The Lord's Prayer: Daily Bread

Give us this day our daily bread, (Matthew 6:11, ESV)

Think about it for just a moment: God cares about your needs.

In a prayer that is centered on worship and requests regarding spiritual needs, Jesus wants us to be sure to come to God for the daily requirements of life. Martin Luther said this petition applies to "everything necessary for the preservation of this life." That includes a lot of stuff!

This means that our needs are important to God. Do you believe that? That your needs matter to him? Not just that super-spiritual guy you sit next to at church or that saint who prays for 7 1/2 hours a day. But your needs. Because you matter to God.

Not convinced? Check out these passages:

The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. (Psalm 34:10) 

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. … (Mt. 6:25-34) 

And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 4:19)

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. (Mt. 7:7-8)

For he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things. (Psalm 107:9)

God longs to meet your needs -- won't you take time to cry out to him today?