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Intro…

Welcome to the Cornerstone Baptist church podcast. My name is Justin Wheeler, I am the preaching pastor for Cornerstone and today we are in week 50 of our journey through the Heidelberg Catechism. Today, I will be talking to you about question 125.

Transition…

This week we continue working our way through the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9-13 and we are going to focus on the phrase:

Give us this day our daily bread…

Lord’s Day Focus...

Question 125: What is the fourth petition?

Answer: “Give us this day our daily bread” means, be pleased to provide for all our bodily needs so that we come to know that You are the only source of everything good, and that neither our work and worry nor Your gifts can do us any good without Your blessings. So, help us to give up our trust in creatures and to put trust in You alone.

Trust in God alone, that is what is at the heart of this part of the Lord’s Prayer. It is trust in God down to provide the very crumbs of bread that will keep us alive today. If you think about it, this is a desperate prayer for God to take away the nagging hunger that our bodies feel constantly. This prayer is like a baby crying for milk and being fully dependent upon mother to provide it.

We’ve all been hungry before, but how many of us have been truly hungry. By God’s grace alone we live in a land where food is plentiful and cheap. Aside from the occasional natural disaster preparation, there is seldom a time when our grocery store shelves are empty. There is always food nearby.

According to the US department of Agriculture, it is estimated that Americans waste 30-40 percent of the food supply every year. That is, we throw away or allow to go bad 133 billion pounds of food which costs around $161 billion dollars. We throw away an unthinkable amount of food. If this startles you and you think you might like to change your habits in this regard, check out usda.gov/foodwaste.

Food is plentiful in this country and has been for decades, which means that most of us, though not all, are not worried about where our next meal will come from. Most of us, assume that there will be food on our table, in our pantry and refrigerator. We take this for granted and this prayer is confronting that in us.

I know that it might be difficult for us to imagine this but try to put yourself in the Israelites shoes/sandals as they were on their way to Mt. Sinai. They were in the wilderness and all they had with them was the stuff they packed up on Passover night in Egypt. They didn’t have grocery stores along the way. They didn’t have anywhere to get food and water. They had to rely on God’s daily provision, or they would surely die.

If you can imagine what that was like, then you can begin to grasp the heart cry behind this prayer. When we ask God to give us our daily bread, we are giving voice to a desperate plea for God to care for us every day. We are also recognizing that the daily bread that sustains us actually comes from His hand.

Even the good things, like food, that we have in abundance; can get in the way of our gratitude to God for the blessing of His care over us. When we take for granted the basic necessities of life, we will inevitably fail to praise God for His generous provision. And make no mistake, every gift that we receive is from His gracious hand.

James 1:16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

Everything we have is from God and our gratitude to Him should be constant and sincere. In fact, Heidelberg wants us to understand that when we pray for God to give us our daily bread, we are putting our trust in God alone. We are battling the self-reliance that is in each of our hearts and we are placing our hope and our trust in God as the provider of every good gift.

At no point should we assume that this prayer is a license for us to stop working and simply ask God to give us what we need. That’s not the point at all. The point is to help our hearts grasp the reality that everything we have comes from the Lord. The job that we have which allows us to buy the food at the grocery store is a gift of God’s blessing. The fact that we have grocery stores, and food in those stores, and the means to buy that food in those stores; all of this is a blessing from God that we do not deserve.

We should be grateful and prayerful. Too often, we fail to pray with sincerity for our daily bread and this might be a display of our lack of confidence in God’s provision and too much confidence in our own ability. Yes, we work to provide good things for ourselves and our family, but the whole process of our needs being met is overseen by God.

Now, I want to go back to the illustration of Israel in the wilderness that I mentioned earlier. There was an entire generation of Israelites who experienced God’s daily gift of bread, but that generation didn’t inherit the Promised Land. In fact, 40 years later a new generation was set to go into the Land and Moses had some final words for them.

God had blessed this generation. He had care for them, led them, provided for them and even helped them win military battles to stay alive. But there was a strong possibility that they would forget all the good things that God had done. So in Deuteronomy 8 Moses says to them, “Don’t you forget that the Lord is the One who brought you here.”

He tells them, “God cared for you…He fed you with manna from heaven…He made the clothes on your back to hold together and not wear out…beware lest you say in your heart, ‘my power and my might have gotten me this.”

This was a real issue for that generation of Israelites and it’s a real issue for us today. We have a tendency to forget that all of life is in the palm of God’s hand. We have a tendency to forget that all that we have comes from His hand. We have a tendency to trust in our own ability rather than to confess our desperate need.

This prayer is an antidote to self-reliance so let’s make this our prayer but also our attitude. “Lord, give us this day our daily bread.”

Thank you for joining me today to discuss this aspect of Christian prayer. Next week, we are going to talk about forgiveness of debts and deliverance from evil. I hope you will join me for that discussion as we look at Lord’s Day 51 and questions 126 and 127.

Conclusion…

If you want to learn more about Cornerstone Baptist church, you can find us online at Cornerstonewylie.org. You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram @cbcwylie. You can find us on Facebook at facebook.com/cornerstonewylie. You can also subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or google play to stay up to date on all the new content.

Thanks for listening.