Give Us This Our Daily Bread

In the simple society of Bible times ‘bread’ meant ‘life’. If you had bread to eat, you had the means of living. To ask for daily bread was, therefore, to ask for the means of sustenance. In our modern world we might also think not only of having sufficient bread but also having enough of all things which go towards our daily living. It is right that we should look to God for all our needs and be thankful for that they are usually supplied. It may also serve to remind us that our real needs are very few and simple, as distinct from our wants which may be limitless.

So in this prayer for bread, there is a request that the heavenly Father will supply all our needs by granting us the means to obtain them. He does not shower loaves of bread from heaven, nor even the money to purchase them. But under His good providence, He provides the means by which they may be obtained and we should be thankful to Him for our jobs, our pensions, or whatever benefit we have by which our ‘daily bread’ is made sure to us.

In the Bible, however, we are taught that ‘man cannot live by bread alone’. Importantly, though food is for our natural bodies, our needs are for more than creature comforts. The very first of the temptations which came to Jesus Christ in the Judean wilderness was that he should use his God-given power to make stones into bread to satisfy his hunger. He refused, knowing that to obey God was even more important. He answered and said: “It is written, man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out the mouth of God” (Matt 4:4). In this saying of Jesus, there is a recognition that ‘bread’ is necessary to human life, but that it is not of first importance. You need the blessing of all that is in the prayers for daily bread: these alone are not sufficient. We have needs for the spiritual side of our nature, as well as for the natural. The word of God is food for the mind in the same way that bread is for bodily recovery. And the word of God embodied in Jesus Christ is the ‘Bread of Life’ without which we cannot live in the spiritual sense (John 6:33).

In this simple request of the Lord’s prayer, we are asking God to supply all our needs, both physical and spiritual, and to do so on a daily basis. It was the servant Job who declared, “I have esteemed the word of his mouth more than my necessary food” (Job 23:12) – and so should we.

In the wilderness the Lord sent “bread from heaven” in the form of manna, on a regular daily basis (Exodus 16:21). So it must be responsible for us to read the word of God daily, just as we receive our daily bread in the form of regular meals. To pray to God to give us each day our daily bread and yet ignore His word of life is a contradiction.

We need to stick to reading the bible regularly using our Bible reading plans. The Bible Companion we have will enable us to read the whole Bible at least once each year. This is indeed ‘daily bread’ to those who use it.

Bro David & Sis Jacklyne Wanjala (Chwele, Kenya)