Give us each day our daily bread…. (Luke 11: 3, ESV)
Golfers are normally aware of idioms unique to our sport. If not, we quickly learn golf’s allusions, analogies, and metaphors. For example, if someone says about a two-man team, “They ham and egged it,” we know that when one partner was out of the hole, his partner saved the day with a par or birdie.
Whether it’s a best-ball or alternate-shot format, we depend on one another to win. I suppose we could also argue that this applies in individual formats too.
It’s no secret that Jordan Spieth popularized the plural pronoun “we” when referring to his caddie, coach, and family after winning more than a few PGA events. Jordan was stating the obvious — he depended on others to succeed.
What, if anything, does this have to do with asking the Father for “daily bread?” Jesus is teaching the disciples that the heart of prayer is a sense of dependence—our dependence on the Father. It’s a realization that we depend on him for everything. When we look to the Father, through the Son, by the power of the Spirit for our needs, we honor him.
Humanity depends on God whether anyone recognizes it or not. It has often been said, “Even the atheist depends on the air God supplies in order to deny his Maker’s existence.” This saying is getting at something critically important—we are all dependent on the Father for life and all its attendant demands. Recognizing this truth is the motive and motivation for a life of prayer.
Paul reminds us, “We live and move and have our being in God.” In short, there is no escaping the reality of the omnipresence of God—he is, indeed, everywhere. For those who disregard him or outright deny him, it is willful blindness. If you are a follower of Jesus, prayer is your connection to him.
The poster child for pride is someone who lives life without a profound sense of dependence on the Father—the One who sustains heaven and earth. The corollary to this is equally true—it requires a modicum of humility to admit our dependence. And the one who cultivates a sense of dependence consistently goes to the Father in prayer.
When Jesus teaches us to ask the Father for daily bread, he is not merely giving us a phrase to recite; he is giving us the recipe for the life that flourishes—a life that daily looks to heaven for wisdom, guidance, and provisions for our pilgrimage through this world.
Often the discussion revolves around the following important questions: What is our daily bread? Is Jesus addressing our physical or spiritual needs? If we answer that question by looking at the entirety of Scripture, we soon discover that Jesus is talking about both.
It was Adam and Eve who thought that they could understand the world and their place in it without reference to God. They presumed that they could live independent of God. They “believed the lie.”
Scripture only recognizes two classes of people—those who are “in Adam” and those “in Christ” (Romans 5: 12-17). Those “in Adam” approach life with a stubborn sense of self-reliance. By grace, those who are “in Christ” learn to depend on Christ for everything.
As the Puritan scholar, Matthew Henry, once wrote, “The man who lives without prayer, lives without God in the world.” He, of course, didn’t mean that in a wooden sense. He meant that those who fail to depend on the Father through prayer miss out on the sweetness of a “felt nearness” of his presence through the rough and tumble of life.