Waiting on God (The Lord’s Prayer, Part 5)

Matthew 6:11

Have you ever played the lottery? Or even in an office pool or something like that? Just recently I think it was up over a billion dollars and all of a sudden you start hearing all kinds of things about it again.

Lottery fever is a strange, strange thing. The more money that’s in it the more people want to play which means the less chance you have of winning. And yet people clamor, we just run, to the idea of becoming completely independent, in this case financially, just overnight without ever having to wait for a thing.

We just don’t like waiting. It’s not in our nature to wait for things especially when we have to wait for things like a paycheck in incremental doses where it’s only given to us bits at a time. It ought to strike us then when our Lord teaches us to pray for the things that we need for this body or this life that he teaches us specifically to pray for them in daily doses.

When Jesus teaches us to pray for our daily needs. He teaches us to pray this way:

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

By teaching us to pray for our bread daily. To pray for the things that we need in this body in life daily our Lord brings us to wait upon him.

To wait.

So we are first taught to repent of our impatience for these things and our desire to have them all at once and become maybe even independent, perhaps of the Lord. But by teaching us to pray for daily bread, he also teaches us to recognize him daily as the source of all of our blessings both for this body and life and also for the life that come.

And finally by teaching us to pray and bringing us to pray for daily bread, he brings us into a reliance on him daily. We call that faith. Faith that trusts in his goodness and in his mercy for life and finally for salvation.

Lord give us this day our daily bread. Amen.

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