"IN OUR PRAYER FOR BREAD WE ADMIT DEPENDENCE ON THE LORD FOR ALL OUR BODILY NEEDS."

125. Q. What is the fourth petition?
A. Give us this day our daily bread. That is: Provide us with all our bodily needs[1] so that we may acknowledge that Thou art the only fountain of all good,[2] and that our care and labour, and also Thy gifts, cannot do us any good without Thy blessing.[3] Grant therefore that we may withdraw our trust from all creatures, and place it only in Thee.[4]
[1] Ps. 104:27-30; 145:15, 16; Matt. 6:25-34. [2] Acts 14:17; 17:25; James 1:17. [3] Deut. 8:3; Ps. 37:16; 127:1, 2; I Cor. 15:58. [4] Ps. 55:22; 62; 146; Jer. 17:5-8; Heb. 13:5, 6.

Scripture Reading:
Proverbs 30:7-9
Luke 12:13-34

Singing:  (Psalms and Hymns are from the "Book of Praise" Anglo Genevan Psalter)
Psalm 104:7,8
Psalm 136:12,13
Psalm 145:4,5
Psalm 127:1,2
Psalm 34:4 &  Hymn 47:5

Beloved Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ!

We begin today with the second half of the Lord’s Prayer. The body of this prayer, you will know, can be divided into two parts; with the first three we ask about God (Hallowed be Your Name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done), with the second three we ask about ourselves (our bread, our sins, our temptations). Of those three –our bread, our sins and our temptations- we ask God first about bread. That may not sound sufficiently spiritual to our ears, but this is the way the Lord has commanded it. Heavenly matters are not more important than earthly matters, or spiritual matters more important than bodily matters; the point is that heaven and earth, what is spiritual and what is bodily, is to focus on God and His glory. Our request for bread has that purpose also.

I summarize the sermon with this theme:

Jesus instructs us to ask the Lord for ‘bread’. The term ‘bread’ does not refer strictly to a sandwich, but to food in general, as well as to clothes, shelter, transport, freedom, health, etc. In the words of our Lord’s Day: with the fourth petition we ask for "all our bodily needs."

Still, the Lord instructs us in this petition to ask specifically for "bread", as opposed to clothes or shelter or health. That will be because bread, food, is the most basic of human needs. There are people in this world who survive without shelter, without clothes, without freedom, or without health. But none can survive without food. Every person on this earth knows that, and so each –to greater or lesser degree- is busy day after day with obtaining food, preparing food, eating food. Bread is basic.

Where does food come from? It’s common knowledge: food comes from this earth. Food does not come from Mars, or from outer space. Food comes from the ground, through a process of seeding, watering, cultivating, harvesting, processing, distributing, baking, cooking; there’s an entire economy based on the production of food. And that process of obtaining food is identical for unbeliever and believer alike, for Christian and Hindu: everyone (as God said after the fall into sin) eats his bread "in the sweat of his face" (Gen 3:19).

The disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. Said He to them: in your prayers you must ask God for your daily bread. That is: that process of getting food, what you sweat about repeatedly, should be topic of your conversation with God.

That’s intriguing. Our daily experience is that food comes from this earth; to get food you need to look down. No, says Jesus to His disciples: to get food you need to look up. We wonder: why?

The apostle Paul proclaimed the gospel to the heathen of Lystra. Said he to them: the God who created the world has left evidence of His continuing care for His creatures. That care is this: "He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness" (Acts 14:17). Notice: Paul is speaking to unbelievers, to heathens, and tells them that over the centuries of their existence their daily food came from God. Though they never asked Him for food, let alone thanked Him for it, it was God who supplied their needs (cf Acts 17:25).

Paul has learned this principle from God’s revelation in the Old Testament. The psalmist in Ps 104 looked carefully at creation, at how the birds have their nests and the animals obtain their food. He sums up God’s word on the matter in vss 27ff:

Here is dependence; all creation receives food from God’s almighty hand. Ps 145 says the same:

It’s this reality that prompts the church to make its confession of dependence in Lord’s Day 10: God so governs all creatures that "leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed, all things, come not by chance but by His fatherly hand."

This confession, we need to know, is not just ours. Lord’s Day 10 puts into words what the Bible teaches. Inasmuch as Peter and Andrew and John and James and the other disciples believed God’s revelation in the Old Testament, they believed also what you and I confess in Lord’s Day 10. These are the men who one day asked Jesus to teach them to pray. In His answer Jesus included the fourth petition: "Give us this day our daily bread." The point? This: the disciples need to take seriously the confession of Ps 104 and Ps 145, that is, if "the eyes of all look expectantly to You, and You give them their food in due season," then the right thing for the hungry to do is to ask God for bread! If "food and drink …, indeed, all things, come not by chance but by His fatherly hand," then we can’t pass God by in our hunger but need to go to the source of bread itself. You see: the confession that all comes from His hand is the reason to pray. To put it differently: Lord’s Day 50 is based on Lord’s Day 10. Deny the confession of Lord’s Day 10, and you have no reason left to ask God for daily bread. Stick to the confession of Lord’s Day 10, and you have every inducement to pray, to ask our Father in Jesus Christ for all our bodily needs. You see: we are dependent. Here is the point of the last part of Lord’s Day 50: "Grant, therefore, that we may withdraw our trust from all creatures, and place it only in You."

There’s an implication here that I need to draw out. We need another car. What do we do? Perchance we refinance, then head of to the car yards to see what’s available and what deal we can make. Yet Jesus’ instruction is that first you pray. That is: exactly because we acknowledge that all things come from God’s fatherly hand –that includes, then, another car!- it is foolish to avoid God when looking for another car. All things come from His hand; so: go to Him for all your needs! And He will show you which car He has lined up for you.

The young people want to get their drivers’ license, need to write their exams at school? All things come not by chance but by God’s fatherly hand. Good and well, then be consistent and go first on your knees before you front up for your exam.

Here is a truth, we understand, for all of life. Those who confess God’s providence, who confess that all things come from God’s fatherly hand, are necessarily people of prayer, necessarily people who repeatedly appear before God’s throne of grace with the fourth petition. For needs big or small, it is for us to turn to God in prayer, describe to Him what we need, and ask Him to supply it. You see, it’s in our prayer life first of all that we show that we take seriously the confession of Lord’s Day 10.

If, then, we are persuaded that we need to ask the Lord our God for all our needs –day by day, hour by hour- how much should we ask for? That brings us to our second point:

The unbelievers around us do not look up to God for their daily needs; they look down. God’s people are different on this point, for we recognize that every good gift comes from above, from the Father of lights (as James puts it, 1:17). Is the difference between unbelievers and believers, though, only a disagreement on the source of our daily bread? Should believers seek as much daily bread from God as unbelievers seek from this earth?

The question is important. We in Australia live in a highly materialistic society. That is: our society cultivates and encourages the notion that people have a right to more, bigger, better. Houses are bigger and stocked with more elaborate entertainment equipment than a decade ago. To eat out once or twice a week and to take an extravagant holiday to some exotic place are seen as Australian rights. If the neighbor can do it, I should be able to do it too. More, bigger, better: it’s the taste of the day.

We live in this culture, and we’re invariably affected by this mentality. How does this emphasis on more, bigger, better affect our prayers? Should we ask God for bread, or for bread-with-jam? Should we ask God for a house, or for a castle? Should we ask God to play the game well, or to win the game?

Jesus answers the question for us in the formulation of the fourth petition. He tells us to ask God this: "Give us this day our daily bread." Jesus’ point is clear: we ask God not for sufficient for the rest of our lives, but we ask God for sufficient for today.

How much do we need today? Here I draw to your attention the words of Agur in Proverbs 30. Agur request God please to take falsehood and lies away from him – a request that doesn’t concern us today with Lord’s Day 50. His second request interacts directly with our question about how much; he asks God to "give me neither poverty nor riches." He doesn’t want too little, lest he be poor and be tempted to steal and so profane the name of God; he also doesn’t want too much, lest he "be full and deny" the Lord, conclude that he doesn’t need God. That second possibility, having too much, is possibly more of a danger for us in our materialistic age than the first. The song Moses taught the people of Israel proves the point. Deut 32: Israel "grew fat and kicked; You grew fat, you grew think, You are obese! Then he forsook God who made him, And scornfully esteemed the Rock of his salvation" (vs 15; cf 8:11ff). Agur sees the danger of having too much, and so deliberately asks God to be moderate in what He gives him – not to little, but also not too much! You see, Agur wants to retain a sense of dependence on God. He knows his human weakness, knows his inborn inclination to conclude in his abundance that he doesn’t need God day by day.

How much should we ask for? Just bread, or also jam on the bread? Just a house, plain and adequate, or a castle? Just a car, or a BMW? Look at the way the Catechism is worded: "Provide us with all our bodily needs so that we may acknowledge that You are the only fountain of all good." The sentence does not stop after the first line, so that we ask God to "provide us with all our bodily needs" – full stop. Rather, the sentence continues with a purpose clause, and explains why we ask God to give us our bodily needs. The purpose is this: "so that we may acknowledge that You are the only fountain of all good." Here is the instruction of Prov 30: don’t give me too little, so that I steal and so state through my actions that You are not the only fountain of all good. At the same time: don’t give me too much, so that I loose my sense of dependence on You and think that I’m self-sufficient. Give me just enough, says Lord’s Day 50, so that I acknowledge and keep acknowledging that I’m dependent on You, that You are the only fountain of any thing that can touch my life.

If that, brothers and sisters, is the thrust of this petition –don’t give me too much, and don’t give me too little; give me just enough so that I keep acknowledging my dependence on You- if that’s the thrust of this petition, it will be clear that this petition cuts too ways. We are very accustomed to the obvious way, that God give us bread; our plate is empty, Father, will You give us bread for the day. But it goes the other way too, that God take bread from us; Father, we have so much that we are forgetting that we are dependent on You, and so we pray that You take some away, that You give us less, so that we acknowledge our dependence on You.

That second element sounds foreign to us, actually doesn’t sit so well with us (for we, like society around us, like to have more, bigger, better…). But consider this. I mentioned earlier that the fourth petition involves more than bread alone, but also food in general, as well as clothes and shelter and transportation and freedom and health, etc. In the past year we have had a couple of brothers in the congregation afflicted with life-threatening illnesses. By the grace of the Lord, both brothers have received good health again. As they and their families look back on the dark hours of ill health, what do they say? This: that illness has driven home to us how dependent we are on God! You see: the Lord has answered the fourth petition, gave daily bread (in this instance health, or lack of it) in such an amount that we all were confronted with our frailty and our dependence on God; we all were driven in the brothers’ illnesses to acknowledge that our Father in Jesus Christ was the only fountain of all good. In giving those illnesses, the Lord was answering us as we prayed the fourth petition!

So it is in other areas of life also. There are those in the churches who have prospered in their business activities over the years, and through this circumstance or that have lost it all. That is to say: God for a period gave less daily bread than in the past, even took away what He had previously given. There are those whose marriages have fallen apart, and that’s to say: God took something away that He’d earlier given. And what do you hear when you talk to these people? Certainly, you hear of pain, but you also hear of growth in the Lord’s service, specifically an increased awareness that God alone is the only fountain of all good, an increased awareness of dependence on Him.

For how much do we ask in this petition? For bread, as well as for jam on the bread? For just a car, or also a Merc? For strength to do our work, or also for applause from the boss? The world wants more and more of material things, but the child of God wants more and more of spiritual things, a greater and greater sense of dependence on his heavenly Father. So that is the focus of our prayer.

Can one then survive with little?! Does one not need much to live this life? Little – and one can think of Joseph in Egypt, a slave, a prisoner…; he had little. And we say: that’s no life! And much – one can think of the rich man of the parable of Luke 12; his crop was so good that he built himself new sheds and told himself to take his ease, "eat, drink and be merry." And we say: that’s life! But Joseph, brothers and sisters, went on –despite himself!- to become ruler of Egypt, while the rich man –despite himself- died the night his new sheds were finished. Can one survive on little? Most definitely, and happily so, when one has the blessing of the Lord! Does one need much to survive? Experience tells us that abundance certainly helps, but the Scriptures, beloved, stress that abundance doesn’t help one a dot unless one has the blessing of the Lord! The blessing of the Lord: that’s what makes one rich! God’s blessing, God’s favor, God’s smile upon you: that’s worth infinitely more than material abundance. When the rich man of Luke 12 died and appeared before God’s judgment seat, he had no chequebook with him, nor a Diners Card; his wealth helped him nothing. And on the day of Christ’s return, all the wealth we’ve amassed in this life will go up in smoke; it will help us nothing. This is Jesus’ point in Luke 12:21: "So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God." What one needs to life is not riches on earth, but riches in heaven, and that’s to say that one has God’s blessing, God’s favor. And one has that blessing, that favor, when one acknowledges dependence on the Lord, trust in our Father in Christ. Again, the concluding part of Lord’s Day 50: "Grant, therefore, that we may withdraw our trust from all creatures, and place it only in You."

For how much do we ask? Agur’s words teach us well: "give me neither riches nor poverty." Make me to confess daily, Father, that I am dependent on You, completely dependent for all my bodily needs.

So I come to our last point,

We ask the Lord, then, for not too little nor too much, but just enough to be continually aware of our dependence on Him. The Lord in His mercy answers our petition and gives us daily bread. What, now, are we to do with blessings God gives us? I want to give two answers to that question.

The first answer flows from the structure of the Lord’s Prayer itself. The body of the Lord’s Prayer, we recall, contains six petitions, the first three revolving around the word ‘Your’ ("Hallowed be Your Name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done"), while the second three revolve around the word ‘us’ (give us bread, forgive our sins, keep us from temptation). This second set of three does not function separately from the first three, but is instead directly connected. Specifically: in the second set of three petitions (those focusing on ‘us’), we ask the Lord God for the wherewithal to do our bit to hallow His name, make His kingdom come and do His will. That is: we can’t hallow God’s name, can’t make His kingdom come, can’t do God’s will, unless God gives us the resources to do so. That, now, is the place of the fourth petition. We ask for daily bread, all our bodily needs, so that we can obey God’s will for us and accept His will for us, we ask for our bodily needs so that we might make God’s kingdom come, might bring glory to His holy name. Recall Agur’s prayer: don’t give me too little, lest I steal and profane God’s name – and that would be against God’s will, and certainly doesn’t hallow God’s name (it ‘profanes’). Similarly, to have too much opens the temptation to deny God, and that doesn’t hallow God’s name or make His kingdom come or cause His will to be done either. It’s also the point of our Lord Jesus Christ in Luke 12. "Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing," says Jesus (vs 23), and that’s to say that we are created for God and His glory. Hence the instruction of vs 31: "seek the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added to you." Food and clothes, health and wealth, is given for a purpose; you receive daily bread so that you can function in God’s kingdom, do His will, hallow His name.

That brings us to the second aspect of the answer. Why might it be that in this petition Jesus formulates the request with the plural word ‘us’ instead of the singular pronoun ‘my’? Certainly, here is an aspect of the communion of saints; the Lord would have us pray for each other. I’m not just to concern myself with my food, my health, my affairs. I’m also to concern myself with your food, your health, your affairs. That is, I’m to pray also for you, and you for me.

But there’s another element here that’s so important in our prosperous society. You see: the Lord does not necessarily give to each person his bread directly.

That’s a thought with which we’re very familiar. A family of growing children must all eat, must all be clothed, must all be housed. Yet the Lord does not give food, clothing, shelter, to each family member directly; He instead gives the means to buy food and clothes and housing generally to the father of the family, the wage earner. And we understand: the father is not meant to stick the money in his own pocket and let his children fend for himself; Dad has received that pay cheque in order to feed others. We pray: "give us this day our daily bread," and the Lord gives that bread to some of us directly and to others of us indirectly, through the wages He gives Dad. To put it differently: we recognize that the Lord has given the children’s portion to the father so that the father might in turn pass on to the children what the Lord has given him.

We’re familiar with the same principle in the congregation. In all our homes we pray this fourth petition, but do not pray it for ourselves alone; we pray it also for each other. For we recognize that the Lord supplies for some of us directly (through wages) and for others of us indirectly (if I may so term it), ie, through the deacons. So we take of our income and put a portion in the collection bag for the benefit of others. We pray for our daily bread, and then we act according to that word ‘our’; we share what we have for the benefit of those to whom God has given less. To put it differently: we recognize that the Lord has given to us bread designated for the other, so that we might pass it on. It’s clear to us that what God has given us –be it food or house or health- is not meant for me individually.

What, brothers and sisters, do you think? Should this principle be restricted to family and congregation alone? We are sufficiently familiar with the circumstances of our world to realize that many millions receive not enough to live but too much to die. Could it be that the Lord has given their portion to us, so that we in turn might share our abundance with them? Would the Lord want to answer their cries for bread through our generosity – even as He answers our children’s cries for food through us parents?

After Jesus spoke that parable of the rich man who built those new sheds, Jesus drew out the implications for His disciples. Vs 22: "Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; nor about your body, what you will put on." Then Jesus referred to the birds and the flowers, and added in vs 30: "For all these things the nations of the world seek after, and your Father knows that you need these things. But seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added to you." That is: don’t worry; your Father in heaven will give you your daily bread, day by day. Store up for every possible tomorrow as the rich man did? No, says the Lord in vs 33. "Sell what you have and give alms; provide yourselves money bags which do not grow old, a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches nor moth destroys."

Our Father in Jesus Christ is sovereign Lord, and gives to each as each needs. So we have much to pray for; in the midst of our daily needs, it’s foolish, so very foolish not to ask the Giver. It’s equally foolish to ask for too much, for that undermines trust in Him. And when He gives more than we need, it’s wrong to keep the extra for ourselves alone. Our Father in heaven is merciful, and makes the rain to fall and gives bread to eat to both the just and the unjust. And sometimes He is pleased to give my portion to another, so that the other might share it with me. Or give another’s portion to me so that I might share it with him.

Jesus teaches us to pray, pray also for our daily bread. We realize: here’s a topic that keeps us praying all the time. Amen.