Give us this day our daily bread. Matthew 6:11.
Like a child, you shall receive day by day what is required for the day’s need. Every day you are to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Be not disturbed if you have not sufficient for tomorrow. You have the assurance of His promise, “Thou shalt dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.” David says, “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.”
That God who sent the ravens to feed Elijah by the brook Cherith will not pass by one of His faithful, self-sacrificing children. Of him that walketh righteously it is written, “Bread shall be given him; his waters shall be sure.” “They shall not be ashamed in the evil time: and in the days of famine they shall be satisfied.” “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?”
He who lightened the cares and anxieties of His widowed mother, and helped to provide for the household of Nazareth, sympathizes with every mother in her struggle to provide her children food. He who had compassion on the multitude because they “fainted, and were scattered abroad” still has compassion on the suffering poor. His hand is stretched out toward them in blessing and in the very prayer which He gave His disciples, He teaches us to remember the poor (The Signs of the Times, November 4, 1903).
The prayer for daily bread includes not only food to sustain the body, but that spiritual bread which will nourish the soul unto life everlasting. Jesus bids us, “Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life” (John 6:27). He says, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever” (verse 51). Our Saviour is the bread of life, and it is by beholding His love, by receiving it into the soul, that we feed upon the bread which came down from heaven.
We receive Christ through His Word, and the Holy Spirit is given to open the Word of God to our understanding, and bring home its truths to our hearts. We are to pray day by day that as we read His Word, God will send His Spirit to reveal to us the truth that will strengthen our souls for the day’s need.
In teaching us to ask every day for what we need—both temporal and spiritual blessings—God has a purpose to accomplish for our good. He would have us realize our dependence upon His constant care, for He is seeking to draw us into communion with Himself. In this communion with Christ, through prayer and the study of the great and precious truths of His Word, we shall as hungry souls be fed; as those that thirst, we shall be refreshed at the fountain of life (Thoughts From the Mount of Blessing, 112, 113).
