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18th August 2025
MondayReflection
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'Brian Sauvé'
Brian has a passion for preaching the Bible
'Bread is a Sermon'
Matthew 6:11
Give us this day our daily bread
As we continue through the model prayer that the Lord Jesus teaches us in Matthew 6, we will focus on a single supplication which we are taught to pray to that Father, one that teaches us our dependence and what to do with it:
Every part of the Lord's Prayer takes us down to the roots of who we are and what we are for.
We are sons of a Father, and that Father is holy.
We are to desire that his name would be hallowed in all the earth - more, that his Kingdom would come and his will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.
In this prayer, we are not only learning how to pray, but also what our lives are actually for - participation in, looking for, and longing for a Kingdom.
And as we turn the corner into seemingly lower things - daily bread, forgiveness, victory over temptation - it's important to see that we are still down at the roots of who and what we are, and what we were made for.
We should ask the question: What does it teach us that we are to be a people who pray, "Our Father in heaven ... Give us this day our daily bread?"
What does this supplication teach us?
As we think through that, we will understand what we are praying for in this prayer and why we need to pray this prayer.
Think of the highest-powered politician, the wealthiest business tycoon, the most famous celebrity on earth.
Maybe think of Elon Musk and his latest net worth of nearly $200 billion.
Think about the opportunities he has, the wealth, the insulation from trouble, the problems you have that he probably doesn't.
Now understand this: Every one of even these seemingly untouchable and insulated people are almost comically dependent.
Deprive any of them of air for three to five minutes and no amount of money, successful startups, or Instagram followers will do a thing for them.
If they don't spend roughly a third of each 24-hour cycle unconscious, they will eventually go crazy and die.
If they don't drink a certain combination of hydrogen and oxygen, they will shrivel up like a raisin, and yes, die.
And for most of them the same thing will happen if you deprive them of attention for more than 6 minutes.
God built radical dependence into the world he made, so that nobody could honestly labour under the delusion of independent strength.
Food, our daily need for bread, teaches us this dependence.
We are - and we are by design - supplicants.
We exist on God's charity and profligate goodness.
God didn't have to make it so.
He could have made a world where people were little perpetual motion machines - he's the author of all the rules; he could do it.
Physics belongs to God.
When Jesus teaches us to pray for our daily bread, he teaches us to daily remember our neediness before God.
We are to be a people who live with deep awareness of his daily grace:
He causes the sun to keep shining, the wheat to keep growing, the leaven to keep leavening, the truckers to keep trucking - all of it is grace.
And so the first reaction you ought to have to this instruction is to be humbled before the God who feeds even his enemies.
Be humbled.
You are as fragile and dependent as a nursing infant at his mother's breast.
Don't forget it.
This is an edited version.
The full article, and Bible references, is avaiable on request
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Brian Sauvé
Brian has a passion for preaching the Bible.
In his preaching, you will find a deep concern for the intersection of Exegetical and Biblical Theology,
the glory of God in all things,
and the primacy of the Gospel in every text.
Refuge Church
We believe that the leadership of the local church should be formed by the ancient Scriptures rather than the corporate world.
For us, this means that Refuge Church is led by a plurality of pastor/elders , qualified for leadership by the grace of Jesus Christ
and in accordance with the requirements given by the Apostles.
Therefore all of our leaders are not just in authority, but under it as well.
Jesus Christ is the Chief Shepherd of Refuge Church, the senior leader to whom all of our leaders will give an account
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This prayer teaches us that we are to be dependent-together.
Don't do what we are so prone, so wired to do, in passages like this.
Don't turn this into a prayer for little individual people-units to pray for themselves.
No! Remember, we are praying in this prayer to our Father, and we are asking him to give us our daily bread.
Keep those pronouns - us and our - in the forefront of your mind.
This is a prayer of provision for your people, not just yourself.
It is shameful for a local church to have some hungry members, some full.
That would be a shame.
When we pray, we pray for our daily bread.
And when God answers, he often does it through the God-imitating generosity of brothers and sisters to fellow brothers and sisters.
This prayer, then, teaches us to ask God: "Who is hungry in my congregation?
Whom can I bless?
Can I be the means by which the Lord answers this prayer for one of my brothers?"
Practically, brothers and sisters:
Can you hire someone from this flock who needs a job?
Can you frequent the business of some brother in this flock?
Can you invest in them?
We are a body.
We abound and we lack as one thing.
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