Daily Devotional

After the God-centered petitions, the prayer turns to our needs. The first is bread, and the petition is striking in its smallness: not a year’s supply, not a five-year plan, but today’s bread. Craig Keener notes that for the traveling disciples in Jesus’ day, this was not figurative. They did not know from city to city where their next meal would come from. The petition was an act of genuine dependence every morning.

For those of us with full refrigerators and stocked retirement accounts, this prayer is harder to pray honestly. The very abundance God has given can become the thing that quietly displaces Him. We know where dinner is coming from, so we forget that He is the one who gives it. Jesus puts this petition in our mouths every day so that we never lose sight of the truth that even the most ordinary loaf comes from the Father’s hand.

Then the prayer moves immediately to forgiveness. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Bread and forgiveness sit side by side because both are daily, both are gifts, and both are received with empty hands. The same hand that opens to take the bread also opens to release the debt. R.T. France observes that this petition assumes a Christian who has already received forgiveness and is now learning to live as a forgiven person in a world full of debts owed and debts to pay. The petition is honest about our ongoing need.