With this month’s LUTHERAN WITNESS, I would like to return to our consideration of the Lord’s Prayer. The petition we wish to spend a little time considering is the Fourth Petition, "Give us this day our daily bread."

If you were to ask people, "What are the best known petitions of the Lord’s Prayer?," I am certain that most people would mention the Fourth and Fifth Petitions. The Fourth deals with daily bread, and the Fifth with forgiveness.

This past week, I once again picked up Luther’s Small Catechism to read what he wrote on the Lord’s Prayer. As you move your way through Luther’s explanation of the Fourth Petition, you can’t help but realize that God gave unique insights into Holy Scripture to his great reformer of the church. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in his writings on the Lord’s Prayer.

In a way, what one finds in this petition is three or four main emphases. Let’s look at each of these in sequence: The first word that we want to focus on is the word "bread." It is one of the dominant words in this petition.

How clearly I can still recall one of my little cousins when she was being taught this petition saying, "No, Mama, cake. Not bread, cake!" When we pray in this petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," what is included in this word "bread"? Luther answers with these words: "Everything that belongs to the support and wants of our body, such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, field, cattle, money, goods, a pious spouse, pious children, pious servants, pious and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, discipline, honor, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like." That is a pretty impressive, all-encompassing list.

When it comes to our daily lives, we receive everything from God. Even the strength to do our daily work comes as a gift from God. Consequently, when we pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," we are not just asking that God would continue to supply us with the food we need to exist, but also all of those other gifts that are a part of our ongoing life and existence in the Lord.

Nor are we here praying just for ourselves, or even just for our family and friends. When the Master uses the plural pronoun "us," He is teaching us to place this request before God both for ourselves and also for all mankind. We realize how wide-ranging our request to God is in this petition. It includes the needs of the whole world.

But you cannot look at this petition without also seeing two more very key words or phrases. They are "this day" and "daily." When you stop and think about it, you realize that of the seven words in this petition, three specifically focus our attention on a daily need or concern about the present day. We realize this, too, is an important aspect of this petition.

As a layman once said to me, "It is interesting that the Lord didn’t teach us to pray here ‘this week’ and ‘weekly,’ or ‘this month’ and ‘monthly.’ Rather, he said ‘daily.’" Very true.

By these words, the Lord would teach us two things. One is His expectation that this prayer come from our hearts as believers to Him on a daily basis. I sometimes wonder whether we give our people enough encouragement to pray the Lord’s Prayer daily. Sometimes I’m afraid we have left our people with the impression that to do this might very well be an overuse of the Lord’s Prayer, or that the Lord’s Prayer is just one of those special prayers for Sunday, not really something to be prayed daily.

Secondly, undoubtedly with these words our Lord teaches us to turn and look to Him for all of those daily blessings that we mentioned above. Now, when we say that, this does not imply that we should not plan for tomorrow. We are not saying don’t plan ahead, don’t look to tomorrow, don’t plan for retirement, etc. Rather, the "don’t" that God would teach us here is, don’t sit around worrying about whether God will daily take care of you. Rather, turn to Him in prayer and, trusting in His blessings, get on with your life.

Now, why does God teach us to pray these words of the Fourth Petition? Again, as Luther says, "He teaches us to pray the petition in order that we might know that all such gifts in our lives do really come from God, and Him alone, and then to receive the same with thanksgiving, yes, with great thanksgiving.

This issue of our LUTHERAN WITNESS will not arrive in your homes until after the Thanksgiving holiday, and maybe that’s just as well. We are reminded that God’s care for us continues every day and that our thanks to Him is not limited to just one holiday.

In fact, what a great petition to pray as we prepare once again to celebrate Christmas. God loved you so much that He sent His own dear Son to live a perfect life in your place, and to suffer and die in your place, and to rise again for you. This fantastic blessing from God is what our Christmas thanksgiving is all about. Yes, God has given us all that we need — our daily bread and so much more. We realize that because God, our Savior, gave us this greatest gift of all, He will indeed give us also our "daily bread."

So to the Lord this day we will once again pray with great gusto, "Give us, our family and the world, this day our daily bread. Yes, this, too, 0 God, we would say to you in our prayers."

God bless always!

Jude 24-25