to enjoy all the riches of this life to His glory and praise, and when we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we are affirming the goodness of food and drink and bodily needs and every lawful pleasure that God gives us in this life. “Give us this day our daily bread,” is a reminder that, as the apostle Paul puts it in 1 Timothy 6:17, “God richly provides us with all things to enjoy.” A dure, joyless Christianity does not reflect the teaching of Holy Scripture. So the fourth petition teaches us that life is embodied and we should celebrate that rather than shrink from it.
Life is a Gift
Secondly, when we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we are praying in the full acknowledgement that life is a gift. It’s a gift. It is a dependent life. We are reminded to pray, “Our Father give us.” Now we like to tell ourselves, don’t we, that we can be anything we want to be. We are all exceptional, after all. And given a level playing field, any one of us could be president or CEO or captain of the team. Right? Isn’t that the narrative? Can do, self-made entrepreneurialism. It’s deeply embedded in our culture. We are taught that hard work and a will to succeed are all you need to “make it” in life. And people who have managed it and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and by the sweat of their brows and by the calluses on their hands, they sort of become our heroes, don’t they. And in terms of civic life and economics and sporting achievement, there’s a great deal of wisdom in all of that. But – and this is really important – that same deeply embedded cultural narrative sometimes makes us resistant to the idea that we are to live, and we do live, every moment of every day depending on the grace of God and not simply on the strength of our own arm. We want to say, “I built this myself. I made my own way. Look what my hands have made. I earn this money. It’s mine. I deserve this lifestyle. It’s mine by right. I own it. Hands off!”
But that is the stance of an atheist or a pagan, not a child of God. Those who call God “Abba, Father” know that even the successes we enjoy are ours only by the blessing of heaven, and every single one of them is fragile and fleeting. In fact, the more material prosperity we enjoy, the more a true child of God needs the attitude expressed in the fourth petition because it calls us to remember that riches are a snare, material prosperity brings with it many temptations, the love of money, Paul wrote, “is a root of every kind of evil.” And so the more we have, the more urgently we need to bow before the Father in a humble confession of His prerogatives to give or withhold however He pleases. The fourth petition teaches us that every single morsel that passes your lips, every dime that you spend, every time you click the AC down a notch or pull a new t-shirt over the head of your toddler or pump more gas into the tank of your car, every time, God is showering undeserved grace upon you. After all, 1 Corinthians 4:7, “What do you have that you have not received? If then you have received it, why do you boast as if you have not received it?” It’s all gift. It’s all gift. Life is embodied. Life is a gift.
Life is Shared
Thirdly, life is shared. When we pray, “Our Father, give us our daily bread,” we ought never to pray for our own needs without remembering we are part of a community in need. There is an expression of solidarity with the poor and the hungry and the vulnerable baked into the fourth petition so that we can’t pray for God to help us without asking Him to help them too. And the challenge in that of course is that if we pray in those terms we better have the integrity to be willing to be part of the answer to our own prayer and go and help where and when we can. We need to remember, I think, the words of the Lord Jesus in Matthew 25. “The Son of Man, when He comes in His glory, will place the sheep on His right and the goats on His left and the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father! Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ And then the righteous will answer Him asking, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you a drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick and in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, as you did to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” The fourth petition teaches us to pray for and to care about all those who need daily bread because life is embodied and life is a gift and life is shared. It is shared in common. And so we are to care for our neighbors and do what we can to see to their needs.
Life is Momentary
And then fourthly, this petition teaches us that life is momentary. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Pray for this day’s bread. Jesus is not for a moment suggesting there is anything wrong with forward planning or making judicious investments or anticipating future needs. Not at all. The Scriptures, remember, commend Joseph for storing up grain for the years of famine. The parable of the talents uses financial prudence as a positive picture of a faithful and fruitful Christian life. Neither are we being called to a type of subsistence living. You know, hand to mouth, day by day, not knowing where our next crust is coming from. That’s not the point of the fourth petition. But rather we are being called to a life of daily dependence for each day’s provision because none of us are immune to the fleeting fragility of life. Are we? None of us are immune.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal.” That’s life, isn’t it? Things don’t last. Moth and rust destroy. Things break. Thieves break in and steal. Do not put your confidence in stuff. “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of things.” “All flesh is like grass and the wind blows over it and it is gone and it’s place remembers it no more.” Life is fleeting, and so we pray about today’s bread. Today. We do it because of James 4:13. You remember James 4:13? “You do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” And so today, moment by moment, Jesus wants us to say to God, “I need Thee every hour! I need Thee, O I need Thee! Every hour I need Thee! O bless me now my Savior, I come to Thee!” Do you pray like that? Aware today, for every breath, for every beat of your heart, for every crumb that you consume that you depend upon your Father’s gracious provision? “I need Thee every hour.”
Life is Modest
Life is embodied. Life is a gift. Life is shared. Life is momentary. Finally, life is modest. Life is modest. “Give us our daily bread.” We’re not praying for filet mignon; we’re praying for bread. We are praying for the basic staples. It’s not the finest food and drink. It’s not a prayer to live each day high on the hog. It’s not a prayer for health, wealth and prosperity. It’s a prayer for what we need today. Actually, the word Jesus uses translates as “daily” – “Give us this day our daily bread” – can mean “necessary” or “essential.” “Give us this day the bread we need for today.” So this is a prayer, do you see, it bows in humility before God and it says, “I want to be content with what you give me. Give me what I need and I will be content with what I have.” It’s the same lesson Paul himself learned in Philippians 4:11. “I have learned, in whatever circumstance I am, to be content. I know how to be brought low and how to abound in any and every circumstance. I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, absence and need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” This is the message of the fourth petition.
“Godliness with contentment,” 1 Timothy 6:6, “Godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out of the world, but if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content,” Paul says. “But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.” Jesus wants to spare you being pierced with many pangs. He is teaching you in the fourth petition the secret of godliness with contentment. “Give me whatever You purpose, and then give me the grace therewith to be content.”
“Therefore I tell you,” Jesus says, Luke 12, “do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens. They neither sow nor reap. They have neither storehouses nor barn, yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass which is alive in the field today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will He clothe you, O you of little faith? And do not seek what you will eat or what you will drink, nor be worried, for all the nations of this world seek after these things and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek His kingdom and these things will be added to you.” That’s the promise, the wonderful promise on which the fourth petition rests. Your Father already knows what you need. You can trust Him with your needs. Do you trust Him with your needs? And are you praying for the grace to be content with each day’s provision?
The Christian Life is a Thankful Life
So the fourth petition teaches us life is embodied, life is a gift, life is shared in common, life is momentary, and life is modest. The Christian life, at least, is modest. There’s just one last thing to say before we’re done. If all of that is true, then surely our Christian lives ought to be marked by one overriding attitude. Surely we ought to be profoundly thankful. Thankful. We ought to be grateful. Think about the person who is teaching us to pray these words, the Lord Jesus. He gave us this prayer. Didn’t He surrender His rights to all these things for us? Didn’t He? The One who is the image of the invisible God, the Word made flesh, had His body, His body brutalized and beaten and exposed to mockery and shame. And in agony He gave up His Spirit in death. The One who taught us to pray, “Give me bread for my daily needs,” cried, remember, on the cross in desperate need, “I thirst!” and did not have His thirst quenched. The One who called us into community, into a shared life, to care for one another as we have needs, wasn’t He left utterly alone, abandoned by His disciples, mocked by His accusers? “He came to His own,” John wrote, “and His own did not receive Him.” Even His Father in heaven, veiled His face from His Son so that Jesus would cry out in utter desolation, “Why have You forsaken Me?” He was poor without a place to call home. “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” And at the last, even what He had was stripped from Him till He was left hanging upon that cross utterly exposed while the soldiers who crucified Him gambled for His clothing.
When we see how the Son of God became a man in Jesus Christ and was stripped of all this, robbed of all of this, surrendered of all of this for us, brothers and sisters, let us give thanks for every crust that we enjoy. Let’s eat our bread each day with a grateful heart and see in every morsel of God’s gracious provision a concrete token, a little sermon preaching the love of Christ for us who cares not just for souls in the abstract, but for our bodies too. He died that we might live. He embraced in His body on the tree all the horrors of the curse so that one day, one day our mortal bodies might be made like His glorious body. “We shall not all sleep,” 1 Corinthians 15:51, “but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, for the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall all be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the Law, but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
That is our destiny, but only because Jesus embraced the opposite of everything we are taught to pray for in the fourth petition. And so when we pray it together, do you see it summons us to deep, Gospel gratitude. Everything we have – every stitch that you wear, every dime in your pocket, the roof over your head, every morsel that you eat proclaims to you the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord who was divested of all of it that He might be your Redeemer. So lift up your hearts and give praise to God for so great love and for such a great Savior. Let us pray together.
Father, please forgive us for our thankless hearts, for our presumption that takes what we have as though it were ours by rights rather than Your gift to us by grace. Teach us, we pray, a dependent life that prizes Your gifts and sees in every one of them a little sermon proclaiming Your love in Jesus who was robbed of all of it that we might live. For we ask this in His name, amen.