Most people reading this post will I imagine be familiar with the words “Give us today our daily bread”, as it is a line from ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ (found in Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4), arguably one of the most well known passages in the bible. Recently I have taken to praying the Lord’s prayer every day, not out of dutiful religiosity but as a way of connecting with and aligning myself with Father God in the mornings.

Often when hearing teaching about the Lord’s prayer, this line is often taught to be about asking God for our daily needs. (And it is still appropriate for that!) But over time I began to see that this line builds on a previous revelation I had from God, that Only One Thing is Needed. I began to see even more through this verse, that really, I do only have one need and it is for daily bread, but not necessarily for physical bread. It is for living bread, the bread that came down from heaven, Jesus Christ.

Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty”. John 6:35 NIV.

Jesus wants to fill us with himself and fill us with life, but how many of us go to him to satisfy our hunger? 

Most of us can only really feel our hunger for Jesus when we stop trying to satisfy ourselves with the temporary things of this world. Those things fill us for a time but never fully satisfy us.

How often are all our worldly needs met yet we still feel longing/empty/hungry?

So we ‘buy more’ and ‘do more’ and just keep trying to fill ourselves to find satisfaction in our lives. Yet we are always left still needing the next ‘thing’…

Not many of us in the western world will experience real lack and poverty on a day to day basis, yet we just want more and more and get lost in our consumeristic lifestyles. We squash and suppress our hunger for the more of God with temporal pleasures and busyness, instead of allowing our spiritual hunger to rise and following that desire to seek his face. 

What are you hungry for?
What is the daily bread you are seeking?
Are you satisfied by your worldly needs being met only?

When you long for something like a new phone or a new car or a nice holiday or whatever your ‘need’ is, how long does the satisfaction last before your desires move onto something else? There will always be ‘something else’ as these things only bring temporary satisfaction. 

Our souls long for what is eternal, not what is temporary. The daily bread you long for will always leave you hungry if it’s only the things of this world you seek for. God has set eternity in the hearts of men (Ecclesiastes 3:11), so we are longing for the eternal even if we don’t consciously realise it. 

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to ask for daily bread but in Matthew 4:4 “He says, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” As Jesus spars with the devil in the wilderness, he shows us a key truth, that physical bread is not enough to give us ‘life’. He infers that the word of God is the bread he needs to truly live, where he goes to receive fullness and life.

Jesus was fully God, yet fully man and we are like him in his humanity. So the truth of Matthew 4:4 is true for ourselves as well, we can not live on bread (temporal/physical satisfaction) alone, we need eternal truth that is found in the word of God and in the person of Jesus, who is alive and who is the living word.

Jesus is the Word who became flesh (John 1:14) and we can ‘eat’ of this living bread by reading the word of God, spending time with Jesus and by taking communion. The truth we will receive from the word and in his presence is eternal. Jesus said “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.” (John 6:63). The things of the Spirit are eternal, not temporary and they will satisfy beyond what any material thing this world can offer.

But we actually have to hunger for Jesus, thereby seeking him and purposely filling ourselves with him. The metaphor he uses to describe himself, the bread of life, shows us that we must eat and be filled with him intentionally. You can’t get full up on bread if you only look at it or smell it or think about it, you have to actually receive it, consume it and digest it. 

How much time do we spend in Jesus’ presence listening to him speak?
How much time do we spend digesting his truth?

Compare it to how much time we spend preparing and eating our ‘physical meals’ every day and it will probably be much less than that. Jesus died so we could have a relationship with God, but that very relationship must become our ‘spiritual food’, our source of life that we consume and value more than the meeting of our own daily physical needs. 

Jesus is our daily bread. We need to encounter him every day to stay full, but it is a fullness that grows and grows to overflowing, rather than a life filled with lots of meaningless stuff and fleeting pleasures. He says ‘whoever comes to him will never go hungry’ but we have to choose to come to him and keep filling ourselves with him. He is basically saying I am available to whoever chooses to seek me.

So if you feel hungry for Jesus or are yearning for more or just feel the general lack of satisfaction in your life, hear his invitation to come to him and be filled! It’s your choice how full and satisfied you are. He is waiting for you to come to him so he can fill you and satisfy you, so come!