Saturday, August 10, 2013

Sermon for 8/11/2013 on the Lord's Prayer, part 3

Matthew 6:9-13  (CEV)
9 You should pray like this: Our Father in heaven, help us to honor your name. 10 Come and set up your kingdom, so that everyone on earth will obey you, as you are obeyed in heaven. 11 Give us our food for today. 12 Forgive us for doing wrong, as we forgive others. 13 Keep us from being tempted and protect us from evil

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In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a pretty boring guy. How boring, you ask? I eat oatmeal for breakfast. Every morning for the past five years, I have fixed a giant bowl of oatmeal. I mix different things in it, but it’s a pretty boring way to start the day.

How many of you are breakfast eaters?
So what types of things do you eat for breakfast?
Just as important—why do you eat breakfast?
As for those of you who don’t eat breakfast, why don’t you eat breakfast?

Now, the big reason I eat breakfast every morning is because I’m hungry. If I don’t eat breakfast first thing in the morning, I’ll be roving around eating just about anything in an hour because I need to eat. My stomach is empty first thing in the morning and it’s crying out for food. Some people just aren’t hungry in the morning.
Others don’t realize that they’re hungry.
I get Caleb up first thing in the morning, and I’ve discovered that I have to take him and set him in his high chair, or else he’ll run around and play for an hour. When I put him in the high chair, he’ll eat because it’s his habit, but otherwise, he just doesn’t realize that he’s hungry, and he’ll fill his time doing things other than eating. Sometimes, he’s content to leave the house without eating. I try to avoid telling the day care worker that he hasn’t eaten anything, because I really don’t want to know what Caleb is like when he realizes that he hasn’t eaten in twelve hours and is pretty darn hungry. I’ve tried to convince him that he is hungry, but the day you figure out how to reason with a two year old, you let me know how to do so.
So how does this fit into a conversation about asking God for our daily bread?
Simple—food doesn’t do us much good if we’re not hungry, or if we don’t realize that we’re hungry. If I take Rachel out to dinner at a fancy restaurant and she tells me, as we’re sitting down, that she’s not hungry, there isn’t a whole lot of point in our being out to dinner. I can’t imagine that it’s much fun to sit and watch me eat.
So when we talk about God giving us our daily bread, the first thing we need to do is recognize our overwhelming sense of hunger. We need what God gives us. Every single part of our being needs to cling to God. The primary sin of the Pharisees, in my opinion, is the sin of pride—they had so carefully honed their religious practices that they had excluded God from it. They thought that their practices would get them into God’s good graces. Jesus comes to tell us how badly we need a Savior. He wants to tell us, to show us, that we are a sinful people that need a Savior, and that the only thing that can fill that need is God.
This is important.
Society is busy trying to distract us and convince us that we can fill our needs with just about any old thing, and they have plenty of things to sell us that will do the trick. This is the equivalent of you, as a child, with a carton of ice cream in one hand, a spoon the other, ten minutes before dinner. Know what happens if you eat the ice cream?
You’ll spoil your dinner!
Mom told us this a thousand times, and we never believed her. We always figured there was room for both, but we never got the chance to put the theory to the test. If we did, we discovered that mom was right. You can’t have both. You can’t fill up on sweets and still have room for the nutritious stuff.
Jesus tells us this when he tells us that we can’t serve two masters. But how we try. We try and have both. We fill our minds and our thoughts with all sorts of things. We fill our days with thoughts of the royal baby, with the pursuit of money and power, with sports and with news. None of these things are bad in and of themselves, but when they become the primary things that we take in, they prevent us from feasting on God’s Word. They prevent us from eating the daily bread God is trying to give us.
So what is our daily bread?
I’ll define it this way—it’s our life-giving relationship with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It’s recognizes that everything good in life—our very life itself—is a free gift from him, made possible by his love, and completely dependent upon his free will. It’s rooting ourselves in him, identifying ourselves as his children, and letting his wisdom guide us in everything we do.
That is our daily bread.
That’s a lot, and I believe it’s a lifetime’s worth of figuring it out. Nobody wakes up one day and gets this all figured out before lunch, never to sin again. We all have good days and bad days, but the important question is how well we are growing. Is your faith growing? Where are you now compared to five years ago? Ten years ago? Are you moving forward, progressing in your love of Christ and your faithfulness toward him? Are you feasting on the bread he’s trying to feed you with?
Now, I believe the primary way God feeds us is through his Word. He gives us Scripture for many reasons, two of which are to reveal himself to us and to teach us how to live. Scripture tells us who we are, and it tells us how we are to be. It tells us that we fall short, and it tells us that we need a Savior. It’s Scripture that reveals to us our dependence on our daily bread.
So when is the best time to feast upon this daily bread? I believe that it’s important to eat all day, every day, but we need to start first thing in the morning. When the Israelites were given manna from heaven in Exodus 16, we’re told that when the sun appeared and day grew hot, the manna disappeared. In other words, if the Israelites didn’t get out and gather the manna first thing in the morning, they missed their chance.
I believe the same is true for us. I’m not going to say that if you don’t study Scripture for half an hour in the morning you’ve missed your chance for faithful living that day, but I will say that not being fed by God’s Word in the morning makes it more difficult to orient yourself to live faithfully that day.
Think of it as a roadmap—when is it best to first look at a map? At the beginning, middle, or end of a trip?
If you think of each day as something to navigate, don’t you think it’d be wise to peek at the map first thing in the morning, to make sure you’re starting out correctly?
Now, for some of you, that’s going to be more challenging than others. Teachers, I know mornings are particularly rough for you, seeing as how you have to be in school so early in the morning. I’m not saying you need to wake up an hour earlier to study the Bible. I think it’s important to set aside anywhere from 10-60 minutes in a day to read Scripture, but that’s not always going to happen in the morning. So find a way to work Scripture into your morning. An easy way? Memorize a Psalm and recite it in the shower. Tape a favorite Scripture verse to your mirror in the bathroom. Read the Bible during breakfast. Say a prayer when you get into the car. Listen to an audio Bible in the car.
I could go on, but you get the point. God wants to feed you daily. Jesus Christ is the bread of life, and he knows that the world offers an infinite number of substitutes, but only he can truly meet our needs.
But we need to be hungry, and we need to recognize our hunger. Only then can we be wise enough to stop and eat. Only then can we truly begin to give thanks for the nourishment we find in God.

Let us pray  

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