Matthew 6:11

Matthew 6:11

I. The Giver of bread is our Father in heaven. God is the only giver, and yet least recognized. Because He gives so constantly, so quietly, we forget to notice and to thank Him. (1) God gives, for there is none beside Him. (2) God gives good gifts, for He is God and He is our Father. (3) God delights in giving. (4) God gives simply. (5) God never takes back his gifts.

II. The gift bread. (1) The daily necessity for food may well teach us humility. We have no life in ourselves. (2) Bread is the gift of the Creator through Christ. The earth would be a wilderness were it not for that tree on which Christ was made a curse for us. (3) Bread is the gift of God, and, as all God's gifts, it has a deep and eternal meaning. The Saviour called Himself the Bread of life. Only God in Christ is life-sustaining food; all else, being dead in itself, can neither give nor sustain life.

III. The expansion of the gift ourbread. The spirit of the Lord's prayer is filial towards God, brotherly towards man. The little word "our" excludes evidently every calling which is injurious to the interests of our fellowmen. None can offer this petition who are enriched by that which brings misery to others. The word "our" implies also labour. If we eat the bread of idleness and sloth, we enjoy what is not rightfully ours. Toil is the consequence of sin, but labour belonged to Paradise.

IV. The limitation of the gift. "Give us todayour daily bread." Christ would have us free from anxious care. The spirit of the world is feverish and restless; men think of the future and of its possible wants and evils, and are burdened with its weight. We cannot be delivered from such anxiety until we understand that it is not merely foolish but sinful, that it is incompatible with the spirit of adoption, with the attitude of faith.

God wants us to be rich; nay, He wants us to possess all things. But the way to riches is, Give up all, even ourselves.

A. Saphir, Lectures on the Lord's Prayer,p. 250.

I. Notice how this prayer is placed. "Thy will be done." That takes the soul right away up into the very highest glory and perfection of heaven. "Forgive us our sins." That reaches right down into the dark deeps into which our trespasses have plunged us. From those great deeps, "our debts," to those heights, "as it is in heaven," we are to rise. Yet between these two comes my text, "Give us this day our daily bread;" a prayer for our business and our basket, lying kindly, tenderly between the depth of our fall and the height of our call. It is as much as to say, that our God can make our bread-winning to help our heaven-winning.

II. The prayer takes it for granted that we are always under the watchful care of our heavenly Father, and yet how much we give way to fretful doubts and anxious cares. The prayer points steadily and surely to the wisdom of being contented with little, and of avoiding all anxious concern about tomorrow.

III. The model prayer has no exclusiveness. It is a stranger to selfishness. It is not, Give me my daily bread. "Our Father" owns our brotherhood, and our brotherhood cares for the wants of others as well as our own; and we cannot use this prayer aright unless we are open-hearted and open-handed to our brother's honest need.

IV. The prayer breathes absolute dependence. You and I are pensioners, and God must give strength to gain it, skill to earn it, power to eat it: all are from Him. What have we that we have not received?

J. Jackson Wray, Light from the Old Lamp,p. 62.

Consider this petition as carrying the wants of the day to God's throne of grace, and pleading for their supply. And in thus considering it, it will be plain that two senses of the words are admissible, and indeed necessary; a temporal and a spiritual sense, according as the daily bread is the sustenance of the body, or that of the immortal spirit.

I. And first for the lower and more obvious of these. "Give us today the daily bread of the body." Let us see what is here implied. The petition is one for our physical well-being in general; for food and raiment and shelter, and all that climate and circumstances render necessary to us; and it is admirably expounded in our Church Catechism: "I pray unto God that He will give us all things that be needful both for our souls and bodies." Thus simply, thus entirely, do we commend day by day our physical frames unto our Father's hand. It was He who at first fearfully and wonderfully made them; it is He who every moment holds the balance on the nice adjustment of which depends the continuance of their animal vitality. All this goes on without our care. Can He not and will He not also keep them in His charge, in those further provisions from without for which our labour is by His appointment necessary?

II. Let us pass now to the second and higher import of the words of the text. Like the natural life, the spiritual life has its infancy, its youth, its maturity; but unlike natural life, it is not subject, unless violently extinguished by declension into ungodliness, to decay or death. And as it grows upwards its daily bread is necessary for its maintenance, its desires are boundless. Not faith nor love nor holiness, nor anything short of Christ Himself, can feed the spiritual being of man. It is He who must be taken into the soul; and all things that stop short of Him are not nourishment are but the meat that perisheth, not that which endures unto everlasting life. To apprehend Christ as mine, to lay hold on Him by the hand of faith, and feed on Him by spiritual participation in Him, this is the nourishment of the life of the soul.

H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. ii., p. 163.

Routine Observance Indispensable.

We need to keep fixed times, or appointed rounds of observance, as truly as to be in holy impulse; to have prescribed periods in duty as truly as to have a spirit of duty; to be in the drill of observance, as well as in the liberty of faith.

I. Notice first the very obvious fact that the argument commonly stated, as against the obligation of fixed times and ways of observance in religion, contains a fatal oversight. It is very true that mere rounds of observance, however faithfully kept, have in themselves no value, nothing of the substance of piety; but they have an immense value, when kept and meant to be, as the means of piety. It is equally true that nothing is acceptable to God which is not an offering of the heart. But it does not follow, by any means, that we are therefore to wait doing nothing till the inclinations or impulses of the heart are ready.

II. Look next at the grand analogies of time and routine movement in the world we live in. Without routine it would be only a medley of confusion, a chaos of interminable disorder.

III. I refer you again to the analogy of your own courses in other things, and also to the general analogies of business. As we are by nature diurnal creatures in the matter of waking and sleep, so we are voluntarily creatures of routine and of fixed hours in the matter of food. How is it also in the matter of business, or the transactions of trade and industry? If there is nothing men do with effect in the world of business despising the law of times, how does it happen that they can expect, with any better reason, to succeed in the matter of their religion, their graces, charities, and prayers?

IV. Consider the reason of the Sabbath, where it is assumed that men are creatures, religiously speaking, of routine, wanting it as much as they do principles, fixed times as much as liberty. The design of the fourth commandment is to place order in the same rank with principle, and give it honour in all ages as a necessary element of religion, of the religious life and character.

V. The Scriptures recognize the value of prescribed times and a fixed routine of duty in other ways. The true way to come into liberty and keep ourselves in it is to have our prescribed rules, and in some respects, at least, a fixed routine of duties.

H. Bushnell, The New Life,p. 308.

The petition for daily bread seems small, because (1) we ask for what so many already possess; (2) we ask it only for the small circle around our table; (3) we ask it only for today. It is, nevertheless, a great petition, because (1) we ask that earthly bread may be changed into heavenly; (2) we ask God to feed all those who are in want; (3) we ask Him to supply the daily necessities of a waiting world; (4) we ask it today, and ever again today. The fact that we thus apply to our heavenly Father teaches us

1. Our dependence upon Him.

2. A wholesome lesson of contentment.

3. A lesson of frugality and patient labour.

4. A lesson of moderation.

5. A lesson of benevolence.

6. A lesson of faith.

J. N. Norton, Every Sunday,p. 82.

References: Matthew 6:11. Homiletic Magazine,vol. vi., p. 257; M. Dods, The Prayer that Teaches to Pray,p. 99; F. D. Maurice, The Lord's Prayer,p. 55; J. Keble, Sermons for Holy Week,p. 427; A. W. Hare, The Alton Sermons,p. 422; J. Martineau, Hours of Thought,vol. ii., p. 50.