Dear Heavenly Father, we just want to once again come with our hearts bowed before You and say that You have supplied to us the only One who can satisfy: the wonderful Lord Jesus.
We do want to tell You, Lord, that those of us who have tasted of His sweetness can never be satisfied by anything else but Him. Everything else has lost its savor, but Christ and Him alone. And today, Lord, we just want to say to You, that’s what we want. We just want more of Him.
And we have to tell You that we just depend upon You to make that the supply of our life. We thank You for how gracious You’ve been to us, even during this time this morning, as we turned our hearts toward You, Lord.
And even now, Lord, we just want to say that You are the only One who can teach. So we just ask that, Lord, You would do that this morning. Teacher, come amongst us and open up our eyes and open up our ears, that we might see those things that are important to You and that they would become important to us.
So open up our ears now, Lord, that we might hear You, and our eyes, that we would see You. And we ask this in the precious name of Thy wonderful Son, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Well, this is sort of the third part, I guess you might say, of what we’ve been sharing about prayer. There was a time when the disciples of the Lord came to Him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray,” just like John’s disciples went to John and asked him to teach them to pray.
What we wanted to say was that the Lord was wanting to give more than just a formula. He was wanting to open up their hearts to their relationship with their Father and their relationship with Him.
And I had said at the beginning of all of this that if there was one thing that I would want to leave with you, it is that prayer is not just something that we do, but prayer is the outcome; it’s the result of a relationship.
And if we understand that, then our life can be a prayer. Then we’ll come to an understanding of what it means when we read these Scriptures that say, “Pray at all times. Pray without ceasing.” There may have been one time in your life where you said to yourself, “How could I do that?” Well, if we would come into an understanding that prayer is the outcome and the result of a relationship, then we can understand how we can pray without ceasing.
We can’t review everything that was said over the past couple of weeks, but let me just go over a couple of things very quickly and very briefly. Last week, we were sharing about that part of the example of prayer where it says, “Hallowed be Thy name.”
And we said, “What does that exactly mean?” It’s so easy to say that: “Hallowed be Thy name, Lord.” What does that mean in reality? How is the Lord hallowed in our lives?
We said it comes through revelation and realization. The Lord speaks something, He shows us something, but it has to become incorporated in our life. Through the very circumstances of our lives, God can be hallowed in our heart.
When you’re reading 2 Peter, it says, “Sanctify the Lord in thy heart.” And so that comes really through these things that the Lord either permits or ordains in our life, and we begin to see Him for Who He really is.
He is the God of peace. He is the One Who loves. He is the One Who heals through the circumstances of our lives. We recognize that, and we begin to set Him apart as unique and different and holy—hallowed. The word hallowed and the word sanctified are both the same word in the Greek.
And so we began to look at that: How do we hallow the Lord in our hearts? It comes through revelation and realization. We want to come to know Him not just theoretically, but experientially. We need to have the revelation realized in our life.
Then we come to that next phrase where it says, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
For that to really be established in our lives, we have to realize that the relationship the Lord Jesus has with us is a result of the relationship that He has with His Father. The desire of the Lord Jesus’ heart is to see the heart of the Father satisfied and for the Father to be glorified.
Because that is what is in our Lord Jesus’ heart, that’s why we have a relationship with Him. Our relationship with Him comes out of His love for His Father and out of obedience. That is what forms our relationship with Him.
And we said that for the disciple, love is the motivation to pray. Because in that love, we identify with the burden of the Lord Jesus’ heart, and His heart’s desire becomes our heart’s desire because we love Him.
The Lord Jesus had said:
The kingdom of God does not come with observation;
nor will they say, “See here,” or, “There it is”;
for the kingdom of God is within you.
So the kingdom of God becomes manifest through Jesus. We saw He was the exact representation of the Godhead, and the way He lived and conducted His life manifested the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God is manifest through the Lord Jesus’ life and also through the life of His disciples—you and I. That is how the kingdom of God is made manifest here in the earth.
That is why we gave examples of precious saints who have gone on before us. When we look at Paul’s life and Peter’s life, and we see Paul performing miracles and people being raised from the dead at the hands of Paul, or Peter healing the lame man, all that we’re witnessing is Jesus living out His life through these men—just like through you and I.
“And Thy will be done.” We were saying that for many of us, it’s difficult to pray, for instance, “Oh Lord, come. Maranatha, Lord, come.” Often, if we really examine that, we find that we can’t pray it from our heart.
The reason is that there is fear in our lives: fear of really surrendering, fear of really giving our life over to the Lord in love and in service, and attachment to this world. We’re attached to this world. We really don’t want to be separated from it, if we would really examine ourselves.
That is why often we can’t pray that prayer from our heart. God has to do something. He has to detach us and prove to us that His love does cast out fear because He loves us perfectly. We have to come to the realization that He really loves me—perfectly, uniquely.
And so often our prayer is really, “My kingdom come, my will be done. Look, Lord, I have a place for You in my heart. It’s sort of over here, but this is my space. This is where I want to rule. This is where I want to make the decisions.”
So those are some of the things that we looked at last week. We come to this next phrase of that prayer from Matthew 6, and it says, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Now first, I want to say to you that the Lord loves us. He really, really loves us more than we can know. He wants to be our supply, and He is concerned about every area of our lives.
He is concerned about our spirit, our soul, and our body. He is concerned about the material things in our life. I’ll tell you a little story, or two quick stories.
As you know, there was a time in my life when I had a restaurant, numbers of years ago down in Florida. I opened up this restaurant really on a shoestring. I borrowed a few thousand dollars to open it.
To make a long story short, I had gotten this storefront. There were two stores together: on one side was a carpet store, and on the other side was where my restaurant was going to be, with big plate-glass windows in the front.
The week before I was going to open the restaurant, I had no money left—not enough money to stock the store, to bring in the product for this little Italian restaurant.
One evening, about eleven o’clock, I was walking out of the store. I had been praying and saying, “Lord, I don’t know what’s going to happen here because I don’t have any money.”
As I was walking out and locking the door behind me, this big black Lincoln Continental pulled up in front. I’m saying to myself, “I don’t know if I should go for my gun or what,” you know what I mean?
But this guy pulls up, gets out of the car, and says, “Hey, you the owner of the store?” Right away, I knew we were going to connect, because I was from the same neighborhood he was from in New York.
He introduced himself and told me that he had the Chromosa distributorship there. Chromosa is a company that distributes to restaurants, particularly Italian restaurants, up and down the East Coast of the United States.
We discovered that we were both from Long Island. I told him I was from Babylon, and he said he was from West Islip. I said, “Oh yeah, my father’s from West Islip.” He asked my father’s name. I said, “Steve Amato.” He said, “Steve Amato? Why, I know Steve Amato.” I said, “Go figure,” you know?
He asked whether I had gotten my product from anybody yet. I said, “No.” He said, “Well, look, I want you to come up to the warehouse. I want to show you the stuff that I have.” So we set a date.
I went up to see him, and I was praying on the way: “Lord, what am I going to tell this guy? This is a businessman. This is his business. I have no money.”
He showed me around the whole warehouse and then took me into his office. He asked, “Well, what do you think?” I said, “This is great. It’s really, really nice. But I’ve got to tell you something: I don’t have any money.”
He stopped and paused for a minute. Then he said, “Look, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll stock your store for you.”
I said, “Another thing: I’m not exactly sure what I need.” He said, “Don’t worry. I’ll put everything that you’re going to need in your store. You tell me what your menu is, and I’ll put everything in the store that you need.”
“And then every week when you order, you pay for that order and a little bit toward what I put into the store. Does that sound good?” I said, “That sounds wonderful.”
I left that place and said, “Oh, the Lord is so good. The Lord knows my needs.”
Over many, many years, the Lord has continued to try to teach me that lesson. Here is another quick story. I had just opened the store, and early one morning a man came in wanting to sell me plate-glass insurance for the front windows.
He sat down and gave me the whole spiel. I told him, “Hey, I’ll tell you the truth, I can’t afford that insurance right now. I’ve got enough insurance going on that I have to have. I can’t afford that.”
I said to him, “You know what? To tell you the truth, my real insurance is in the Lord Jesus Christ.” The guy said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and walked out the door.
That night, after I closed the store, I went home and went to sleep. The next morning I woke up and went to the store. As I was walking up, I saw my neighbor’s plate-glass window shattered.
I got into the store, and my neighbor came over. He said, “Hey, Len, guess what happened last night? Some guy came driving down 41, shooting out store windows. But mine wasn’t shot out.”
Again, the Lord was speaking to my heart. He said, “You’re Mine, and I need for you to trust Me that I will provide for you.”
See, the Lord wants to make us recognize that the circumstances in our life are for this one reason: that He has the opportunity to demonstrate how much He loves and cares for us—that He is our provision.
That’s what it’s about. It’s not happenstance. It is God Who is intimately involved in your life and my life, my dear brothers and sisters, and He wants to make Himself real. This is what prayer is about. It’s about relationship—coming into this trusting relationship with the living God.
So what does this mean: “Give us this day our daily bread”? What was Jesus wanting His disciples to really understand?
In Matthew, when I read that verse, “Give us this day our daily bread,” there are some other verses I would read, and I would say to myself, “Well, how does this jive?”
Matthew 6:8 says:
Your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him.
Matthew 6:25 says:
Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink;
nor about your body, what you will put on.
Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
It’s interesting because the word life there, the Greek word, is psuchē. He is saying, don’t worry about those things that you need physically—what you are to eat, what you are to drink, or what you need for your body. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
Verses 32 and 33 say:
Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added to you.
He wants us to know that your heavenly Father knows about this stuff. This food, this clothing, that roof over your head—that’s a given. Your Father knows about that. But there are more important things. There are things that He really wants you to be involved in and to know about.
He has a supply for those things. This other stuff, don’t concern yourselves about it, because if you do, you’re going to be distracted from what’s really important.
But we’ve got this thing turned around and upside down. We place our importance on cheaper things: “What am I going to eat? What am I going to drink? What am I going to do?” You see what I’m saying?
God is saying, “Listen, I don’t want you to concern yourself about those things. There are much more important things that I want to show you. I want to take you from being so earthbound that you don’t know what’s going on in the heavenlies.”
He invites us into His very throne room to reveal His heart to us, that we could be involved in the things that He is involved in. But we get so narrow and so petty.
What is this Scripture about? It’s about priorities. Is the King, the Lord Jesus, the most important Person in your life?
These are questions that we have to ask ourselves. Sometimes we just don’t take the time to ask these kinds of hard questions. But is He the most important Person in your life?
You know what? This is a real easy thing to answer. You just have to look at your life. Sometimes we don’t want to look at our lives in such a sharp way, because then we’ll have to deal with it. We’ll have to address it.
But is He the most important Person in your life? Is everything that you do aimed at pleasing Him? Are you interested in what He has for you to do, or are you busy doing your own thing?
So who are you living for? Is the kingdom of God and His testimony what you are living for?
In your everyday circumstances—whether it be your housework, whether you are on the job, whether you are painting a house, doing carpentry work, or teaching school—is there a motive behind it for the furtherance of the kingdom of God and that the testimony of the Lord Jesus would be established where you are?
Is that what is transacting in your heart? Or are we so preoccupied with everything else that we don’t even give these things a thought?
On the job, is there this motive to further the kingdom of God on the job site through the way you speak, the way you act, and the way you interact with other people? Is that foremost in your heart and mind?
When we ask ourselves these questions, it has got to be as plain as the nose on your face, because you live with yourself just like I live with myself. And when the answer comes back to us, we can have freedom.
If we’re not living that way, we repent and say, “Lord, forgive me. Forgive me that I’m so self-centered. Forgive me, Lord, that once again it’s all about me. Forgive me, Lord.”
And you go on. That’s it—you go on. You refocus, and you say, “Ah, today, Lord, it’s for You. What I say and what I do and how I do it: for You, Lord, that Your kingdom would be established, that once again the kingdom of God would be made manifest through me.”
Sometimes what we do is, as I would put it, we look over the wall into the world—at the Bathshebas of the world, the enticements of the world. Here we are in this Christian life, but every once in a while we want to look over that wall.
And when we do, sometimes we’re caught. David was caught looking out over the balcony. Whether it be another man or another woman, some position at work, or just things, we look over that wall and all of a sudden we’re caught.
We begin to say to ourselves, “If I give enough time and attention to that, it can be mine. It can be mine.”
It could be us men looking over the wall at another woman, or a woman looking over the wall at a man. It could be some position at your work, or it could be just some thing—some car, some house.
You are captured by it. All of a sudden, your time, your energies, and your thoughts are directed toward that thing that now you want.
“I want that position, that higher position. What am I going to do? I’ve got to spend more time at work. I’ve got to show those guys I’m really diligent. I’ve got to put extra time in. I’ll go in on Saturdays. When they call me, I’m always going to be there.”
“Oh, well, yeah, I know I can’t make the Wednesday night meeting because I’m so exhausted from work. Or I can’t come here on Sunday because there’s this other function. Or I can’t visit with the saints because of the paperwork that has to be done.”
And all of a sudden, our focus is off the important things. The food, the clothing—that’s where our focus becomes.
We find ourselves standing there one day, looking at our life, and saying, “What’s going on?”
All of a sudden we look, and we find that we have a life that’s all compromised now. Our life in the Lord is compromised. We’re living what I refer to, as you’ve heard in the past, as this Christianity of compromise.
This Christianity where there are no lines. Everything is blurred now. You’re not distinguished from the world anymore because you’ve allowed so much of the world in. It’s the Christianity of compromise—the Christianity of convenience.
Then we begin to recognize, “Wow, my life is so shallow. There’s no real substance in my life.” Have you ever found yourself like that in your walk with the Lord? I have.
My life became so compromised, you wouldn’t have known if I belonged to the Lord or not. There is a shallowness to life. You go through the motions of living, and all of a sudden you begin to wonder, “Well, what really is important?”
Then we begin to look at our circumstances, and sometimes we become bitter. We start to complain. We start to point our finger at everything and everyone else for the way we’re feeling.
Have you ever been in that place? “Yeah, my life is this way and this way, but it’s because of this. Or it’s because of that person. This is why I am this way.”
But if we blame our circumstances for not going on in the Lord, for not being well, then we’re fooling ourselves. Our focus is wrong. Our source is wrong. That is what we have to come to the conclusion of and face. You just can’t point fingers.
I know for myself, when I’ve been in those places, it’s because my focus has been wrong. I’ve looked over the wall, as it were, and my life is not for Christ. In some respects, He is not my life.
So we can’t do that. You know what we have to do? We have to repent, and we have to go back, as the Scripture says, to our first love. That’s all. We have to come to that place of repentance.
I’ve told this story before, but there was a time, numbers of years ago, when I went into a real deep depression. This was in my transition time between restaurants and another career.
I was waiting tables and doing this and that. I was getting older, and I had no insurance, nothing like that going on. I kept saying to myself, “Oh, look at this. I’m this old. What, am I going to be waiting tables till I’m sixty?”
Which I am now, and I’m not waiting tables. But I got real depressed—I mean, really depressed—to the point that my brothers were worrying about me. They called up some dear brothers in the Lord and said, “Hey, Lenny is in trouble. He is really depressed.”
I began to look at everything else around me and say, “This is why I am the way I am.” But that was a lie. The thing I had to do was repent. I had to repent.
But God, in His mercy, brought me to a day of repentance. I said, “Lord, forgive me. But Lord, I cannot get out of this hole.” I got to the place where I couldn’t get out of the hole I was in.
You know what I kept hearing whispered in my ear by the evil one? “Stay there. This is where you belong.”
But that day, when I cried out from my heart, a Scripture came to me—just a portion of a Psalm that says, “He reached down and grabbed me by the hand and pulled me out of the miry clay.”
From that moment on, He began to extract me from the miry clay. My focus was wrong. My blame was wrong.
Let’s turn to Matthew 6. “Give us this day our daily bread”—our source and our supply. That was a wonderful song that the brothers and sisters picked out before this.
I’m going to read Matthew 6:19-21, but before I do, I’ll tell you this little story. I had the one restaurant, and I was now in partnership in another restaurant, so I had sort of two restaurants going at the same time down in Florida.
My cousin called me from New Jersey. He wanted to make a move down to Florida. He had a good job working with hospitals, but he said he wanted to open up a restaurant.
He said, “Look, I’ll put up the money, Len, if you’ll put up the expertise.” By this time, I was rolling along pretty good with the restaurants. I said, “Great. That’s terrific.”
I made the decision just like that. Some people questioned me and asked, “Brother, do you think that is good?” I said, “Yeah. It’s good because when I’ve got three restaurants going, I won’t really have to put much time in at any one. I can devote more time to the Lord and really serve Him more.”
So my cousin told me to find a location. I found one, he sent me the money, we formed a corporation, and he sent money for me to buy equipment. I bought the equipment and got the store set up.
And all this time, I had never gone to my Lord to say, “Lord, is this what You want me to do?”
Then one day, we were having a prayer meeting at my home. I very nonchalantly said to the saints, whom I had been informing of how the Lord had been providing for all of this and orchestrating it, “Listen, how about you pray with me about this?”
They said, “Okay, let’s pray.” Oh, what a mistake that was.
We began to pray, and as we began to pray, the Lord gave this Scripture to me: Matthew 6:19. I didn’t know what that Scripture was, so I opened up my Bible and began to read:
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,
where moth and rust destroy,
and where thieves break in and steal;
but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,
where neither moth nor rust destroys,
and where thieves do not break in and steal.
For where your treasure is,
there your heart will be also.
Well, that stopped me in my tracks, because my treasure wasn’t the Lord Jesus. My treasure was my own little kingdom I was trying to build. That was the truth of the matter.
That’s why I didn’t want to go to the Lord. I wanted to be the supply of my life. Not only did I want to be the supply of my life, I wanted to do what I wanted to do with that supply. That’s why I was afraid to go to Him. I didn’t trust Him.
As faithfully as He had been to me all those years, still I was attached. I’m not saying I’m completely detached, my dear brothers and sisters. I’m pressing on by God’s grace. But I was attached more to the world then.
I had a fear that if I really let go, would He be there for me? But when I read that Scripture that day, I knew what God was saying.
When I asked the brothers and sisters who were praying with me, “Did you have any impressions from the Lord?” another brother said, “You know, this Scripture came to me,” and he read Matthew 6:19-21.
What was I left to do? I had already formed a corporation with my dear cousin, who didn’t know the Lord at the time. I had already committed myself to this. But there was only one thing left to do: call him and tell him I couldn’t.
I got him on the phone and said, “Tom, you may not understand this, but I neglected to ask my Lord if I was allowed to do this restaurant with you. And He told me no.”
Of course, there was dead silence on the other end of the phone. He said, “You’re right, I don’t understand,” and he hung up.
I don’t have to tell you what that did to me. First of all, it brought me to repentance once again. But the Lord, in His mercy, a few days later had my cousin call me up.
He said, “Yes, I don’t understand, but at least can you help me get started?” I said, “Yes, I could do that, but I can’t have anything to do with the business.”
That’s what happened. He eventually came down and opened the business. And another wonderful thing: after he had moved down there, within a few years he came to the Lord Jesus, and he is still following the Lord to this day.
The Lord was wanting to say to me, “You can trust Me. You can trust Me for your provision. Give us this day our daily bread.”
Paul encouraged the saints in Philippians 4:19:
My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.
This is what He is wanting to teach me, and He is wanting to teach you: He will supply all our need in the Lord Jesus.
In 2 Peter 1:3, it says:
His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him Who called us by glory and virtue.
The word there for life is zoē. It is talking about the actual life of God—the divine life, this life that has been implanted in us by the work of the Lord Jesus.
His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to that life, that divine life, the life of Christ within. Again, whenever they use this word knowledge here, they are talking about real experiential knowledge—not something theoretical, not just something up here, but something that God works into our life.
In the Scriptures, bread is often thought of as the staff of life, the bread of subsistence, the daily indispensable bread. We can paraphrase that line, “Give us this day our daily bread,” this way: “Give us the bread which this day’s necessities require.”
Along with bread, we also know that water is a necessity of life. Without water, you can’t live. You’ve got to have water. We all know that—or is it wooder? Depends on where you come from. It’s water.
Jesus, our Lord, spoke of Himself as the bread that came from heaven, and He spoke of His life as that life-giving water.
We turn in John 4. We know this story. I’m going to read John 4:10-14. Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well.
Jesus answered and said to her:
If you knew the gift of God,
and Who it is Who says to you, “Give Me a drink,”
you would have asked Him,
and He would have given you living water.
The woman said to Him:
Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep.
Where then do You get that living water?
Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well
and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?
Jesus answered and said to her:
Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again.
See, my problem over the years is that’s the well I chose to drink from—Jacob’s well. I chose to drink from the well and the supply of what this world had to offer.
Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again;
but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst.
But the water that I shall give him will become in him
a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.
There are two wells that we can drink from: the well of Christ’s life, or your own well. You can drink out of your own well—your own experiences, your own strengths—but you will always come up thirsty.
Hasn’t that been the case in your life? It’s been the case in my life. When I rely on my own past experiences, my own strengths, to do something, to engage in something, to straighten something out in my life, I find that I come up thirsty.
But Christ is saying, “If you would take from My life, this life will well up in you as living waters, always fresh.” It is a fountain of living waters, fresh to meet every situation, every circumstance—not in some old stale way, but in a way that meets that particular circumstance, situation, and relationship in your life.
If you would draw from the well of My life, you will find it fresh and clean and pure. Because if you do the same thing the same old way, you end up with the same results. Haven’t we heard that? That is the story of our life often.
We come into situations and deal with them the same old way because we rely upon ourselves. We’re afraid to abandon ourselves by faith into Christ and draw out of His life.
So often, before we do that, we return to ourselves, just like Peter returning to fishing—what he was used to, what he was comfortable with, things that may have worked in the past.
But when you come to Christ, they will not work anymore. God has to bring us to that place and say, “That will not work anymore. That’s from another kingdom. You’re part of a new kingdom, and we do things differently here.”
God is wanting to bring us to that place where we would learn to draw from the wellspring of Christ’s life. It’s living by the Spirit. It’s another way of saying it. It’s living by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.
This is our daily bread. This is what He is talking about: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Two wells to draw from—which one are you going to draw from? Which one will I draw from? The wellspring of Christ’s life should be our only choice.
We see throughout the Word of God that bread is used in worship, like the unleavened bread used in the Passover meal, or when the Lord Jesus, at what we call the Last Supper, takes the bread into His hands.
It also speaks of relationship. In 1 Corinthians 10:17, it says:
For we, though many, are one bread and one body.
It speaks of life. Remember, one of the points of all of this, talking about prayer, is that prayer has everything to do with relationship: our relationship with our heavenly Father and our relationship with one another.
In John 6, these are passages we are very familiar with. But if we read John 6:26-35, it is interesting because the crowd had followed Jesus after the feeding of the five thousand.
Jesus answered them and said:
Most assuredly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw the signs,
but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.
Sometimes that is the way our life is in the Lord, especially in the beginning. You seek the Lord not because of the signs that spoke of Who He was and His character—the signs that were supposed to say, “This is the gift of the Father to us.”
But they followed Him because of what He did, what satisfied them, the blessing, you might say. Especially when we are young in the Lord, the Lord is so gracious to us. There are so many blessings that come our way.
There is freedom from sin and habits and all sorts of things, the answering of prayers all around us, and we are so alive to those blessings that our focus is on these things rather than on Him.
Have you had that experience? I have, where a good portion of my Christian life was focused on the blessing rather than the Blesser. God had to sort of change that focus a bit.
He says:
Do not labor for the food which perishes,
but for the food which endures to everlasting life,
which the Son of Man will give you,
because God the Father has set His seal on Him.
They said to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them—and I think this is significant in understanding something of what “Give us this day our daily bread” means:
This is the work of God, that you believe in Him Whom He sent.
God does these things, allows these things, and brings us into these circumstances in our life to say one thing to us: “I love you, and I want you to believe My love for you. I want you to believe that I am your sustenance and the One Who provides every good thing in your life.”
This is the work of God: that you would believe in Him Whom He sent.
They said to Him:
What sign will You perform then, that we may see it and believe You?
What work will You do?
Our fathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written,
“He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”
Then Jesus said:
Most assuredly, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven,
but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven.
For the bread of God is He Who comes down from heaven
and gives life to the world.
Then they said to Him, “Lord, give us this bread always.” And Jesus said to them:
I am the bread of life.
He who comes to Me shall never hunger,
and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.
Very interesting. He says, “I am the bread of life,” and in that bread is life itself. The life that He has given us—this divine life, the very life of Christ that we have within us—is nourished by Him.
He is the life, and He is the nourishment of that life.
John 6:47-50 says:
Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life.
I am the bread of life.
Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead.
This is the bread which comes down from heaven,
that one may eat of it and not die.
What bread are we eating? Are we eating the manna that this world has to supply? If you are nourished on that, then you are going to experience death in your relationship with God.
When I say that, you will experience that sense of separation—not that we can ever really be separated from Him. Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ and the love of God in Christ Jesus.
But you know when you have an estranged relationship with someone, even though you are related to them, you can feel estranged. If you are drinking from another well, if you are eating the manna of this world, you will feel that estrangement.
You will feel that sense of the Spirit of God sort of wilting inside of your spirit. You know that sensation? I’m sure I don’t have to explain it. I know we’ve all had it at one time or another. We feel just a lack of life.
John 6:36 says:
But I said to you that you have seen Me and yet do not believe.
This is where the connection is made. This is what the Lord wants to say to us about, “Give us this day our daily bread.” It needs to come by faith—by believing that He is our daily bread, that He is the One Who sustains, nourishes, and gives life.
We’re going to end with a couple of other verses, one in Hebrews, just to emphasize this point. In Hebrews 3:5-8 and 12-14, it says:
Moses indeed was faithful in all His house as a servant,
for a testimony of those things which would be spoken afterward,
but Christ as a Son over His own house,
whose house we are if we hold fast the confidence
and the rejoicing of the hope firm to the end.
Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says:
“Today, if you will hear His voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
in the day of trial in the wilderness.”
Some of what that is saying is this: our hearts can become hardened if we continue to do the same thing the same old way—our way. We can become hardened in our hearts, my dear brothers and sisters, refusing to do things God’s way: the life of Christ, drawing from the well of our salvation.
Verse 12 says:
Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you
an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God;
but exhort one another daily, while it is called “Today,”
lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.
Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God—in departing and not taking of that living water, of the bread of life, resorting to your own devices and the ways of this world.
Your heart will become hardened, and it’s very deceitful. It can happen so suddenly. It’s the drifting of the boat away from the shore after it has been untied. All of a sudden, you wake up in the boat and you’re miles from shore—so imperceptibly.
Hebrews 4:2 says:
For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them;
but the word which they heard did not profit them,