Text: Matthew 6:11
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
Bread is a Sermon
We live in the wealthiest society ever, and I mean in the history of the human race. This is not a disputable question, especially when you factor in things like technological and production advances and the resulting lift to our standard of living.
Even so, most of us are only vaguely and intermittently aware of the historical strangeness of our time. Think about nearly any of the normal items you all likely have in your home. Take the humble refrigerator—possibly my favorite appliance with the exception of the waffle iron.
Frigidaire came out with the first self-contained refrigerator designed for normal home use in 1923. Most people didn’t have one until the late 30s or later, and it wasn’t until 1940 that they added the freezer.
So think: Before that, unless you cut blocks of ice from the local pond and packed them in sawdust in your cellar, you simply didn’t keep things all that cold. Unless you were a Roman emperor, who reportedly had ice carted from the Alps by donkeys.
So all of us normies would dig a root cellar deep enough to keep our produce in. You smoked and pickled and salted your meat, and you’d need a dairy cow, some pigs on the hoof, and a good number of chickens to approach the normal menu on a mundane Tuesday at any of our houses.
We live in the wealthiest society in the history of mankind, period. And yet—and maybe you don’t know this—you are radically vulnerable and dependent in ways that you may not be aware of.
Are you aware of the number of things that must go right for you to eat food two weeks from now? Think of how many semi-miraculous things must be true for most people in America to eat next week.
First of all plants have to continue being capable of turning sunlight and dirt and water into the noble potato. Think about that. Photosynthesis. Starlight-grown potatoes. Every potato you’ve ever eaten was pretty much made out of starlight.
Then you need farmers and harvesters and sorters and packers and sellers and truckers and grocers and ten-million other people I’m forgetting. We are radically dependent and vulnerable people; we just don’t know it. We just don’t live in awareness of it.
All of that entire chain that turned hydrogen into starlight into potatoes into food on your table—every process and person along that chain—was made by and is sustained and upheld moment to moment by a good Father, the Father of lights from whom comes down every good and perfect gift.
I’m all for self-sufficient homes, trust me. I’m all for getting that chain less dependent on many of those links. But what I’m saying is that even the guy with the totally self-contained homestead is radically dependent on things utterly out of his control.
This morning, as we continue our slow plod through the model prayer that the Lord Jesus teaches us in Matthew 6, we will focus on a single supplication which we are taught to pray to that Father, one that teaches us our dependence and what to do with it: Give us this day our daily bread.
Let’s read the whole section again, starting in Matthew 6:9. Look there with me, if you would. This is the Word of the Living 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.”-Matthew 6:9–13
Thus ends the reading of God’s Word; may he write it on our hearts by faith. Let’s pray.
Sons & Supplicants
Every part of the Lord’s Prayer takes us down to the roots of who we are and what we are for. We are sons of a Father, and that Father is holy. We are to desire that his name would be hallowed in all the earth—more, that his Kingdom would come and his will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. In this prayer, we are not only learning how to pray, but also what our lives are actually for—participation in, looking for, and longing for a Kingdom.
And as we turn the corner into seemingly lower things—daily bread, forgiveness, victory over temptation—it’s important to see that we are still down at the roots of who and what we are, and what we were made for.
We should ask the question: What does it teach us that we are to be a people who pray, “Our Father in heaven… Give us this day our daily bread?” What does this supplication teach us? As we think through that, we will understand what we praying for in this prayer and why we need to pray this prayer. First:
1. This prayer teaches us that we are utterly dependent.
Think of the highest-powered politician, the wealthiest business tycoon, the most famous celebrity on earth. Maybe think of Elon Musk and his latest net worth of nearly $200 billion. Think about the opportunities he has, the wealth, the insulation from trouble, the problems you have that he probably doesn’t.
Now understand this: Every one of even these seemingly untouchable and insulated people are almost comically dependent.
Deprive any of them of air for three to five minutes and no amount of money, successful startups, or Instagram followers will do a thing for them.
If they don’t spend roughly a third of each 24-hour cycle unconscious, they will eventually go crazy and die.
If they don’t drink a certain combination of hydrogen and oxygen, they will shrivel up like a raisin, and yes, die.
And for most of them the same thing will happen if you deprive them of attention for more than 6 minutes.
God built radical dependence into the world he made, so that nobody could honestly labor under the delusion of independent strength.
Food, our daily need for bread, teaches us this dependence. We are—and we are by design—supplicants. We exist on God’s charity and profligate goodness. God didn’t have to make it so. He could have made a world where people were little perpetual motion machines—he’s the author of all the rules; he could do it. Physics belongs to God.
When Jesus teaches us to pray for our daily bread, he teaches us to daily remember our neediness before God. We are to be a people who live with deep awareness of his daily grace: He causes the sun to keep shining, the wheat to keep growing, the leaven to keep leavening, the truckers to keep trucking—all of it is grace.
And so the first reaction you ought to have to this instruction is to be humbled before the God who feeds even his enemies. Be humbled. You are as fragile and dependent as a nursing infant at his mother’s breast. Don’t forget it.
2. This prayer teaches us that we are to be dependent—together.
Don’t do what we are so prone, so wired to do, in passages like this. Don’t atomize this text. Don’t atomize this prayer. Don’t turn this into a prayer for little individual people-units to pray for themselves.
No! Remember, we are praying in this prayer to our Father, and we are asking him to give us our daily bread. Keep those pronouns—us and our—in the forefront of your mind. This is a prayer of provision for your people, not just yourself.
It is shameful for a local church to have some hungry members, some full. That would be a shame. When we pray, we pray for our daily bread. And when God answers, he often does it through the God-imitating generosity of brothers and sisters to fellow brothers and sisters.
This prayer, then, teaches us to ask God: “Who is hungry in my congregation? Whom can I bless? Can I be the means by which the Lord answers this prayer for one of my brothers?”
Practically, brothers and sisters: Can you hire someone from this flock who needs a job? Can you frequent the business of some brother in this flock? Can you invest in them? We are a body. We abound and we lack as one thing.
3. This prayer teaches us that God cares about our needs.
I think all of us find ourselves from time to time falling into the error of thinking that the spiritual is the good, the bodily the bad. We can begin to think that what God cares about in his people is that we just think the right spiritual thoughts between our ears.
But certainly one thing a prayer like “Give us this day our daily bread” teaches us is that God is not a God of the spiritual alone, but the material. He is a God of yeasted dough and cooking hearths. He is a God of lunch.
God cares about all of us—about all that we are made of. Why? Well, because he made us this way, and he spoke his Very Good over all of it. This prayer teaches us not to be too spiritual for God—as if such a thing were possible.
We are to come to him with the kinds of things that our children come to us with. See, like I said the very first week we began to look at this prayer, the whole prayer is summed up in “Our Father,” to some extent. If we are really praying to our Father, then we should’t be surprised to find that he cares about the kinds of things a good dad would care about in his children.
What I’m saying is that one thing this prayer teaches us is that there is no shame in going to God and asking for his blessing and provision as often as our children go to us for a snack. For my children, that is every 16 seconds.
Do you believe that? I mean, really believe it? Do you want to know how you can know if you believe it? Here’s how: When you have a material need or worry, what is your first instinct? Do you go to the Father and ask? Is that a rut that is worn down in your mind? Is that a track that you naturally fall into when you face need?
4. This prayer teaches us that God likes to be asked.
Why would God like to be asked? Doesn’t he already know what we need? Indeed, yes. Of course he does. Jesus told us that very thing just a few sentences ago in verse 8, that your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
So why does he like to be asked? There is more than one way to answer this question truthfully. One way would be to say that he delights to be asked because he loves us—and he knows that we were created to find our joy, contentment, and satisfaction in humble dependence on himself.
So he delights to be asked, because he made us to ask in the same way that he made the Sun to rule the day and the fish to swim in the sea—and so delights in the Sun as it shines and the fish as they swim.
We could also say that he delights in anything that magnifies the glory of his grace—that’s the whole point of everything: His glory. That creation, including created us, would display the glory of his goodness.
I’d like to take just a moment and point at a thought, a question which you might have in your mind right now as a result of this portion of the Lord’s Prayer, and it is the question, “If God delights to be asked, tells us to ask him, owns all things, is utterly sovereign, and invites us to ask him for our daily bread, why do Christians sometimes starve to death?”
Lord willing, we will answer this question more fully in Matthew 6:31–33 in a few weeks, but I’d like to say for now that I know this text might provoke this question in you, and what I will say now is simply that for the Christian, all things are a gift.
For a Christian, nothing God gives us or allows for us to receive—whether that is a glorious feast or death by starvation—is anything other than a servant of our ultimate good. When God allows his children to suffer, it is not withholding good from us. He rather promises that even these circumstances will be made to serve us.
So we pray and ask and seek and knock, and as we do so we live by faith—meaning we trust that the God who sees all, knows all, and in whom no shadow of turning or evil resides, will work all things together for good for his people, even those things which seem decidedly not good from our vantage point.
Bread is a Sermon
Now, all this is true, and contextually, this is the most direct and straightforward meaning of this portion of the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus really is talking about our simple, day to day need for provision. He would have us live with a daily awareness of our utter dependence upon God for even the most basic of our needs—like the need to eat.
But I can’t help but ask a question here in this portion of the prayer: What is bread? Because when we ask that with our Bible open, it doesn’t take long to realize that—while bread certainly isn’t less than a glorious source of nutrition—it is also much more than that. Bread is also a sermon.
There’s a story in the Gospel of John that brings together both the object of bread and the sermon in the object, that brings together both bread and what it preaches. It’s in the sixth chapter of John, a very famous and well-known part of Jesus’ ministry—the feeding of the 5,000.
The scene begins with Jesus going up on a mountain to teach a great multitude—some 5,000 men, women and children besides. Now that I think about it, maybe the very sermon we are looking at now. And they listen all day, and so they’re hungry. And Jesus ends up feeding them all by multiplying a little boy’s lunch of a few loaves and fish into enough for the whole crowd, leftovers and all.
So Jesus is very popular with this crowd. They want to make him king by force. So Jesus escapes across the sea to Capernaum. The crowds discover this and follow him there as well.
And this is where Jesus does exactly the opposite of your classic church growth model—I mean, he’s got them right where he wants them. He’s met the felt need of hunger. They’re interested. Now is when he’s supposed to seal the deal and convince them to follow him.
Instead, he rebukes them: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.”
And they way, well, give us a sign if that’s you. And they have a suggested example: “What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
And Jesus responds , “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
And a few paragraphs later, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”
And virtually the whole crowd stumbles over this teaching, and so they leave.
Bread is a sermon. It’s a sermon you can stumble over. In the wilderness, God gave Israel bread from heaven, which they called “Manna.” Manna basically means “What is it?” They people saw the bread on the ground and they asked, “What is it?” And in Hebrew, that question sounds like the word “Manna.”
And for a few thousand years, there’s no answer. What is it? Some kind of bread. And then Jesus comes to Israel, and he both answers the question and is himself the answer to the question. Jesus is Manna. Jesus is the bread from heaven.
Like bread, he is life. Bread is concentrated life. Without it, we die.
And like bread, he is good. We don’t just long for bread to meet some biochemical fuel need. Bread isn’t exactly to humans what gasoline is to cars—because God created us with nerve endings, with tastebuds. Carburetors don’t have taste buds. Bread satisfies a biochemical, caloric energy requirement, yes—but bread also satisfies other desires, desires for pleasure.
So Jesus isn’t just the solution to a theological math problem. He is also good. He is also the satisfaction to the hunger of the human soul.
And like the Manna in the wilderness, this bread from heaven is free. You can’t work for it, purchase it, or earn it. In fact, you spoil it if you try. You take up this bread, the Lord Jesus Christ, by faith, not by works.
In that chapter of John’s gospel, in John 6:28, the bread-eaters ask, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” which in context is basically the same as asking, “What is the work that we need to do to pay for this bread?” Jesus’ answer is direct, clear, and better news than you and I can possibly fathom. He says, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
What does that mean? Well, it means, “You can’t pay, you must simply eat. Believe in me, and feast.” In Isaiah 55, over 700 years before Jesus’ coming, God gave this invitation:
“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;
and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what does not satisfy?Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.
Give ear and come to me;
hear me, that your soul may live.”-Isaiah 55:1–3
Jesus is himself what the prophet was talking about. He is the feast, and there is no admission price to come and sit at the table. Why? Is it free because the stuff on the table is worthless? No! It is infinitely costly. Jesus is infinitely valuable; the whole Universe wouldn’t even be an adequate down payment to buy Jesus with.
It’s free because it’s been paid for by the only person with deep enough pockets to satisfy the cost: God himself. It is free, because God is a God who delights to be asked, who delights to give, who delights to magnify the endlessness of his reserves by giving freely.
On the cross, Jesus—the True Bread that has come down from heaven—was broken and laid on a table before his enemies. On the cross, Jesus ate the bitter meal and drank the bitter cup of death that we deserve for our sin.
He ate the bitter and offer us the bread. And unless you admit your hunger and sit down at the cross and feast, unless you sit at the table of the cross and eat of Jesus, “…you have no life in you,” he says in verse 53. So don’t dare not to come.