'_Daily_ bread' clearly cannot be the right rendering, for after 'this
day' that would be weak repetition.
The word is difficult, for it only occurs here and there in Luke.
It may be rendered 'for the coming (day),' but that can scarcely be
supposed to be our Lord's meaning, when His precept to take no thought
for the morrow is remembered. A more satisfactory rendering is,
'sufficient for our subsistence,' the bread which we need to sustain us.
Such a petition points to desires limited by our necessities. What we
should wish, and what we have a right to ask from God, is what we
_need_--no more and no less.
This does not reduce us all to one level, but leaves Him to settle what
we do want. How different this prayer in the mouth of a king and of a
pauper! But it does rebuke immoderate and unbridled desires. God does
not limit us to mere naked necessaries--He giveth liberally, and means
life to be beautiful and adorned. That which is over and above bread is
to a large extent that which makes life graceful and refined, and I have
no wish to preach a crusade against it; but I have just as little
hesitation in declaring what it is not left to pulpit moralists to say,
that the falsely luxurious style of living among us looks very strange
by the side of this petition. So much luxury which does not mean
refinement; so much ostentatious expenditure which does not represent
increased culture or pleasure or anything but a resolve to be on a level
with somebody else; so much which is so ludicrously unlike the poor
little shrimp of a man or woman that sits in the centre of it all!
'Plain living and high thinking are no more.'
'My riches consist not in the abundance of my possessions, but in the
fewness of my wants.'
'The less a man needs, the nearer is he to the gods.'
So, what a lesson for us all in this age, where everyone of us is
tempted to adopt a scale of what is necessary very far beyond the truth.
Young and old--dare, if need be, to be poor. 'Having food and raiment,
let us therewith be content.'
We cannot all become rich, but let us learn to bring down our desires
to, and bound them by, our true wants.
Christ has taught us here to put this petition after these loftier ones,
and He has taught us to pass quickly by it to the more noble and higher
needs of the soul. Do we treat it thus, making it a secondary element in
our wishes? If so, then our days will be blessed, each filled with fresh
gifts from God, and each leading us to Him who is the true Bread that
came down from Heaven.
'FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS'
'Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.'--MATT. vi. 12.
The sequence of the petitions in the second half of the Lord's Prayer
suggests that every man who needs to pray for daily bread needs also to
pray for daily forgiveness. The supplication for the supply of our
bodily needs precedes the others, because it deals with a need which is
fundamental indeed, but of less importance than those which prompt the
subsequent petitions. God made us to need bread, we have made ourselves
to need pardon. The answer to the later petition is as certain as that
to the earlier. He who gives meat will not withhold forgiveness. _Give_
and _forgive_ refer to our deepest wants, but how many who feel the one
are all unconscious of the other!