[AI translation] One of the biggest issues in our lives is the bread problem. From the beginning of humanity to the present day, humanity has been struggling for a just and fair solution to the bread problem. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that the most important spring and driving force of humanity's struggles is the problem of daily bread. And if bread is such a major issue for mankind, it is only natural that the Book of Life, the Bible, should also deal with it. In the prayer that Jesus gave to his followers as a daily prayer, which became the common prayer of all Christians, and which, because of its brevity, contains only the most important things, there is the request for daily bread in the middle. Someone once said that during the Lord's Prayer, it would be good to pause for a moment at each sentence and think about what is in it! Let us do that now! Let us pause for a moment at this request of the Lord's Prayer and let us be aware of what it means for us! What creed, what request, what demand?For a long time I thought this was the easiest part of the prayer the Lord taught us. After all, most people who pray at all ask for these things all the time. Most of the general prayers that go up to heaven have a content that has to do with bread issues, livelihood issues. What do people usually ask God for? Health, healing, help not to see need, not to get into trouble. They imagine that there is a so-called God, whose job it is to ensure that we have a smooth, preferably peaceful life, to make our ideas a success, to fulfil our needs, in other words, to give us our daily bread, our livelihood. In most prayers, this is what happens: we present to God our everyday, earthly needs, our troubles and our troubles, and we ask the mighty God to help us in all these things! God!
Well, I have come to realise that in the Lord's Prayer, the request for daily bread is something quite different. Here Jesus does not give the encouragement to pray as before. Here it is something else. Here Jesus is trying to bring an area of our lives under God's rule that is most easily left out. What area of our lives is this? The daily bread and the worries, troubles and struggles of earning it. The economic and social aspects of our earthly life: the job we hold, the work we do for a living, our weekly or monthly earnings, and the fringe pursuits of this or that, out of which we pay rent, clothing, food, electricity, gas, medicine. So all the areas of our earthly life where we feel and carry the weight of material issues, where we are forced to feel the uninterrupted power of money, the rule of Mammon.
It is precisely the thousand cares of daily bread that can tempt us to let this area of our lives fall imperceptibly under the dominion of Mammon. We fear its power, and yet we tremble for it. We refuse to acknowledge its dominion over us, and yet we serve it. I have heard such a sigh: "I would so much like to occupy myself with spiritual things, but dirty material things take up all my time! The problem is not that the material things take up your time, but that they are dirty. It is a sign that those materials are not under the dominion of the living God. And everything that is not sanctified by obedience to God's will, everything that is outside the scope of His dominion, is indeed dirty! Do you know what the word Mammon means? It means the dung of Satan! To dig in it is indeed dirty! But it should not be dirty! Because it could be holy, the rule of God, subject to the will of God! Because Mammon does not mean money or wealth in general, but money made into a bale, wealth made into a master, materialism dominating our lives and making everything its servant, which is imperceptibly dominating us in the very matter of our daily bread, our livelihood. And so our life becomes a life of service to two masters.
In the most dangerous condition, the principle of duality enters our lives. We become men of divided hearts: may Christ reign over our spiritual life, our emotions, our ecclesiastical and religious manifestations, but in our economic affairs, in the daily struggle for bread, in the struggle for existence, something else. This area of our life is taken out of His dominion, where Christ's ideas and ideals cannot be applied. Many people live in such an inner split. There are certain circles in their lives where they allow Christ to rule and reign, but other circles are closed off from His influence. We rule over these reserved places, we decide there!
And yet the attempt to have a double dominion in the human soul is doomed to failure. "No man can serve two masters", says Jesus #Mt 6,24. Yet we try again and again, and yet we wonder why our lives are so unsatisfying. Of course it is, for we cannot be happy and useful people with an inner discord. An awful lot of failure and misery comes from the disunity of Christ ruling in the spiritual life and mammon ruling in the external life.
Jesus wants to lead us out of this inner disunity with this prayer of the Lord's Prayer: give us this day our daily bread. He wants us to bring this area of our lives under the direct rule of God. He wants us to achieve inner unity, so that the life of Christ may reign victoriously in every part of our being and in all our relationships. So that we do not want to make Him half-king while we have left demigods in our hearts. We have to decide: either we must completely exclude Christ from our lives, forget Him, and take the rule completely into our own hands, in which case we will be under the control of our own self in everything, and thus achieve inner unity, - or we must completely surrender and place under the rule of Christ all reserved areas, including the daily bread-matter. In which case we will have a life controlled by Christ and united in Him! Our lives will be one-centered!
This request expresses, above all, the desire, the will, the will to have Christ at the centre of all the material demands of our life, of all our livelihood, of all our struggle for existence. May these problems also be settled by Him, through Him and for Him. Jesus is not so much a spiritual reality that we are not interested in these quite material aspects of our lives. He knows what it means to be hungry, thirsty, homeless, living in illegality. He has walked through the depths of life, and in doing so has sanctified it.
Jesus is there in everyday life. He is not only present in the church, where we sing the Psalm in church fellowship, beautifully dressed in our festive clothes, in peaceful silence, undisturbed, but he is also quite at home where the sweat of our brow flows in the work, where our arms and our heads grow weary in the struggle for existence. Where a mother wonders what to cook for lunch, where a factory worker sighs at the machine during the night shift, where people run and run, push and push, compete because they need bread! Jesus is there, for it is written: being rich, he became poor for us #2Cor8,9, to make our economic and social needs his own. He took upon Himself not only the burden of our sins, but also all the other burdens of our lives. With this prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread", He has also taken solidarity with us on the material plane.
As if to say: your bread is mine and my bread is yours. Your need is my need, and your hunger and thirst is my hunger and thirst. Once in the wilderness, when He fasted forty days and forty nights, He also became hungry. One morning, as he was going to the city, he was hungry, and he would have looked for fruit on the fig tree by the roadside, but he could not find any. At the cross-tree he sighed, "I am thirsty! So far has he come among us, so far has he become one with us, so far does he say with us, "Give us this day our daily bread." It is as if he were taking our hands in his, as a mother prays with a little child, and saying with us, "Give us this day our daily bread! It is as if he were saying: do not leave me out of the question of bread, of this great, great area of your life, for I am here in this too, I am your Saviour here too!
Asking God for our bread is not an excuse for working for it. There is no magic in this request, no need to live without work. We do not ask God for our bread like the bad student who has not finished his arithmetic and now prays to God that the teacher will not find him. To make bread from stones, to get abundance without work: this is Satan's invention. He tempted Jesus with it when he encouraged him to turn stones into bread! True bread is not made of stones, but of work and the blessing of God. So in this request is also my commitment to do the most honourable work I can. I can only ask God for the blessing of bread for work that I do with full responsibility and accountability to Him. If I have done the work honestly, then I can ask in good conscience for His blessing to provide my bread today.
And just one more little word: it is our daily bread. What is important here is this plural first person, which makes it clear that I can and may ask for my daily bread by asking for the bread of all men. My bread is included in everyone's bread. My livelihood is in everyone's livelihood. This "we" means that we are all one big family: children of one Father, brothers and sisters, in the whole world, responsible for each other's bread or lack of bread.
The solution to the whole social problem is to change from being "I-people" to "we-people" in the bread issue. In the bread question, the emphasis must be shifted from the first person singular to the first person plural, from I to what! This is what Jesus is teaching us here with this request. He wants me to see myself as a member of a large family of people. To consider my own interests in such a way that I also consider the interests of other people. To ask for my own needs to be met, so that at the same time I ask for the needs of my neighbours, my neighbours, the needs of humanity on the other side of the globe to be met!
Someone might say that the fact that a few believing souls take seriously what Jesus teaches here does not solve the world's social problem. But by the same token: grafting wild rose bushes does not make every wild rose bush in the forest noble. But then, isn't it worth planting rose gardens? Well, it is quite certain that many in the flower gardens of God's kingdom would find relief if we could learn to pray earnestly every morning, "Give us this day our daily bread." And if we could learn to give thanks every night: "Thank you, Lord, for giving us this day our daily bread!
Amen
Date: 23 May 1954.
Lesson
Mt 6,19-24