DAILY BREAD

This coming Sunday I will be back in Indiana, God willing and the flights are on time. 

I have been preaching a series on the Lord's Prayer recently, looking at each phrase in turn. So this week I am working on a sermon on "Give us this day our daily bread" - an interesting verse to ponder in the midst of extreme poverty. 

Each day here in Ghana, I am passing hundreds of people who know the experience of hunger intimately and literally. Many, no doubt, have endured more than an entire 24-hour period without bread to eat.

And many of these would be professing Christians who know and pray the Lord's prayer. 

How is the prayer answered for them?

(I am assuming that when we pray a prayer given to us from Jesus Christ Himself, we can expect a positive answer from our heavenly Father, right?)

It's not an easy question. 

On the one hand, when Jesus commands us to pray for "daily bread", it is a clear reference to the manna which the Israelites picked up 6 days a week throughout the 40 years of their desert wanderings. 

And this would lead one to interpret the prayer in the most literal sense: "God, give us the food we need today". 

But then we also need to remember that Jesus refers to Himself as "the Bread of Life" (John 6:35), leading us towards a more spiritualized interpretation of "Give us this day our Daily Bread": "God, feed us spiritually today".  

So in the Lord's Prayer, are we asking our Father for physical nourishment, spiritual nourishment, or both?