Matthew 6:9-15
Amen. Turn in your copy of God’s
word to Matthew. Matthew chapter six, nine through
15 is where we find the Lord’s prayer. And tonight we think
of verse 11, give us this day our daily bread. So Matthew chapter
six, beginning at verse nine, Jesus says to the disciples who
asked him to teach them how to pray, he says, pray then like
this, our father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come,
your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this
day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have also
forgiven our debtors and lead us not into temptation, but deliver
us from evil. For if you forgive others their
trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if
you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your
father forgive your trespasses. Amen, the word of the living
God. Well, y’all can thank Charlie
over here for making the sermon longer because in his prayer,
he reminded me of something that I didn’t put on paper, but I
should say, So if we go five minutes longer, it’s his fault.
But he said something about advances in technology and how they help
us. And it reminded me of what Martin Luther taught in his doctrine
of vocation. Doctrine of vocation would be
the biblical view of what it means to be a person who works.
Right? God has made every one of us,
he has fitted every one of us for a task. Some of us may be
moms, others dads, you know, we may be grandparents, we may
be Sunday school teachers, we may be worker bees at the post
office, or we may be in the transportation or the education field or the
medical field. We may be the butcher, the baker,
or the candlestick maker. And I was thinking during that
prayer that Charlie was making about how Martin Luther said,
when we pray, give us this day our daily bread. We’re praying
for the cow. We’re praying for the milkmaid.
We’re praying for the dairyman. We’re praying for people like
Louis Pasteur, who invented the wonderful process of pasteurization. That’s how we get healthy milk
these days. We’re thankful for the grocer,
or maybe back in the day, the milk delivery man. I grew up
in a house just down the street, and on our back porch, we had
an icebox. And in that icebox, they literally,
in the last hundred years, delivered ice. And they delivered milk
and eggs and other fresh items. The guy that cuts my hair before
he became a barber was a milk delivery driver for, I think,
the Melville farms out in Nevin, the Scott farms, something like
that. And so Martin Luther was reminding the people he taught
that whatever is your vocation, it may be that God answers the
prayers, give us this day our daily bread through your hands. Think of maybe an example or
two in the room. Some of you are in the medical
field and so someone’s praying for good health. It may be that
your hands, your knowledge, your experience is what brings good
health to someone in the providence of God. Maybe you’re in education
and it may be that a child learns character from you. Perhaps they don’t learn it at
home or they’re not learning it in the rest of their environment,
but because God has put you in their path. in the schools, it
could be that he uses that to influence and on and on we could
go giving examples. And so as we think on give us
this day, our daily bread, uh, it’s a way bigger prayer, isn’t
it? Then we think, uh, sometimes we may just think, Lord, I’m
hungry. Give me something and I deserve it. So give it to me
now. Right? That’s probably sometimes how
our sinful hearts think. But tomorrow morning, as you
pour milk on your cereal or, Eat your yogurt or do whatever
it is you do. Think through all that it took
to get what you got to put in your mouth. And you’ll see how
God answers your prayers through the hands of many people. Now
on to the regular part of our programming. Here’s a little
pop quiz for you. Do you remember the three items
that are in the Ark? That is the Ark of the Covenant
and not the one that Indiana Jones was looking for. but the
one in the Old Testament where Moses and all the Israelites
put three things in there. Well, there was Aaron’s staff.
Remember that budded, it budded to show that he was God’s man,
God’s leader. There were the two tablets of
the 10 commandments, but there was a jar of manna. There was a jar of manna to remind
them that God every morning provided for them in the wilderness. You
remember when God called Israel out of Egypt, they crossed the
sea on dry land and they entered the desert. And originally, well,
God has no plan A or plan B, but initially they were to go
straight on into the promised land by circuitous route. But because of their unbelief
and their stubborn hearts, God let that first generation die
in the wilderness. But during those years of provision,
he gave them water from the rock. During those years in the wilderness,
he gave them bread from heaven. Every day, manna would come down,
and six days a week, they were to collect enough for the day.
If you collected too much, because you got stingy or grubby-handed,
it spoiled. And on the sixth day, before
the Sabbath, you were to prepare for the Sabbath by gathering
a little extra. That was the only day you could gather extra,
and it would be kept for the Sabbath. He also provided quail. Quail came from the heavens and
fed the people. If you’re into reading your Bible
through the year and maybe you’re doing that historical, well not
historical, it’s the seven day plan where you read law, prophets,
writings, whatever. Perhaps you read Joshua. 1 through
5 the other day. And Joshua 1 through 5 tells
the story of how Israel finally went into the promised land.
And as soon as they crossed the Jordan on dry land into the promised
land, the manna ceased because the people ate from the fruit
of the land. So those 40 years, bread from
heaven, water from the rock, For those 40 years, their shoes
did not wear out, the moths did not destroy their clothing, and
they had plenty of provisions. And so that manna in the jar,
in the ark, was a reminder of how good and gracious God had
been. Now some of you, I don’t know,
I don’t wanna get in trouble for ageism or something, or throw
an age on you, but some of you, perhaps, I don’t know, can remember
the Great Depression, anybody? Or at least the after effects
of it? My mom was a child of parents who lived through the
Great Depression and we always picked on my mom because if we had supper
and we were cleaning up from supper and there was one green
bean left, she would put it in a little baggie in the fridge
and she’d save it and she’d find a use for anything that was left
over. She was from a part of South
Carolina. They were a farm family. Well,
if you didn’t have it, you couldn’t eat it. And so she remembered
those days. And maybe some of you will remember that. We live
in a time of plenty. We live in a time of waste. We
live in a time of ingratitude and unthankfulness for all that
God has given us. And perhaps a jar of manna on
the table would be a good reminder of all that God has done for
us in the Lord Jesus Christ, that people of Israel lacked
nothing in the wilderness. And if you do a quick reading
of Psalm 78 and of Psalm 106, and there’s other places in the
Bible where this pops up, Psalm 95, our call to worship today
is another place, the people constantly disbelieved God. In
fact, in Psalm 78, the proverbial or the rhetorical question is
asked, can God spread a table, a banquet in the wilderness?
And the answer, of course, is yes, he can. And the answer,
of course, is yes, he did. But still the people complained,
this manna, this meat, oh, that we could go back to Egypt where
there were leeks and there were onions and garlic and all kinds
of good things to eat. They rather would have had slavery
and a buffet than redemption and simple provisions. And so
a little perspective is given to us as we think of this petition,
give us this day our daily bread. And I want you to remember this,
etch it in your minds and etch it into your hearts. God provides
us with our daily needs so that we can seek first his kingdom. I think it’s important to think
that way, particularly because of the context of Matthew chapter
six, Jesus is giving the principles of the kingdom in the Sermon
on the Mount. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those
who mourn. Blessed are those who hunger
and thirst. Blessed are you when you are persecuted. All those
blessed or happy statements are given to show what people of
the kingdom are like when their hearts are changed. And so just
a few verses later, we learn to pray, give us this day our
daily bread. And for what other purpose than
to live for God’s kingdom would he give us daily bread? He wouldn’t
give us daily bread for paganism. He wouldn’t give us rich provisions
so that we could not please him. Now we do remember the rain falls
on the just and the unjust. We remember that God gives good
things to all his creatures. And yes, the unrighteous and
the wicked who do not give thanks to God or acknowledge him, yes,
they receive from his heavenly bounty in this life. But it’s
only the righteous who recognize and remember and observe that
the blessings of our covenant God to his covenant people are
so that we can live for his kingdom, seek first his kingdom. So God
provides us with daily bread in order that we can seek first
his kingdom and its body and soul. He gives us what we need
for both body and soul. So I want us to think of a couple
ways about this request. First, our provider. Our provider
is none other than God almighty. I think of places in the scripture
where it says he is the father above. He is the father of heavenly
lights. Every good and perfect gift comes
down from God. And we think of Christ, but we
think of the food and the meat and the blessings that we have.
God is our wealthy benefactor, you might say. He owns the cattle
on a thousand hills. He is the maker, the owner, the
sustainer of the world and everything in it. He can distribute to his
people generously and he can give to you even in lean times. He can give when the world seems
to say there’s a recession, when the world seems to say, There’s
inflation when the world seems to say interest rates are too
high and on and on you can go. God can stretch what he provides
and it can outdo what the world and the economist say is probably
true. God is a covenant making God.
He makes promises to us. He obligates himself to us and
he is gracious to us. And I think if you back up for
a moment and think about first, God is the creator and how wonderful,
kind and good he is. He took what was formless and
void and he formed it and filled it in order that there may be
a theater for his glory. So that on that stage, the wonderful
work of redemption through Christ. would be performed on a worldwide,
universe-wide stage, and we would see His glory, His goodness,
His grace, and His provision. And then you narrow in and you
see that on that earth that God took what was formless and void
and formed it and filled, He made a garden, and He planted
it, and He put the man in the garden to work it, to keep it,
to name the animals. to subdue it and have dominion
over it, to make it work, to make it fruitful, but also to
keep it safe. He gave him a wife as a helpmate. He named the animals
and whatever name he named them, God called them by that name. And so we see at the end of the
creation account, God looks on all that he made, the sun and
the moon and the stars, the cycles, the seasons, the seed time, the
harvest, the fruitful and multiplying of birds and land animals and
fish of the sea, but especially the people that he made, he gave
his benediction very good. And we notice throughout the
history of God’s people, how he clothes them, how he feeds
them, how he gives them an ark. to escape the floods. He gives
them the promised land as a place where they can live in a land
that flows with milk and honey. They’ll escape from Egypt. But you remember some centuries
before they escaped from Egypt, there was a famine in the land.
And those wicked brothers of Joseph sold them into slavery.
And eventually Joseph, after all his trials and tribulations,
becomes the chief steward of Pharaoh. And he builds the granary
cities. there in upper Egypt. And he
prepares during the seven years of plenty for the seven years
of want. And when Israel or Jacob comes and sojourns in the land
of Egypt, God protects his covenant people by providing for them
in a rich and mighty way through the wisdom of that son sold into
slavery. And over and over and over, we
see through the Exodus and through the wilderness, God caring for
his people. Jesus says to his disciples,
consider the lilies of the field. and all their splendor, even
Solomon was not arrayed like one of these, or consider the
birds of the air, the sparrows. How much does God care for them?
How much more does our heavenly father care for us? So don’t
be like the pagans. Don’t worry about what you will
eat or what you will drink, but trust the Lord for his good and
gracious provision. And God has shown over and over,
hasn’t he, that he is our provider, Jehovah Jireh, our provider. You can trust in your own wit,
your own ingenuity. You can trust in your ability
to make money, invest money, grow money. You can trust in
your ability in this world with your work ethic and your gifts
and your graces. But it’s only God, by God’s hand,
that you succeed. And he can take everything you’ve
made, everything you’ve earned, and he can turn it to nothing.
but he can also take everything you have, everything you’ve earned,
and he can add blessing and peace with it. So it’s good to trust
in God, but also it’s good for us to remember as we’re made
in God’s image, particularly you men who are providers, it’s
your task, it’s our task to be God-like to those who are under
us, to go out and work, to go out and provide, to labor over,
to worry over, to struggle over the needs of our household and
to take care of in some limited, small, godlike way to those that
have been entrusted to us. It’s our job to provide for our
families, to help support the work of the church, and to help
those who are poor. That’s how God often provides. It’s through the simple everyday
faithfulness of his people. So there’s our provider. Let’s
think about our provision. I know we don’t keep pocket change
much anymore. But back a few years ago, I was
thinking about how much pocket change we have in our top drawer,
how much pocket change we have in the junk drawer in the kitchen.
how much pocket change maybe we have in the the mason jar
in the top of the closet or perhaps in the ashtray of our car but
i’m realizing as i say all of this that’s old news we don’t
have ashtrays we don’t have pocket change because we do electronic
transactions we well that’s a day gone by but if you could gather
up with a little lint from your pockets, a couple bucks and change,
you would find yourself to be in the top 10% of the world.
Now, I didn’t say the top 1%. I don’t think any of us are in
the 1%er crowd. But if you have a few bucks to
your name, you’re in the top 10% of the world. The rest of
the world, the other 90%, lives generally in poverty. And we
think about what we have. What is our provision? It’s all from the hand of God.
It’s Joseph. It’s the grain. It’s the water
from the rock. It’s the bread from heaven. It’s
the quail. It’s the 40 years. It’s the vineyards we didn’t
plant. It’s the cisterns we didn’t dig. It’s the houses we did not
build and the cities we did not establish and the walls we did
not raise that is our provision. God has given these things to
the sojourning Israelites. the Israelites as they landed in
the promised land, but he’s given to every believer. He’s given
us a whole host of gifts. And Martin Luther, I think, had
a wonderful list of what it meant to him to have daily bread. It’s
good food. It’s good friends. It’s good
fortune in this world. It’s having peace and tranquility.
It’s having a happy life, a happy marriage, a table full of children.
For him, it was his theological students. It was his work in
reestablishing the biblical church on this world and other things
like that. Our provision, our daily bread
is much larger than chicken. It’s much larger than bread and
milk and food. And there’s that wonderful hymn
that says we should count our blessings. We should name them
one by one. It’s amazing, isn’t it? In our
culture, we go from Thanksgiving to Black Friday. We go from Thanksgiving
to let’s go get more. I think the world would be a
better place if we lightened our load, if we thinned out,
if we got rid of, and we never replace those things with more.
Live a simpler life, live a content life. You know, the TV commercials,
the radio ads, they’re all meant to make us dissatisfied with
what we have and with what we don’t have. And so we’d go out
and get more. I remember there was a little
kiddie video our kids would watch. I think it was a veggie tale.
And it was about Madam Blueberry going to Stuff Mart. and Madame
Blueberry went to Stuff Mart all the time and she loaded up
at Stuff Mart and Madame Blueberry lived in a tree house and eventually
her tree that her house was in keeled over because it was weighed
down by so much stuff. And so maybe we need a better
definition of what daily bread means. Sometimes You hear the
little phrase, is your cup half empty or is it half full? I imagine
it’s actually overflowing. Well, our provision is something
we ought to give thanks to God for. Remember in the scripture,
paganism is often pictured with ingratitude. Paganism is often
paired with ingratitude. You get the picture, you get
the idea that a person who doesn’t acknowledge God also does not
give thanks to God. If you don’t acknowledge God
or give thanks to him, you’re a pagan. And sometimes we can
be practical pagans. We say, dear God, thanks for
what I got. I worked for it, but I guess
you helped along the way. That’s sometimes our attitude.
But pagans aren’t thankful. It was the sin of Israel. They
were discontent. They were full of envy, lust,
and murmuring, and God was not happy with them. Now think about
in history and biblical history where God has provided. Remember
Elijah went to the widow of Zarephath and said, what have you got in
the cupboard? Not much. And he said, just keep every day making
your cakes. And her oil never ran out. Her
flour never ran out. As long as the man of God was
in her house, uh, the provisions kept on coming. Think of Ruth
and how in a time of famine, The Moabite stayed faithful to
her mother-in-law and God provided a kinsman redeemer in Boaz. Think of a time in my childhood
when I believe it was in the early 1980s. We were in an economic
time, much like now, big inflation, high fuel cost. We lived in a
house with electric heat. My dad didn’t make a terrible
amount of money as a new church plant pastor, and so we kept
our house pretty cold. Well, a man in the church had
just bought a wood stove for his house, and they were enjoying
its warmth, and he was wealthy enough to purchase the exact
same wood stove and have it installed at our house. And so for probably
five or six winters, we remained living in that house. We had
a warm, toasty, roasty house. That’s a big childhood memory
for us, to have been kept warm by the provision of someone who
saw that need and met it. I can remember in the early days
of pastoral ministry in my own life, when our refrigerator went
out and the people of the church, well, they put a fridge in for
us. I can remember when a baby was born and the washer and dryer
went out. and a mystery check at Christmas
for about $1,500 came in the mail. Never figured out who it
was, but that paid for a new washer and dryer. Think of driving
in the past an 18 year old car and somehow some way it just
kept on going. And I think we can see seasons
and stretches of faithfulness. Maybe it’s with hospital bills.
Maybe it’s with the needs that we have that we say, there’s
just no way this need can be met. Well, God is big and he
is strong and he is mighty. So we thought about our provider,
that’s God. We thought about our provisions,
the things he’s given us. Let’s think about our posture.
What ought to be our posture when we think about daily bread?
Well, what do you deserve? You deserve death. What do you
deserve? God’s wrath. What do you deserve
on the face of the earth? Well, nothing. But you say probably
in your head, well, I go out and work. I go out and make a
paycheck. I go out with that paycheck and
make purchases. Yes, you do. But it’s in God,
it’s in him that we live, move, and have our being. What do we
deserve? We deserve nothing since the
fall of man and sin. We’re unworthy. And God ought
to withhold his blessings from us as the curse for our disobedience. But instead, he’s a God of steadfast
love and faithfulness. He overlooks our sin because
he’s placed them on the sun. And at Calvary, those sins were
paid for. And so he loves us with an everlasting
love. And our daily dependence is on
God and not our checkbook. Our daily dependence is on God
and not Edward Jones. Our daily dependence is on Jehovah
Jireh, our provider who gives us everything when we deserve
nothing. And our posture needs to be one of gratitude, one of
thanks, one of recognizing all that we are and all that we have
is of God. And we should be careful because
of the warnings, Paul says in Corinthians, the things of the
Old Testament, the stories about the wilderness people, They were
written for our instruction. And so when they murmured and
God was angry with them, we should remember, no, no, no. He didn’t
like that. When we covet, we’re saying we’re dissatisfied with
what God has tailor made and provided for us. When we lust
after other things, we’re saying, God, you’ve given me things,
but I don’t like them. I want to trade them in. The
other day I went to the UPS store, big mistake. Everybody’s returning
Amazon packages. Grandma got them something and
they don’t like it. It doesn’t fit, so they gotta
send it back. That’s why my parents started giving money. Nobody
sends money back. It’s universal, right? But we’re
a return and traded out people because we’re not happy. And
so we shouldn’t murmur, we shouldn’t covet, we shouldn’t lust, we
shouldn’t be people of ingratitude. But also we shouldn’t be people
who have to show for all our blessings, a poor use of those
gifts and those graces. Our posture ought to be one of
worship, worshiping God for who he is and what he’s done and
what he’s granted to us. Our posture should be one of
work. We should be a people like Adam in the garden who work and
make stuff fruitful. We should be people who keep
and protect and are good stewards of what God has given us. We
should use it well with thanksgiving. We should be generous to others
and we should be helpful to others who are in need. Think about
the victory God showed his people over Egypt. and how they crossed
the sea on dry land and quickly sang, I will sing unto the Lord
for he has triumphed gloriously. The horse and the rider have
been thrown into the sea. And not two notes later, they’re
grumbling. Grumbling about water, grumbling
about the bread, grumbling about what God hasn’t given them. And
I think of those of us who are this side of the cross, not victory
over Egypt, but victory in Jesus over sin and death and darkness.
and we grumble about our food as well. And God did not deal
kindly with the wilderness people. No, he put them to death. He
put them to death for their unbelief, their ingratitude, their grumbling
and their grouchiness. They didn’t make it into the
promised land. Unbelief, ingratitude, unthankfulness. And God calls
us to believe the impossible in our everyday provision. And
we can believe that because we have seen God’s ultimate goodness
and graciousness. He who did not spare his own
son, but delivered him up for us all. How much more will he
not also with him freely give us all things? Pray with me. Lord, we thank you for our daily
bread. We’re so blessed and we pray
that we would use it to seek first your kingdom and to give
you all the glory. Also help us to look on others
who may be in need and may we be kind and gracious to those
around us who are experiencing less and may we be a gracious
kindness and hand to them through Jesus. We ask all this, amen.
We want to sing of God’s goodness and we’ll use number 559 of the
Lord’s Prayer and let’s do stand to sing.