The Sermon on the Mount: Praying For God's Provision

James H. Cosentino II

The Sermon on the Mount • Sermon • Submitted 6 months ago • Presented 6 months ago

Matthew 6:9–15

0 ratings

· 23 views

Notes

Transcript

Introduction

Read Matthew 6:9-15

Matthew 6:9–15 (ESV)

Pray then like this:

“Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

Ask God to Provide for Your Physical Needs

Believe that God Cares for You

First, in this prayer, Jesus is inviting us to come to God with our personal needs and requests

As we pray for our daily bread, we are reminded that God desires for us to come to Him with our personal needs. In fact, our prayers to God is a reflection of the trust we have in His daily provisional care for our needs.

A refusal to pray for our needs is a sign of a lack of faith in God and a sign of dependence upon our own ability to provide for ourselves.

Come to God as the Perfect Father Who Cares for His Children

Jesus invites us to come to Him so that we will constantly be reminded that God is our perfect Father who cares for us. As we pray for our needs, we continue to grow in trust and in intimacy to the Father who loves His children.

And as a Perfect Father, we can trust that He will meet our needs according to His perfect Wisdom!

For all the fathers in this room today, I think we all know how far we fall short of being the perfect father that we are called to be. We can think back to mistakes we’ve made. And yet, most if not all of us I think can say we truly do love our children and that we want their best. If we, who are imperfect, desire the best for our children, we can trust that God who is perfect, cares infinitely more for us and we can trust Him enough to come to Him with our requests.

Trust that God Will Provide for Your Daily Needs

In praying this, we are asking God to provide for us each day

Next, as we pray for our daily bread, we are seeking to trust God on a daily basis. Yes, it makes us feel better when our Savings account is full and we are definitely commanded to work and to be wise in how we spend and steward what God has given to us.

But God wants us to trust Him on a daily basis, knowing that He will give us what we need for each day.

This takes us back to the Exodus as the Israelites had just been brought out of Egypt into the wilderness. On their way from Egypt to the land of Canaan, the people began to complain about not having any food.

So God provided a strange substance that would fall from heaven. They called it “mana,” which means, “what is it?” God told them to collect only what they needed for each day. However many collected more than what they needed for the day, thinking they could save up just in case the bread didn’t come the next day. The mana rotted over night and was covered in maggots. They learned that God would send the mana each day and they would have what they needed.

Remember that Everything You Have Comes from the Father

As we ask, we are reminded that everything we have comes from God

Part of the beauty of this prayer is not just that we are asking God to provide for us but that it is serving as a reminder of where all of our needs and provisions come from. Daily praying for God to provide for our daily bread is a daily reminder that everything we have comes from God.

Our sinful hearts blind us to this fact and we easily forget how our daily needs are met.

Watch this short clip from Shanendoah.

Notice his prayer here and how he really attributes their possessions to their own hard work and ability to provide. His prayer of thanks was not really a prayer of thanks but one of pride telling God that what they had on the table was a result of their own hard work.

But who gives us the breath to work? Who gives us another day to live? Who gives us the strength to do what is required? Who gives us the opportunity to work? Also, you can do everything right and still not receive what you have tried to work for. You can water and you can plant, but the growth of the crop, or the success in business or in whatever job you do, comes solely from the hand of God.

This prayer reorients our hearts back to seeing how our needs are daily met, which is through the gracious hand of God alone.

As we ask, we ask in gratitude for what God has done and for what He will continue to do

As we see that God provides for all our needs, it will also change our hearts to pray in gratitude for how God provides according to His perfect love and wisdom for His children. Even if He says no, we trust that every answer He gives is for our good and His glory and so we pray this prayer in true gratitude knowing that God is good and will perfectly provide all we need.

Ask God to Provide for Your Spiritual Needs

But when Jesus tells us to pray for our daily bread, we must also remember that we need much more than just physical provision.

God absolutely cares for our physical needs because He created our physical bodies. Yet He did not just create us to be physical beings. He created us to be physical and spiritual beings, which means we need spiritual sustenance as well as physical.

Man Does Not Live on Bread Alone

When Jesus was in the wilderness right after His baptism, He went through a time of prayer and fasting for 40 days.

By the end of that period, Satan comes to Christ to tempt Him, to turn Him away from His mission by having Him focus on His secondary needs.

The first temptation for Christ was to seek His own physical nourishment. Satan told Jesus to turn the stones into bread, knowing that Jesus was fully God and was able to carry out such a small and simple task.

This temptation was to lead Christ from trusting His Father to provide for Him to depending upon His own will and His own needs.

Jesus’ response to Satan was to quote Deuteronomy 8:3

Deuteronomy 8:3 (ESV)

And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

Jesus quoted this part of Moses’ teaching which referred back to God providing for His people in the wilderness. Part of God’s provision in the wilderness was not simply to provide for their physical needs, but to help the people to grow spiritually as they learned to depend upon God and His Word.

Man does not live on bread alone, but by every Word that comes from the mouth of God.

Jesus is Our Bread of Life

So what is this Word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Well, it is partly referring to the Bible.

As we seek God’s provision for our daily bread, we ask that God would fill our hearts and minds with His Word, the Scriptures. Pray that God would grow our love for His Word and to grow in obedience to His Word.

But ultimately, the Scriptures point us to the final Word that alone can bring life to each of us.

John 1:1 (ESV)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Scriptures are God’s written Word to us to show us Who He is. However, the Scriptures point us to final and complete Word of God, who is Christ alone.

John 6:32–35 (ESV)

Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

Jesus is telling the crowd He is teaching that their souls are hungry and thirsty for something greater than food that spoils. Jesus is our Bread of Life for whoever comes to Him in faith.

Pray that You Would Find Joy and Satisfaction in Christ Alone

As we talk about Christ being our bread of life, we have to understand that our souls were made to hunger and desire satisfaction from a source outside of itself.

We all feel this inward hungering inside ourselves.

Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, wrote about the God-shaped hole that is in each of our hearts. It is a vacuum that within each of us that we seek to fill with all kinds of things. We can try to satisfy our souls with things like work, money, power, success, relationships, pleasures, food, or sex. We become idolators in how we look to these temporary things to fill the God-shaped holes in our hearts, only to find out they can never truly satisfy.

Trying to fill our souls with these other things is like putting a square peg into a round hole. No matter how hard we try, we will never truly satisfy our desires with these pleasures that quickly perish. Only Christ Himself can truly bring satisfaction to our souls.

So we pray that God would incline our hearts to look to Christ to bring us the joy and satisfaction in life that we are all searching for.

Pray to God what the psalmist prays for in Psalm 119:36-37

Psalm 119:36–37 (ESV)

Incline my heart to your testimonies,

and not to selfish gain!

Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things;

and give me life in your ways.

Ask God to Provide for Others Through You

God Has Blessed Us So We Can Be a Blessing to Others

As God provides for us, He wants to invite us into blessing others.

We give a portion of what God has given to us back to Him, not because He needs it, but rather because He wants us to grow in continual trust and dependence upon Him and also to bless us by using us to bless someone else.

There may be seasons of life where God will provide for you through the gifts of others. But there will also be seasons where God will provide extra for you so you can pass that extra on to others who are going through a rough time.

Ask God to Use You to Provide for Other’s Physical needs

So first, we ask God to open our eyes to see those who are in need and what opportunities God has given to us in order to be a blessing to those around us. How can we be used by God to meet the physical needs of others?

Is there a person or family God has put on your heart to give a little extra to? Maybe God is calling you to give above and beyond to the ministries of the church so the church can further its ministry to others.

We are about to worship through the Lord’s Supper. If you will notice, every time we observe the Lord’s Supper, there are deacons at each of our doors with baskets for an extra offering above and beyond the normal offering. The money given during these times go into our benevolence fund which go to help provide extra assistance for whenever someone within our church family has a special need for help, whether that’s through a health crisis, a job loss, or just a difficult and trying time where they need some extra help paying the bills for a month. We get to be the hands and feet of Christ to provide God’s physical care for our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Ask God to Use You to Point Others to the Source for Their Spiritual Needs

Maybe you know someone that isn’t necessarily hurting physically, but you know they are starving spiritually because they either have never experienced the joy of following Christ, or maybe there’s a brother or sister in Christ who has fallen away from following Him. You can be the source of blessing and provision used by God to bring the spiritual nourishment of the Bread of Life to them as you help them to see their need for Christ.

Yesterday, we got to take part in packing boxes for Operation Christmas Child. I want to say thank you to Meri and Jean and for all those who have worked with them to accomplish this amazing ministry. This is a beautiful ministry that seeks to be a blessing to bless others both physically and spiritually. Through this ministry, you and I get to be the hands and feet of Jesus to provide Christmas gifts to boys and girls who have probably never received a Christmas gift before. They receive a special physical gift to let them know they are loved and cared for. Yet, the point of those boxes do not end with simply giving kids a physical gift. The main point of these boxes is to go that extra step by opening up doors of conversations to lead these children and their families to the joy of following Christ. Through these boxes, countless families get to hear the greatest story of Jesus and what He has done to save us from our sin. So this ministry gets to serve by meeting both physical and spiritual needs.

How is God calling you to be His hands and feet to minister and to serve others?

Related Media

Related Sermons