Jesus taught his disciples how to pray
Matthew 6:9-13: Luke 11:2-4
This is often called the Lord’s Prayer although this is not a prayer that Jesus prayed or he would need to pray. This is a prayer that He taught the disciples to pray. Jesus dos not need forgiveness from sins as we humans do. There are two versions of the Lord’s Prayer; one in Luke 11, and the more familiar one in Matthew 6. In some circles of Christianity it may be known as 'The Our Father prayer'.
There are mainly two parts to this prayer. Part I is about God and and His Glory, and Part II that starts with "Give us this day" is about man and his need. First Part is acknowledging God’s greatness and praising God. The second part is acknowledging who we are and our condition. We are weak and sinful humans created by the Sovereign God. We need Him to provide for our daily life.
We approach God with reverence as He is Holy, at the same time as a child approaches the father because we are children of God through His Son Jesus Christ. We are all children not like the generational relationship we have as human beings, but as positional relationship as Jesus Christ is to the Father. In a human generational relationship, the children become parents and then generations go on. Christ is fully God who came to this world as a human being positionally as the Son of God in human flesh. God does not have grand children or great grand children. We are all children of God, no matter what generation we are in.
Prayer is to acknowledge the greatness of God and His sufficiency in meeting our needs. The second part of the prayer is: "Give us and forgive us." Praying for the need of our body and need of our souls. 'Give us our daily bread' is asking for our bodily needs, to be freed from the fear of tomorrow. 'Forgive us' is asking for spiritual need, to be freed from the fear of sin and guilt.
There is a great nursery song, "God is great, God is good, and we thank Him for our food." There is wisdom in those simple words. God is great in a way that cannot be said of any other person or thing. He is the only all-sufficient one. Everything else we will ever touch or discover is a contingent thing. It has needs. It requires something to cause or to continue or sustain. But God is not like any other. He is self-existing, self-sustaining, and self-satisfying. He has no needs outside of Himself at all. This acknowledgment is the first step in a prayer.
A young woman brought her fiancé home to meet her parents for thanksgiving dinner. After dinner, her mother told her father to find out about the young man. The father invited the fiancé to his study for a talk. "So what are your plans?" the father asked the young man. "I am a biblical scholar," he replied. "A Biblical scholar. Hmmm," the father said. "Admirable, but what will you do to provide a nice house for my daughter to live in?" "I will study," the young man replied, "and God will provide for us." "And how will you buy her a beautiful engagement ring, such as she deserves?" asked the father. "I will concentrate on my studies," the young man replied, "God will provide for us." "And children?" asked the father. "How will you support children?" "Don’t worry, sir, God will provide," replied the fiancé. The conversation proceeded like this, and each time the father questioned, the young idealist insisted that God would provide. Later, the mother asked, "How did it go, Honey?" The father answered, "He has no job and no plans, and he thinks I’m God!" When we begin to pray, “Give us Lord our daily bread,” we are acknowledging that the Lord who is the source of that daily bread and not anyone or anything in this world or elsewhere.
The smell of a warm fresh bread is irresistible, especially when it is warm and slathered with butter. The prayer Jesus taught us to pray reminds us about the true source of our daily bread. It reminds us that bread does not come from a supermarket. When we take a bread off the shelf from the store, that place is not the source of the bread. Bread does not come from the farmer who grew the grain or the baker who baked it. It does not come from the owner of the land that it was grown. It is a gift from God. God had used the land, the farmer, the baker and the grocer and anyone in between to accomplish this complex task for producing that bread. That is why probably we have the phrase: "the greatest thing since the sliced bread." Behind it all, the 'unseen hand' that is giving us our daily bread is the kind and merciful hand of our benevolent heavenly Father. "Praise God from whom all blessings flow!"
One of the earliest translations of the Lord’s Prayer was in old Syriac (a language that very closely parallels the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke and predates English by centuries). In that language, it reads “give us today the bread that does not run out.” One of the most basic of human fears is that of not having enough. When I retired from my corporate job, we always talked about our savings and IRAs that if that was enough to keep us for another 20 or 30 years. We don't know because we don't know how long we will live, or what is awaiting in the future. Only the heavenly Father knows. So asking Him is the best option. In this prayer Jesus is teaching us that prayer can help release us from that fear whn we pray “give us today the bread that doesn’t run out”. It includes the bread of today, it includes the bread of the future, that will be enough to keep us alive–– all that we need, all that we will use. Peter says, "God's divine power has given us everything we need for life and for godliness. " (2 Peter 1:3).
After the Korean war, a large number of children were orphaned. It happened in the wars in Vietnam, in Bosnia, and in other places. In the case of Korea, relief agencies came in had to deal with all the problems that arose in connection with having so many orphan children. One of the people involved in this relief effort described about a problem they encountered with the children who were in the orphanages. Even though the children had three meals a day provided for them, they were restless and anxious at night and had difficulty sleeping. As they talked to the children, they soon discovered that the children had great anxiety about whether they would have food the next day. To help resolve this problem, the relief workers in one particular orphanage decided that each night when the children were put to bed, the nurses would place a single piece of bread in each child’s hand. The bread wasn’t intended to be eaten; it was simply intended to be held by the children as they went to sleep. It was a “security blanket” for them, reminding them that there would be provision for their daily needs. Sure enough, the bread calmed the children’s anxieties and helped them sleep. Likewise, we take comfort in knowing that our physical needs are met, that we have food, or “bread,” for our needs.
The fear of not having enough in the right now, that basic human fear, can destroy a sense of joy in the present and erode a hope for the future. I believe that we find a broad application if we lean into this ancient Syriac translation–– where we pray for God to deliver us from the fear and anxiety of not having enough to eat. “Give us bread for today and with it give us confidence that tomorrow we will also have enough.”When God gives us, it is more than enough. Our prayer should be "give us today just enough to meet our needs.”
This petition of the Lord’s Prayer, then, teaches us to come to God in a spirit of humble dependence, asking Him to provide what we need and to sustain us from day to day. When Jesus fed the crowd with five loaves of bread and two fish, they had enough and more that they had to carry them in twelve baskets. I believe it was a lesson for the 12 disciples, since they wanted to send the crowd away hungry. But they had to carry one basket each after the crowd ate. God gave manna (the heavenly food) the people of Israel who travelled in the wilderness in their journey to the promised land. They were allowed to collect enough for each day. Anyone who collected more and kept for the next day found out that it decayed with worms in it. (Exodus 16:19–20). Thats another lesson they learned. Trust God with today, then He will provide for tomorrow as well.
A boy and mother were at the checkout counter at a grocery store. There was a large bowl of candies at the counter said "Free, carry a handful with you.” The boy stood at the bowl and looked at it. The cashier told him to take a handful and it was free. He didn’t want to do it. Finally, the cashier grabbed a hand full of candy and gave it to him. On their way out, the mother asked him why he didn’t want to grab the candies by himself. He said, “The cashier has bigger hands than me.” When we allow God to give us He will give us in good measure as Jesus said, "A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap.” (Luke 6:38)
The prayer for daily bread also teaches to work through large problems in small, daily bites. Asking God for our daily bread, rather than our weekly, monthly, or yearly bread, is also a way to focus us on the smaller, more manageable bits of a problem. To deal with something very big, we may need to work at it in small, daily bites. Sometimes all we can handle is one day (or even just part of one day) at a time. A man who had a rare cancer underwent surgery in his young age. He said it was very difficult. Then the surgery was followed with dozens of painful chemo treatments and radiation. He told his mother who used to take him to chemo, “ “Oh, Mother, I can’t stand having 16 more of those treatments.” She said, “Can you go today?” “Yes.” “Well, honey, that’s all you have to do today.” He said, It has helped me many times all through his life when I remember to take one day or one thing at a time. Jesus said: “Do not worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow has its own worries” (Matthew 6:34). The Lord’s prayer acknowledges the power and resources of God to meet every need we have on a daily basis.
The prayer seeks the help of God in serving others, not just me and myself. The phrase is “Give US this day OUR daily bread,” not “Give ME this day MY daily bread.” We ought to center our prayers not on us but also for others as well. Martin Luther explains: “Daily bread includes everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body, such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, land, animals, money, goods, a devout husband or wife, devout children, devout workers, devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, self-control, good reputation, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.”
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