The Lord's Prayer - Adult SS - Lesson 4: Daily Bread

And so do you remember, you can see on your handouts, you can break up the Lord's Prayer into three sections.

There's the address, who we pray to.

Then the next two lines are petitions about God, asking things about God.

And then petitions for us, asking things specifically about us.

And today we're beginning the first of those petitions about us.

We are asking God to provide something for us.

What is it? Our daily bread.

What do we mean by daily bread? Daily bread here, by this, Jesus means all the necessities of life, all our needs.

So just after the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, Jesus goes on to speak about, therefore, do not be anxious, saying, what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear? And so Jesus has in mind when he says daily bread, not only physical bread, like flour, yeast, wheat, put it in the oven.

Not only that, so not only physical food, but it does include that.

But he's thinking all of our needs in life.

Food and drink, clothing, finances, work, car troubles, health, medication, every need in our life.

But that is very helpfully summed up here in the phrase daily bread.

Because bread, particularly in those days, in Jesus' day, bread was essential to staying alive.

So you could go for a while without eating meat, but you needed bread to get by daily.

Daily bread is kind of a shorthand for life, the essentials for living.

And so just notice the flow of the Lord's Prayer here.

Because it might kind of seem jarring as we get to this.

So we go from, what have we seen so far, the heights of the transcendent heavenly gods and his name, his glory and his kingdom.

And from there, we now jump to a loaf of hovis from Tesco.

And it seems a bit of a big jump down, doesn't it? But actually, I want to say that this is a really relevant and natural thing to say next.

Because we need bread, we need life to fulfill all these other things that we've just prayed for in the Lord's Prayer.

We need life to hallow God's name.

We need energy to do God's will.

And so these petitions about us aren't separate to the petitions before.

And so do you remember, you can see on your handouts, you can break up the Lord's Prayer into three sections.

There's the address, who we pray to.

Then the next two lines are petitions about God, asking things about God.

And then petitions for us, asking things specifically about us.

And today we're beginning the first of those petitions about us.

We are asking God to provide something for us.

What is it? Our daily bread.

What do we mean by daily bread? Daily bread here, by this, Jesus means all the necessities of life, all our needs.

So just after the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, Jesus goes on to speak about, therefore, do not be anxious, saying, what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear? And so Jesus has in mind when he says daily bread, not only physical bread, like flour, yeast, wheat, put it in the oven.

Not only that, so not only physical food, but it does include that.

But he's thinking all of our needs in life.

Food and drink, clothing, finances, work, car troubles, health, medication, every need in our life.

But that is very helpfully summed up here in the phrase daily bread.

Because bread, particularly in those days, in Jesus' day, bread was essential to staying alive.

So you could go for a while without eating meat, but you needed bread to get by daily.

Daily bread is kind of a shorthand for life, the essentials for living.

And so just notice the flow of the Lord's Prayer here.

Because it might kind of seem jarring as we get to this.

So we go from, what have we seen so far, the heights of the transcendent heavenly gods and his name, his glory and his kingdom.

And from there, we now jump to a loaf of hovis from Tesco.

And it seems a bit of a big jump down, doesn't it? But actually, I want to say that this is a really relevant and natural thing to say next.

Because we need bread, we need life to fulfill all these other things that we've just prayed for in the Lord's Prayer.

We need life to hallow God's name.

We need energy to do God's will.

And so these petitions about us aren't separate to the petitions before.