In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

You younger people probably won’t remember who Jack Benny was, but older people like myself would. He was still around when I was a little kid, and he was a radio star before TV, and then he became a TV star, but he was a comedian. One skit that he did on more than a few occasions, for which he was famous, was he had a mugger who came up to him and said, “Your money or your life,” and he paused, and the guy paused, and the guy said, “Well?” And Jack Benny responded, “I’m thinking! I’m thinking!” And the reason why it’s funny is it’s ridiculous because if you don’t have your life, your money doesn’t do you any good.

But Christ tells us: What does it matter if a man gains the whole world and he loses his soul? You might keep your earthly life for your entire lifetime, and you might be able to enjoy your riches, but if your hope is in your riches and it’s not in God, then when this earthly life comes to an end, what good will those riches do you? They won’t do you any good whatsoever. So it’s very important that we keep the things of this life—the goods, the necessities that we have—in their proper perspective, and that we also place a higher value on the things of the next life, on the things of God. Christ says in the gospels:

No man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon. Therefore, I say unto you: Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?

This balanced perspective of where our priorities ought to be is what we are praying about in the Lord’s Prayer when we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” A lot of times when you hear Protestant preachers that talk about the Lord’s Prayer, they go past this petition very quickly, because Protestants only see this in terms of praying for meeting our daily necessities, but they don’t see praying for our daily bread as having any greater meaning than that, but it has a great deal of meaning.

First of all, when we say, “Give us this day our daily bread,” it’s a reminder again in the Lord’s Prayer that we’re not coming to God as an individual; we’re coming to God as a Church. We don’t just pray for ourselves; we pray for others. We are coming as a family; we are coming as a Church before God, and we’re asking that God would give us our daily bread.

And when we pray that he would give us our daily bread, it’s for this day. It’s to remind us that we shouldn’t worry about tomorrow, and that doesn’t mean that we don’t prepare for tomorrow, but it does mean that we shouldn’t be anxious. Christ says in the Gospel:

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take thought for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” The idea of daily bread is that it’s our essential bread. The word in Greek that’s translated as “daily bread” is an unusual word. It doesn’t occur anywhere else in the New Testament, and it doesn’t occur in any classical Greek literature. So you sometimes will find Orthodox people that will say that it’s incorrect to translate this as “daily bread.” Well, I would say it’s certainly worth noting that the word has a deeper meaning than just “daily bread,” but when you go to the Gospel of Luke and you read how the Apostle and Evangelist Luke translated the Lord’s Prayer, he translated it as “daily bread” in no uncertain terms, so I figure that the Apostle Luke probably knows what Christ meant. It does certainly mean “daily bread,” but the word means a little bit more than that. Sometimes it’s translated as “superessential bread,” but probably the better way to put it would be that it’s the “essential bread.” It’s the bread that we need, not necessarily what we might want, but it’s the bread that we need the most for our existence.

Our daily bread is not merely the physical food that we eat; it’s also the spiritual food, and that’s the more important food that we’re praying for. When we read the Scriptures, when we attend the services, when we sing the hymns of the Church, when we hear the teaching of the word of God—all of this is part of the daily bread, and that’s why, as part of our daily spiritual disciplines, we should be making sure that we read the Scriptures. We should be making sure that we are praying, that we’re participating to the extent that it’s possible for us in the liturgical life of the Church. Some of us, we live far away from church; it’s not possible for us to be there all the time. Some of us are closer. But we should, to the extent that we’re able to do it, to try to enter into that daily liturgical life of the Church, because all of this is part of the spiritual food that we need every day.

It’s also that we are to live out what we are taught. Christ said in the gospels, “My food is to do the will of him that sent me and to finish his work.” So our spiritual food is to do what we read about, not just to read about it; not just to study it, but to put it into practice.

But the deepest meaning of “our daily bread” is the heavenly bread. What is the heavenly bread? Well, in the Old Testament, when the children of Israel were led forth out of Egypt by God and set free from slavery, there was 40 years they spent wandering in the wilderness, and God fed them daily the manna from heaven. Every day there would be manna they would find on the ground in the morning. They would gather it up, and if they tried to gather extra, to last for the next day, it would spoil, with the only exception being that on Friday God would give them manna sufficient to last for two days so that they wouldn’t have to go out on the Sabbath and gather bread.

One of the points of that miracle is that we shouldn’t be worried about the next day; we should only be worried about this day. God will give us what we need for this day. And if we trust God for that, we will lose this anxiety that so many of us are beset by. In the gospels, Christ, after he fed the 5,000, he had a conversation with many Jews who had tracked him down looking for him, and Christ chided them, and he said:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, you seek me not because you saw the miracles but because you did eat loaves of bread and were filled. Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of Man shall give unto you, for him hath God the Father sealed.

They were seeking after Christ, not because [of] who Christ was or that he was the Messiah, but these people were seeking after Christ because they got fed, and they wanted to see if they were going to get fed again. And Christ is saying to them that’s not what you should be looking for. Look for that heavenly bread. And then, further on down in that same conversation:

The Jews said to Christ, “Our fathers did eat manna in the desert, as it is written: He gave them bread from heaven to eat. Then Jesus said unto them, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven, but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven, for the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven and giveth life unto the world.” Then said they unto him, “Lord, ever more give us this bread.” And Jesus said unto them, “I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”

So when Christ says that Moses didn’t give them the heavenly bread, the point that he’s making is that was a miracle; that was a great miracle that God fed the people in the desert for 40 years every day. But that miracle was pointing to a reality; it was a shadow of what was to come. It was pointing the Israelites to a reality that would one day come to them, and that was Christ.

“I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever. And the bread that I give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” The Jews therefore strove amongst themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Then Jesus said unto them, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him. As the living Father has sent me and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not as your fathers did eat manna and are dead. He that eateth this bread shall live forever.”

We partake of the heavenly bread every time we partake of the Eucharist. That’s what the heavenly bread is that Christ is talking about. This is his very body and his blood, and this is why Protestants who don’t believe that have a hard time seeing a whole lot of significance into the Lord’s Prayer, but it’s a very hugely important part of the Lord’s Prayer, and this is the reason why we pray the Lord’s Prayer. We sing it in the Liturgy right before Communion, because we are praying for that daily bread, and this is the ultimate form of that daily bread, this spiritual nourishment that we’re seeking from God.

So what we need to do, as Christians, is we need to learn to not worry about the things that we need for this life. That’s not to say that we don’t prepare; that doesn’t mean that we don’t plan, but that we are not anxious, but that we trust God, because if we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, everything else, Christ tells us, will be taken care of. “All these things will be added unto you.” Let us pray, study the Scriptures, learn from the wisdom of the Church, and put what we learn into practice, and let our whole lives be a daily preparation for worthily receiving the bread of life, which is Christ himself. Amen.