Our Daily Bread
A compilation
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When Jesus taught His disciples to pray, only one of the things He told them to ask for was a physical need—“Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). All the rest of the prayer is praise to God or requests for spiritual gifts or blessings so that we can better please and serve Him. His including a request for material supply recognizes that we live in the natural world and that God wants to supply our physical needs. But it goes deeper than that.
When the Samaritan woman met Jesus at Jacob’s well, He told her that physical sustenance wasn’t enough. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst” (John 4:13–14). Jesus is the bread and water of life, and His presence in our lives is even more important than our physical food and water.
Just as food and water are needed every day to sustain life, so we also need a daily supply of spiritual strength. Just as God expects us to work hard to procure our daily food, He expects us to put effort into procuring our spiritual food by reading His Word and spending time with Him in prayer, reflection, and meditation.
Thankfully, God wants to give us what we need—and most importantly, He wants to give us Himself. God wants everyone to eat His spiritual food. Going back to the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus was teaching His disciples to not only pray for supply of their daily needs but also for His Spirit—“the living bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:51)—to be present in their lives each day.—Ronan Keane
Recognizing our need
We live in a very different context than people did in the first century. Give us this day our daily bread. Now, there are millions and millions of people in the world who have to rely on noticeably daily bread to come in. They may not know where their next meal is coming from and they live day to day.
Many other people … don’t live like that. Or at least it doesn’t feel like we live like that. We can go to any number of grocery stores and we can see shelves of food… And so what does it really mean in a context where many people around the world are surrounded by great wealth and prosperity that we pray, Give us this day our daily bread?
This is still a powerful reminder and a necessary prayer because even though we may see grocery stores around every corner, we still are dependent upon God to give us what we need. Haven’t we seen this even in the last couple of years with various upheavals, supply chain issues, COVID, and inflation? We’ve actually seen empty shelves. We’ve seen how quickly, even in our very wealthy world, that we can be missing what we think we need. So we really do rely upon God.
And when he says daily bread, of course he means not simply bread or even simply food, but everything we need for this day. It’s so instructive that Jesus tells us to pray, Give us this day our daily bread. If we’re honest, I’d kind of like it to say, Give us this year our yearly bread. God, once a year I’ll come to you. Can you set me up for the year?
That’s not how Jesus wants us to live. He wants us to be reminded that his mercies are new every morning. So every morning, we need to anticipate and we also need to pray that God would give to us new mercies, new grace. That’s how God had the Israelites live in the wilderness. He said, I’m going to give you enough manna for this day, so don’t go out thinking that you can cheat the system. You need to trust me. Wake up tomorrow and I’ll provide for your needs.
And the Lord’s Prayer reminds us of that. And Jesus enjoins us to keep praying that and see that God will give to us, not just food and sustenance, but everything we need to please him, to live for him day by day.—Kevin DeYoung1
Why daily bread
Jesus teaches us to pray that God would give us daily bread (Matthew 6:11). Obviously Jesus was not telling His disciples to pray only for bread. But bread was a staple in the diet of the Jews, and had been so for many years. Furthermore, bread was a powerful symbol of God’s provision for His people in the Old Testament. We remember how God cared for the Israelites when they were in the wilderness after their exodus from Egypt. Life in the wilderness was hard, and soon the people began to complain that it would be better to be back in Egypt, where they had wonderful food to eat.
In response to these complaints, God promised to “rain bread from heaven” (Exodus 16:4). The next morning, when the dew lifted, there remained behind on the ground “a small round substance, as fine as frost. … It was like white coriander seed, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey” (Exodus 16:14, 31). When God miraculously fed His people from heaven, he did so by giving them bread. …
This petition of the Lord’s Prayer, then, teaches us to come to God in a spirit of humble dependence, asking Him to provide what we need and to sustain us from day to day. We are not given license to ask for great riches, but we are encouraged to make our needs known to Him, trusting that He will provide.
If we find that God’s hand seems to be invisible to us and that we cannot discern His providential intrusion into our lives, that may be due partly to the way we pray. We have a tendency to pray in general. When we pray in general, the only way we will see the hand of God’s providence is in general. As we enter into prayer, this conversation and communion with God, and put our petitions before Him, pouring out our souls and our needs specifically, we see specific answers to our prayers. Our Father has invited us to go to Him and ask Him for our daily bread. He will not fail to provide it.—R. C. Sproul2
Dependence on the Father
We depend every moment on our Father-Creator to keep us and the rest of the universe in being (for without His will, nothing could still exist), and to sustain nature’s rhythmical functioning so that each year sees seedtime, harvest, and food in the shops (Genesis 8:22). And it is right for us to acknowledge this dependence regularly in prayer, particularly in an age like ours that, having assumed nature to be self-sustaining, now has problems about the reality of God.
Some regard petitions for personal material needs as low-grade prayer, as if God were not interested in the physical side of life and we should not be either. But … petitions looking to God as the sole and omnicompetent source of supply of all human needs, down to the most mundane, are expressing truth, and as the denying of our own self-sufficiency humbles us, so the acknowledging of our dependence honors God.
Neither our minds nor our hearts are right till we see that it is as necessary and important to pray for daily bread as for (say) the forgiveness of sins. God really is concerned that his servants should have the food they need, as Jesus’ feedings of the 4,000 and 5,000 show. God cares about physical needs no less than spiritual; to him, the basic category is that of human needs, comprising both. …
We are told to ask for bread, as the Israelites were told to gather manna, on a day-to-day basis: the Christian way is to live in constant dependence on God, a day at a time. Also, we are to ask for the bread we need; i.e., for the supply of necessities, not luxuries we can do without. This petition does not sanctify greed! Moreover, we must as we pray be prepared to have God show us, by his providential response of not giving what we sought, that we did not really need it after all.—J. I. Packer3
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Requesting daily bread is not only about physical provision. It can also refer to asking God to provide for our less tangible needs. … Jesus calls Himself the “Bread of Life” (John 6:35). “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind” (John 1:4). Jesus says He came to bring us abundant life (John 10:10). Not only are we saved for eternity, but we also experience a restored relationship with God now. We seek Him daily, and He renews us day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16). The branch is continually nourished by the Vine (John 15:5).
Yes, God sustains us physically and meets the less tangible needs of this life. More than that, He fulfills our spiritual needs. He is the bread that satisfies our spiritual hunger. He sustains our hearts. When we ask God for our daily bread, we are humbly acknowledging Him as the sole giver of all we need. We are living day by day, one step at a time. We are exercising simple faith in Him to provide just what we need, when we need it, for every area of life.—GotQuestions.org4
Published on Anchor February 2025. Read by Gabriel Garcia Valdivieso. Music by Michael Fogarty.
3 J. I. Packer, Praying the Lord’s Prayer (Crossway, June 7, 2007).
