Part 3
Give us this day our daily bread
A couple of months ago a woman in Brazil brought her uncle to the bank in order to get a loan. The catch? He was dead. Yes, this woman brought her dead uncle to a bank, propped his head up and thought she could score some easy money before people caught on. Heres a short clip of it.
It reminds me of a different story I once read.
In 1860, a ship traveling from Panama to the United States sank. Four hundred people lost their lives. One of those passengers was a very successful businessman who had two hundred pounds of gold on the ship. Reluctant to lose all this wealth, he strapped as much as he could to himself before jumping into the sea.
Of course, this man blinded by his desire for great wealth failed to realize somehow that while finding a gold bar may keep your finances a float for a few months it actually can not well.. Keep you afloat. Instead it sinks you.
And therein lies the illustration both of these stories present. Money is not a bad thing. No where in the Bible does it imply money or wealth is inherently evil. The issue only pops up with a LOVE of money. And as human beings we certainly have a problem with a love of money.
For many people it controls nearly every aspect of our lives. We do not have kids because they are expensive. We do not eat healthy because it is expensive. We dare not share our money lest we lose it. We choose our job based on how much we make, we work and save and pinch pennies so we can have more of it.
For some people… they might avoid church because Jesus tends to convince us that it is worth being generous.
If we were to stumble upon a stack of cash all of us would likely look like these guys
We have now passed halfway through the Lord’s Prayer. The first half contains three stanzas of who God is and how we can serve him. We pray together for us to be better Christian’s and to empower us to do his work.
Now we come to the second half of the prayer where we recognize our inability to do most things. And we pray for God to act on our behalf.
Now we take the initiative to invite God to do something. We are asking God to do something because it is something ultimately out of our control. Living like Jesus, our control. Loving our neighbor, treating christians as brothers and sisters, our control. Giving us our daily bread? That is not something we can truly control.
It is a plea to God to do that which we are unable to do. At least we should have the humility and ultimate dependance on God that we recognize that we are that powerless outside of God.
Jesus reminds us of our dependance on him to for our daily provisions by reminding his readers of two things.
The first is the manna in the wilderness. When Israel was wandering in the desert for 40 years they had to depend on manna, or heavenly bread for their daily sustenance. They were to gather just enough for that day because any left over for the next day would rot and mold.
The other scenario, and we see this in a parable from Jesus elsewhere in the gospels, is that many workers in the first century world got paid daily. So if you were sick for a few days you could lose everything. (Matthew 20)
Both of these together created a complete dependence on God. And that is what we are praying for in this prayer. That we would be provided with our bread, our sustenance, for today.
What does daily bread mean for us in the 21st century in America where we can buy some ramen or cook some mac and cheese for 2 or 3 dollars and feed a family of 4 for a night? What does it mean when we go to the store and buy enough bread for a week?
Perhaps our prayer should not be give us our daily bread for we have none, because for the vast majority of Americans even on the bad days it is not that I do not have bread, but I do not have longhorns.
So instead let us pray, allow me to exist so closely connected to you God, that I come daily to you in faith that each bite I take I think of as a blessing given out by God instead of a meal earned by my own work.
So in doing so, I rely on you alone, not in my own wealth.
And if in faith we took it one step further we might pray, and if it gets me closer to you, give me the strength to throw it all away. To count it as all trash, garbage.
Paul makes this same point in Philippians 3:8 where he writes ”Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ” (NLT)
But it's never that easy is it? To consider all wealth and worldly accomplishments as trash? Because let's be honest for a second.. the comfort that money provides, the power it provides, the peace of mind it provides? It has a deep hold on us doesn’t it.
Our deep connection to money is like the story of Frodo and Gandalf and the ring from the first Lord of the Rings book.
Gandalf warns him of the deceptiveness of the ring but Frodo doesn’t believe him. So Gandalf says try, try it now. Throw it in the fire. Frodo brings the ring out of his pocket, and is unable to throw it in the fire. He stops to look at it, admire it, and went to throw it away but could not. Then he made one final effort of will. He made a movement, and he went to cast it away but he found that he had put it back in his pocket.
If asked today to give it all away how many could? If in an instant you lost all that you owned but your body and family were not harmed would smite or reject God?
As long as your needs are met today is there anything worth worrying over? . Denzel Washington said many years ago in a short speech “you will never see a hearse carrying a uhaul. You can't take everything with you, Egyptians tried that and they got robbed. (https://www.facebook.com/share/v/15ZDQxy3Xb/)
so Pray for the now. Pray for sustenance. God is not telling you to die of hunger because of your generosity. But he is asking us to figure out how to live in reliance on him.
Let's take a moment then and get down to the reality of how we should respond. Lets ask ourselves a few questions to guage if money and wealth really is an idol in our lives.
Ask yourself honestly if being poor is something to be frowned upon. If it means you did not work hard enough, you should be pitied, or even more so, if you are poor you should be judged as inadequate.
Ask yourself friends, Do you believe that to be poor means you are not obeying God and it is a punishment? That's how the people of Jesus' time viewed it. That's why when Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to get into heaven the disciples freaked out and said so who then can be saved? (Matthew 9:23-25)
Because if it's not the blessed, the rich, the divinely gifted and able bodied then who is worthy? Who can make it? It makes sense that we would view the rich that way right?
But the theologian William Stringfellow says “where money is an idol, to be poor is to sin”
You see the American dream has warped the image of what it means to be successful. What it means to be blessed. Tell me what is closer to the American dream. A first generation college graduate who became a CEO of a fortune 500 company and makes 10 million a year. But in order to order to obtain these things also worked so much he ultimately got divorced and missed his last daughter's birthday.
Or the man who works as a beloved janitor at the local school making 25k and lives paycheck to paycheck and hasn’t eaten at a sit down restaurant in over a year but who sits down and reads a nightly story to his two daughters who have to share a room in his two bedroom apartment.
Which one is the American dream?
Which one is biblical?
Here's the real question, Which one would you rather have?
Money has a deep hold on most of us doesn’t it?
Conclusion
So what are we to do? I’m Not asking you to give. I’m Not asking you to share your wealth.
Let's just start with can you figure out how to live a day without the comfort of being in the top 1 percent of the world? Can you go without a full belly for a day? Can you go without swiping a card, cashing a check, or looking forward to your next purchase? Can you live in the here and now? The present moment where you are fully reliant on God.
If everything you find comfort in this life disappeared would you still lean on God? Would you still trust him to provide for tomorrow? The question I give to you to answer for yourself today is not how much you should give up. nor is it How generous is the right amount of generous?
The question I want you to answer is do you trust God to provide. Is your trust in your wealth, in your material things, your comforts, your monetary, Safety net, or in Jesus?
Do you trust God when there’s nothing else to rely on. Does your love for God changed depending on your blessings?
To Echo the words given to Abraham when God created his covenant with him, let us pray to be blessed, not for our own, needs our own comfort, so that we may be a blessing to others.
Let us pray this together. Proverbs 30:8-9
Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
give me neither poverty nor riches,
but give me only my daily bread.
Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
and so dishonor the name of my God.