Reflections on God: Daily Bread

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been using the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer to guide our reflections on who God is. Today, we’re going to take a look at the next petition, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. What does this have to say about God? Well, there is an important assumption in this petition that will answer that question. The assumption is that our Father provides all that we need.

Now, that will sound appropriately spiritual sounding to many, but it would be fair for someone to ask me how I got that from a prayer about bread. I have an answer for that question. In literature, you can refer to the whole of something by mentioning only a part of that something. This is not something that I have created. It’s something from the smart people. They even have coined a fancy grammatical label for it: synecdoche, ‘a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part’.

So, Jesus isn’t calling us to pray merely for something to toast for breakfast. ‘Bread’ is the ‘part’ that actually refers to the ‘whole’. But what is that ‘whole’?

Well, it’s easy to see this request for bread (the ‘part’) as a request for all of our food (the ‘whole’). Bread is a common biblical stand-in for that. (‘When he summoned a famine on the land and broke all supply of bread…’ Psalm 105:16)

But I don’t think that that’s quite enough. We need to take another step and see daily bread as the stand-in for all of our needs. Jesus is calling us to pray to the God who provides all of our needs.

This is where I see a potential problem. I think that it’s fair to say that most of us have been taught that it’s on us to provide for our needs. Now, it may not have been expressed exactly in that way. You may have been taught to ‘take responsibility’ for yourself. As a result, it would feel wrong, you would think of yourself as not acting ‘responsibly’, if you had to depend on someone else to provide for you and your family. So, you tell yourself that you need to be careful to plan well so that you can provide for what you need. You don’t want to depend on someone else. I think that this way of thinking is common enough.

Now, a question. If you have adopted these notions about the necessity to provide for yourself and your family, why do you bother to pray this petition? Don’t you have ‘our daily bread’ covered?

I hope saying it in that way makes something clear. The training that many of us have had about taking responsibility for ourselves has exposed us to a great temptation. We can so easily depend on ourselves and think that we don’t need to depend on our God for the things that we need.

At this point, I could go on to talk about how falling into that thinking is sin, which it certainly is. But I will, instead, say that thinking in that way is simply stupid. I say that because it is so unrealistic. At any moment, your ability ‘to be responsible’ can be taken away from you, completely gone, in the blink of an eye. We are, both in body and soul, such fragile creatures. It doesn’t take much to completely undo us. And to use a very biblical term in its very biblical sense, it is a fool who thinks otherwise.

This is where I remind you of the label of this series of brief essays: Reflections on God. What does this petition teach us about the God whom we worship? He is the God who provides all that we need, from bread to housing to health to the will to live another day. We depend on Him for everything. He has promised to do this for us. And because he is our caring Father, He will do that in the right way and at the right time.

This leaves us with a choice to make. We can submit to this God, trusting Him to provide for our needs according to His wisdom and love, reaping the divine blessings that come with this trust. Or we can pursue the very foolish (and rebellious!) path of depending on ourselves to make it through this life, reaping the divine cursings that come with such foolishness. That’s our choice, and we all face it day after day after day.

Our God is the great provider for all who trust Him to do that.