Before every meal I ate with my family growing up, we would pray the Lord’s Prayer. When I was young, I don’t think I really understood what it meant. But as I got older, it made more and more sense to me. One line that I understood early on, but have grown to appreciate as containing all kinds of depth is, “Give us this day our daily bread.” When I was little, I believed I was praying for God to make sure we had food to eat every day. It’s the most straight forward way to understand the prayer and it makes sense. We should ask God to make sure we have food. I think this is an easy prayer to take for granted though, mainly because we don’t live in a time where food scarcity is a major problem.
When I took catechism classes in Junior High School, I learned that asking God to meet our need for daily bread points to a larger request. I learned that Jesus was instructing us to pray for God to meet our physical needs. It is a prayer for more than just food. We are asking Him to take care of our clothes, shelter, safety, etc. When we pray, we should ask God to take care of us.
Recently, while studying the verse for a sermon, I learned that the word often translated “this day” or “today” is a bit of a language mystery. Today is a reasonable way to translate it, though it’s also possible that the word is “tomorrow.” The minor variation of today or tomorrow might not seem like a lot, and it really doesn’t change the meaning of the prayer much. That is, until you read it in the larger context of the whole Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount.
Specifically, I am referring to a teaching Jesus presented at the same time where He tells us not to worry about things like food or clothes, because God knows what we need and will take care of us. In that teaching, He says that we should not worry about what we will eat tomorrow and that worrying will not add a single hour to our lives. If we put these two ideas together, the Lord’s Prayer is instructing us to ask God to meet our needs and then letting that worry go. We let it go and trust God, who knows what we needs and loves us. His character dictates that we can trust Him. So “give us this day (or tomorrow’s) our daily bread is a prayer for God to take care of us, so we can trust Him and let go of our worries.
It is easy to ask at this point: what if God doesn’t meet that need? Lots of people go without food. To this I would reply that the trick is to consider the verses that precede the request for bread: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What does this mean? The request here is that God would do whatever it is He has planned. We are asking Him to act according to His will and trust that He knows what He is doing. The truth that comes with that prayer is that sometimes God’s will may be that we experience hunger or hardship. Sometimes, He may will for things to go badly for us. However, if that is the case and if God is good, then we can trust that it is going in a direction that fits His plan. That’s a tough idea. Trusting God’s plan and that He will be in control is difficult. There are all kinds of reasons God may choose to allow us to endure difficulty. Hard times teach us to trust Him. Hungry days teach us that, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Sometimes difficulty teaches us lessons that can be acquired no other way. There are all manner of reasons for hardship. Many of those reasons will not be clear to us in this lifetime. Still, if we trust God’s will and His provision, then we can find comfort in the knowledge that things are happening with a larger plan in mind.
