I just want to welcome back a couple of folks that have been away, the Jardines and the Rossins. Good to have you back with us again and to see your cheery smiling faces. Take your Bibles and let's go to the book of Matthew again. We often ask each other, how can I pray for you? Something you hear people say once in a while and maybe in a text or a message or an email, we find out how can we pray for each other? How can we pray for each other? Scripture clearly calls us to pray for each other. In James it says, simply pray for one another. And scripture gives us examples of Jesus and Paul who prayed for their disciples and fellow believers. Listen to what Paul wrote to the Romans. He said, for God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers. Paul was always praying. for people of God. In Philippians 1, he said this, I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine, making requests for you all with joy. In 2 Thessalonians, he said this, he said, finally, brethren, pray for us that the word of the Lord may run swiftly and be glorified just as it is with you. And we do spend time in prayer for each other, don't we? We pray for health issues and we pray for financial issues. We might pray for relationship issues and spiritual growth issues. We might pray for the salvation of a loss. We pray for missionaries and pastors and people that we know that need prayer. And because God calls us to pray for each other, it would seem appropriate to notice what he says in his word about how and what we should pray for each other. God, our Heavenly Father, like all parents, loves to see His adopted sons and daughters loving each other. I think it thrills the heart of a living God when He sees us all get together like this, and we sing together, and we enjoy time together, and we fellowship together, and we love each other both in practical and in spiritual ways. We just enjoy being with each other. God, our Heavenly Father, wants us to be looking after each other. He wants us to be encouraging each other, helping each other, loving each other. In fact, Jesus said this. He said, By this the world will know that you are my disciples if we love one another. And praying for each other shows that love to each other. Well, this morning, I want us to begin to see the Lord Jesus teaching on how we, as his disciples are to pray for one another. So let's read again, Matthew six, verses five to 13. He says this. He says, when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites for they love to pray, standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut the door, pray to your father who sees in the secret place, and your father who sees in the secret will reward you openly. And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Therefore, do not be like them, for your father knows the things that you have need of before you ask him. In this manner, therefore, pray. 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 forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen. In the first half of that prayer, Jesus is teaching us to pray the things that are uppermost in his Father's heart. He prays, let your name be holy in my life. He prays, let your kingdom come. He teaches us to pray, let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And then the second half of that Lord's prayer, the Lord teaches us to pray for each other the things the Father desires for us. The things he desires to give us if we would ask him, and he prays literally for three things. Jesus teaches us to pray these things. Number one, we're to pray for the spiritual growth of each other. In verse 11 he says, give us this day our daily bread. Spiritual bread ingested and digested brings spiritual growth. Secondly, we're to pray for deeper, loving fellowship with our heavenly father and with each other. Look what he says in verse 12. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. That forgiveness brings reconciliation and a deeper fellowship. We're to pray for protection against the evil one. He says, do not bring us into And the idea there is the presence of temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. So we're to pray for protection for each other from temptation and future sin. Now, early in the week, as I was working my way through this and studying and writing notes like a madman, I thought I'd go through all three of these things in one Sunday morning, but you know what? As I started to unpack the first one, I realized I got through page 7 or 8 on my notes. I thought, you know, if I preach a 21-pager, they're not going to like that too much. In fact, it'll be so much that they'll probably give up and go home. So we're just going to take our time. We're going to unpack these three requests. So this morning, we're just going to look at the first one, which is this, give us this day our daily bread. And next week, we'll look at what it means to ask God for forgiveness as we forgive others. And that's a very key thing for us to understand. The message today really simply is this. Pray for each other's spiritual growth. In the Lord's words, give us this day our daily bread. And what I want to do is just work my way through the text. I'm just going to unpack the words and just kind of enjoy and savor what Jesus is saying. So notice, first of all, he gives us a command. He says simply, give. Notice to whom it is that we're praying. We're praying to God, our Heavenly Father. This type of bread that he's saying to ask for has only one source, and we're to ask the one who is to give it, the Heavenly Father. This bread can't be bought. Not bread you can go down the street and buy off the shelf and take and pay two, three, five, seven bucks, whatever it is. This bread must be asked of somebody else. This bread cannot be manufactured on our own. We can't get together. Brayden, just for fun last night, made Heather an apple strudel before she left. And I'm telling you that it was good, right? He got in there, man, and he's amazing. He gets on the internet, prints out a little recipe, and he follows the instructions to the letter. I said, Brad, Brad, add some brown sugar. No, Dad, you can't. It's not in the instructions. And he would not let me adjust. It tasted great, but Brad got in there, and he mixed everything up, and he did the whole thing, and then when we ate it, man, it was good. Moving on. It's not bread you can manufacture yourself. This kind of bread has to be asked from one who will give it. This type of bread comes without price. It's not valueless. Instead, it's such a high value that no price can be set on this kind of bread. It must be given to us by God because it cannot be bought. We ask this of God because James tells us this, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. This is bread that we ask God and God alone to give. Secondly, he says, he commands us to pray, asking for it to be given. And that asking speaks of faith that's necessary to receive it. When I go up and ask you for something, I don't ask with total doubt that you're going to give it to me. I ask you in the faith and the hope that you might give it. And this is exactly the same. Jesus is saying, listen, come to the Father and ask, give me this bread. And we are to ask in faith, not doubting that God will give. Listen, prayer, we said before, is the purest form of faith. It's going to God and saying, give us the thing that we need so badly and the thing that God delights to give us. Prayer is a form of faith. In the command to give is also an implied promise that it will be answered. The fact that Jesus is saying, listen, come to the Father, come into his presence and ask him for these things. There is implied in that a promise that he'll answer. Faith is trusting God to keep His promises. We pray and ask God to give in faith that He will keep the promise to answer and to supply us with our daily bread. Faith is also our total dependence on God for His gracious supply. Faith and grace go absolutely totally hand in hand. They're together. That's why we're saved by grace through faith. They have to be together. And the prayer asking God to give is totally dependent on the grace of God for its supply. You say, what's the grace of God? The grace of God is his goodness expressed to those who deserve only God's punishment. Never ceases to amaze me. We sit here as a group in the morning and we're all sitting down. The work is all finished. It's all been done. And all of us know in the depths of our own hearts, the depth of our own sin and iniquity. We know how much we've offended and wronged God in the things that we have done. And God, yet he supplies grace. It's his goodness just poured out on top of us. I never get over the word in Ephesians 1. It says that God lavished his grace on us. It's like Brady with the strudel and this icing. He just kind of slathers it on there, man. Not dribble. He pours it out. And God's grace is exactly that. He just poured out on top of us. Our salvation is a result of the grace of God poured out on us in the person of Christ, His suffering, His dying, His rising again to purchase our salvation. When we ask for a gift from the hand of God, we're asking for His kindness to be expressed to us. But we need to remember something. God is never obligated to display his grace toward us. Our spiritual growth is a result of the grace of God in supplying what we need in order to grow. Beloved, consider just for a minute. Stop and think. What an incredible invitation it is that Jesus tells us to make. What a command he gives us. Our Heavenly Father, give to us our daily bread. The word give is like an aorist active imperative. And you think, who cares what an aorist active imperative really is? It has the same verbal force as a prayer for God's name. to be made holy in our lives. To be invited to make such a polite command of the living God tells us that it's something He desires to answer. He desires to give it to us. Give us this day our daily bread. It's all of God and His grace to supply. What an amazing, loving kind of Father that we have this morning. Notice next the pronouns in that little passage there. He says, forgive us, or give us our daily bread. He said, forgive us our debts. And he says, deliver us. It's not a singular thing. He doesn't say, listen, just give me and my. He says, give to us our. They're not solo, individualistic prayers, praying only for ourselves. We're commanded by Jesus to pray these things for each other. We're to pray for those that cannot or will not pray for themselves, either due to hardness of heart or grief or weakness or whatever. We're to pray for each other. In praying these things, we're for each other. We're sharing the grace of God that we have each experienced. I think we can all stop and think back to our lives and realize just how much of God's grace has been poured out on us and how much of God's grace that we have all experienced. And we who've experienced much grace ought to show much grace to each other. You know what the Bible says? Jesus is talking about a man who is an unjust servant who mistreats and withholds what's good from his master's household, and he says this. For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required, and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more. Listen, every one of us sitting in this room, we've all experienced so much of the grace of God. If you stop and think, listen to your mind, if you like, or write down a piece of paper, all that God has given you. You need to buy more notebooks and more paper because you just never run out of things to say. God has given so much grace to us, and the way that we share that grace is in praying for each other that God will cause us all to grow. You know what convicts me personally about this message? It's this. It's this one thing. God confronted me with this recently that I'm not a very gracious person. That's a tough pill to choke down, I'll tell you. But you know what? I've experienced so much of the grace of God, and there are times when I'm so slow to give it to somebody else. I put high demands and high expectations and high requirements, and if people don't measure up, it just frustrates me. And I stop and think, you know how often God must have gotten so frustrated with me in the last three minutes? And God has given so much grace. God expects us to share that grace with one another, to pray for one another. Jesus is teaching us, listen my disciples, my beloved, pray this way, give us our daily bread. So we pray on behalf of one another. Listen, beloved, we're commanding the Lord's Prayer to pray on behalf of each other and ourselves. One of the problems Confronting the church of Jesus Christ is a very self-centered, individualistic approach. It's kind of crept in. It sees me and my problems as my chief concern. It always kind of bothers me when you ask someone, hey, is there something I can pray for? And they say, no, there's nothing in my life that needs prayer. Thanks. And you go, so you're the only one in your life? What about people around you? And I'm just the same. I see, oh, well, you know, I mean, my health's OK, and my marriage is good, and my family's doing all right. Yeah, I'm fine. I don't have to pray. What about everybody else around you? What about the folks in your neighborhood, the folks in your church that need prayer? We need to be people who are looking outside around us to see, what else can we pray for? What needs to be prayed for in our meeting? What needs to be prayed for in our neighborhood? Listen, the church is a corporate body made up of individual parts, and we need each other. And each part needs to be praying for the other part, so the other part does its work and works together to build up the body together. Listen, outside of dying for one another, the purest form of love that we can show is to plead for God's grace to be working out in your life and mine. To plead that God, with His grace, will cause us to grow, will cause us to love him more, and to fall more in love with each other, and more in love with God, and to serve with bigger hearts, and kinder hearts, and more loving hearts. I don't know about you, but when someone sends me a text or an email telling me that they're praying for me, it's love, and it's encouragement, and it means the world. When you pick up that little thing and you just hear those little words, praying for you today, what can I pray for? It just cheers me on to keep going. Jesus is commanding us to pray for each other and for ourselves. These are prayers we pray for each other on a daily basis. This speaks to us of a loving fellowship that we have as believing brothers and sisters to pray for one another. Next thing I want you to notice, he says, pray this day. Give us this day our daily bread. The idea here is bread that's sufficient only for the day in which we receive it. That doesn't imply that God's supply is poor or weak or lacking or it goes off quickly. It tells us that we're to be constantly depending on God's supply. We need it every day. We're to be dependent every single day to ask for the growth-giving bread that we need. God who designed us and created us knows the human heart and its tendency towards independence and self-reliance. I'm so like that. Man, I can just deal with it myself. Don't worry about it. I got it covered. Don't worry about that. You know what God keeps doing? He says, okay, and puts his foot out, and I go, bang, on my face. So God can say, now, did you still want some help? And he helps me up. But we're like that, aren't we? We say, you know what, I've got this, it's okay. But what God is saying to us, and what Jesus is saying in this prayer is, pray this day, give us this day our daily bread. Keep being dependent on God. Keep on your face before God, keep seeking his gracious supply. We need a supply for not only our spiritual growth, we need God's supply for our spiritual dependence to keep going back to God and depending on him for more. The necessity of praying this day, each day is to regularly remind us that apart from God, we can do nothing. You know, John 15 says, it says this, I am the vine. You are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him bears much fruit for without me, you can do nothing. Take your Bible. Just flip over for a second. The book of Ephesians. There's a great little prayer that Paul prayed. There's a couple of great prayers that Paul prays in Ephesians. There's one I just want to quickly look at. Ephesians 1, beginning at, let's read from, read from verse 15. He says, therefore, I also, it's Paul speaking, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, the knowledge of him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened that you may know What is the hope of His calling? What are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints? And what is the exceeding greatness of His power towards us who believe according to the working of His mighty power? Do you realize? You don't draw a breath. without God's power at work. You don't, your brain doesn't function for one tenth of a second without God's power at work. The reason why we need to pray for daily bread is because we need that supply every day. We need to go back again to God again and again and again, constantly depending on him for that feeding, that supply that causes us to grow. We need to do it every day because if God were to supply all that we needed for this whole spiritual journey, we would soon forget our heavenly father who supplies it. If God were to supply full maturity, the moment we ask, we would quickly become proud and self-righteous and boastful. Jesus commands us to pray this day so that we would be always dependent on him for the supply of bread for growth. Beloved, we need our daily supply of bread from the Father. Next thing I want you to notice is this. It's the kind of bread he says to pray for. He says, give us this day our daily bread. It's not the best rendering of the word. The word's a very unusual word in Greek. It's called, it goes like this, epiusion. And you say, well, who cares? It's a Greek word. It only comes up, I think, once in the entire New Testament. And Paul, not Paul, Matthew used it in giving Jesus his prayer to say this, it's the idea of for this day, or the idea of a very necessary thing. What they found in ancient Greek was a shopping list, believe it or not, of somebody going to buy bread and going to buy necessary food. And it was this word used there to describe the bread they needed to buy. It was necessary bread. It had to be eaten the same day. It was required for that day. And what it teaches us is this, that this bread is a staple that's a daily requirement. It's a vital requirement for the health and sustaining of our lives. There are some things that we all enjoy as treats, you know, periodic enjoyment, the rich food, the fancy food, the finer wine, the best meat, all that kind of stuff. But there are other kinds of foods that are just a staple requirements. Daily, necessary food. We need water, we need vegetables, we need fruits, we need protein. All those things are necessary for the right balance of a healthy diet. And daily bread, necessary bread, is one of those requirements. It helps us to grow and maintain our health. So daily bread speaks of a vital necessity that we require that only comes from God's hand. This is something we cannot live long without. In this Christian spiritual walk of faith, following the Lord Jesus Christ, we need the daily necessary supply of spiritual bread for the journey, which brings us to the bread itself. Give us this day our necessary bread." Now, I'm going to disagree with about 60% of the guys I looked at and read on this passage here. Most of the scholars and commentators will say, this is speaking of bread like that's in the Bible, physical bread. And I'm going to say, this is not primarily physical bread, wheat, yeast, milk, that kind of stuff put together. It does include... physical bread, so giving thanks for our dinner, praying and asking God for the food we need to sustain ourselves, the physical meat and potatoes and bread and milk and whatever we need, giving thanks and asking God for those things is right and good. It's an excellent thing to stop before we eat dinner and give thanks for dinner to God, okay? But it includes that, but that's not primarily what he's talking about. Listen, Bread, along with every other blessing that we receive, is certainly from the hand of God. We said at the beginning, every good gift, every perfect gift, comes down from the Father of Lights, with whom there's no variation or shadow of turning. So every gift you have, every good thing you've got, you got it from the hand of God. But what he's talking about here is spiritual bread. What he's talking about is the bread that only God can give. And the reason why I say it's not physical bread is Matthew 4.4, in the context of this whole passage from Matthew 4 to Matthew 6, Jesus says two things that are important. In Matthew 4, he says this, man shall not live by bread alone, speaking of physical bread, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. That bread that proceeds in the mouth of God is the bread that's necessary for spiritual life. Now take your Bibles and look over Matthew 6, verses 25 to 34, and listen, we'll read together. Matthew 6, 25 says this. Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you'll put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, Yet our Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you, by worrying, can add one cubit to his height? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. And yet I say to you that even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field which today is and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear? For after all these things the Gentiles seek, for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But, verse 33, Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself." What's Jesus saying? He's saying, look, the clothing you need, the food you need, all those things, the Father in heaven knows you need them. Don't worry about those things. So when Jesus takes time in teaching us how we should pray for each other, when he makes such a powerful statement and a compact statement like, give us this day our daily bread, I don't think he's really talking about bread like that kind of bread. I believe he's talking about spiritual bread. He's talking about the Lord Jesus. Physical bread is not as important in our daily feeding as the spiritual bread we receive from the mouth of God. So what's the bread we're to ask for? It's Jesus, isn't it? Jesus himself. It speaks so much of the Lord Jesus, bread itself. John 12, 24, what's he say? Most assuredly, I say to you, it's Jesus speaking, unless a grain of wheat falls in the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it produces much grain. What's Jesus talking about? A physical grain of wheat dropping in the ground? No, what he's doing is giving an analogy about his own life. He's saying, listen, unless I die, go in the ground and die and spring forward and give up, there'll be no fruit. And so when Jesus died and went to the ground and was buried and then rose again, he brought a great harvest of saved souls. Us. Bread speaks of Jesus' death to gain a harvest of souls, the grain of wheat that's harvested, then ground into flour and mixed with yeast, then passed through the oven's fire to make bread. It speaks of Jesus' death to forever deal with the problem of sin. You know why we use raised bread in there? A lot of groups use crackers, right? They take them, they break it all up, and they say, well, unleavened bread in the old Jewish days, that's what they used. Why do we use raised bread? Because it's easier to get or it's cheaper? No. We use raised bread for a really good reason. It's actually a beautiful picture. How do you get raised bread? You mix it with yeast, right? And what happens to it? It rises up, right? Makes a nice big fluffy loaf of bread. And when you put that piece of bread that's all doughy and sticky and still rising up, if you don't stop it, what's going to happen? It's just gonna keep getting bigger, right? But what you do is when you push it all down, you put it into the oven, the heat of the fire of that oven forever stops and arrests the development of that yeast in that loaf. And what it's a picture of, when we see that bread there, it's a picture of the fact that when Jesus died on the cross, his death under the judgment of God forever dealt with sin. It's finished. Jesus was the bread of life sent by God who knew no sin, but he was made to be sin for us. He was crushed by God's wrath against us. All of the wrath of God against your sin was poured out against Jesus. He was put through the fire of God's judgment against us. Jesus said this of himself about the bread of life. He said this in John 6, for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Who is he talking about? Jesus. He's talking about himself. John 6 and verse 35, Jesus said this, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. In John 6.51, he said this, I am the living bread that comes down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. So when Jesus teaches to pray this and give us this day our daily bread, he's talking about us feeding on Christ. feeding on the word of God, feeding on Jesus himself. So Jesus is the bread of life, not just for salvation. He's also the bread of life by which we grow. Who here has kids? Most of us, right? Who here has ever seen a little baby that doesn't develop for very long and dies? It's a very, very sad thing. Can you imagine if we were born, born again, And the father just said, well, they're born again. Good enough. They're saved. That's all that matters. You think, what a terrible tragedy. The reality is that when God saved us, he didn't save us just to save us, just to get us into the fold. He saved us that we might be like Jesus. He saved us that we might grow. in our faith will not grow in the grace and knowledge of the living God, that we might grow to be more like Christ in every area of our lives. And he's so gracious and a loving and a kind God that what he did was he didn't just give us the salvation. He also gave us the means by which we grow up. And it's a command of scripture for us as a people of God to grow. Why did Jesus command us to pray like this? He commanded us to pray like this, that we might grow to be more like the Lord Jesus Christ, more like Himself. You know what else? It's a Father's will for us to be like Jesus. The Bible says in Romans 8, 29, He predestined us to be conformed to the image of Christ. He predestined, which means what? Which means He predetermined that you should be like Christ. Why do you call yourself a Christian? Because you're supposed to be a little Christ. And when the world looks at you and other believers look at you, they immediately begin to recognize, oh, there's something different about that other person. People might look at you and think, oh, it's something different anyway. But, you know, they look at me and go, there's something strange over there. But you know what? It's amazing when two believers meet up and you can almost sense it right away. Oh, wait a minute. I think I've met your kind before. I can't remember where I was. I was in a house walking through. I was sizing up a job in Canada for cabinet making. And these people were just lovely people and I'm just enjoying. We're chatting away and we finally get around to talking about the cabinets. As I'm walking through the house, I just begin to notice little things around the house. And then I said, hey, I think you got my favorite book here. And he had a Bible on his desk, and I pick it up. And he, oh, you're a believer too. I said, yeah, you guys are believers. And boom, we talk like mad for another hour, right? It's just this sense right away, hey, there's something different. Because there was a little bit of Christ in that person, and Christ was showing through, even though He looked different than me, and all of us look different, and all of us do different things, there was the image of Christ being showing through the surface. And what God is designed to do in giving us bread to feed us in order to make us grow, is to change us to be more like Jesus. That's the point. 2 Corinthians 3.18 says this, I'll try it in English. Second Corinthians three verse 18 says this, but we all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord. What's beholding as in a mirror where he's holding one in his hand right there. You can see it. Look down on it. It's a Bible. picking up the Word of God and viewing it and looking at it, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord as we focus and feast on the Lord Jesus Christ, we are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies. What a living sacrifice! He preached last week. What's the purpose of that? That we might not be conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds. How do we renew our minds? We feed on the Word of God. That's what makes us grow. That's why Jesus is saying, listen, people of God, listen, disciples, pray this way. Pray on behalf of each other. Give us this day our daily bread so that we might grow. I want to finish up and just give you a couple of practical things, but I want to do it by going back to the Old Testament. Take your Bibles, flick all the way back over to the book of Exodus. Whenever we think of give us this day our daily bread, we should go back to one story in the Old Testament right away. And some of you will already remember what I'm thinking of. It's the story of manna from heaven. The next is 16 in verse 1 all the way down to verse 18. It's a long passage, but I want to read it all. And then we'll just make a couple quick points, and we're done. We'll go to the Lord's table. In Exodus 16, it's talking about the story of the Israelites journeying from Egypt towards Mount Sinai, where they're going to get the Ten Commandments and the law, and so on. And as they're journeying, it says in verse 1, they journeyed from Elim, and the congregation of the children of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month, after they had departed from the land of Egypt. Then the whole congregation of the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. And the children of Israel said to them, Oh, that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into the wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. And the Lord said to Moses, behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you, and the people should go out and gather a certain quota every day that I may test them whether they will walk in my law or not. Flip down to verse 13, talks about the quails came up at evening and covered the whole camp. In the morning, the dew lay all around the camp. And when the layer of dew lifted off, there on the surface of the wilderness was a small, round substance as fine as frost on the ground. When the children of Israel saw it, they said to one another, what is it? for they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, this is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat. This is the thing which the Lord has commanded. Let every man gather it. according to each one's need, one omer for each person, according to the number of persons that every man take for those who are in his tent. And the children of Israel did so and gathered some more and some less. So when they gathered, they measured it by omers. He who gathered much had nothing left over, and he who had gathered little had no lack. Every man gathered each one according to one's need. I want to make a couple points, and they are this. Verse three, there's a hunger for bread in order to survive. They had a hunger. They went out in the middle of the wilderness. They've been going for a couple of days, maybe a week, and they've got nothing to eat, and they're hungry. And for us, there needs to be a hunger in our hearts for the bread of life, for Christ himself. There must be a hunger to grow in grace. There must be a hunger to grow, to be more like Christ. Are we singing ancient words ever true? You know, the idea there is that we be filled with the word of God so that we might grow. Give us this day, Father, our necessary bread that we might grow. There is a hunger in the hearts of the people of God for the bread of God. There must be a hunger for the bread of life. You know what Jesus said? He said in Matthew 5, blessed are those that hunger and thirst for righteousness. For what? They'll keep going hungry? No, they shall be filled. When we hunger for God's word and we go there longing to get a bit more, so we grow a little bit more and we see that God's work in life, you spend some time in the word of God, you give yourself a month, maybe two months, and you watch the way that your heart is before the living God, and you invest some time every single day hungering and thirsting, pleading with God to feed you with his word as you open it and you read through it, and I guarantee at the end of that two months, you're gonna say, man, look how much God has given me. It's a promise of Scripture. Jesus said, hey, I want you to pray. I want you to ask my Father for the bread that fills you, the bread that gives you growth and life. There's got to be a hunger there. Verse 4, God promises a supply of bread from heaven. In Jesus' command to pray, there's a promise of answer given, the daily necessary bread. So we must ask in faith in God, believing that God will keep his promises. If you go before the living God with your Bible open and plead with God to feed you and teach you and show you more of Christ, I guarantee you. You will come away going, wow, I learned something of God today. Verses 13 and 14, God kept his promises. The very next day, the quail there in the evening, the next morning they go out of their tents and all across the ground there's this white substance on the ground. I don't know what manna looks like. It looks a little, I guess, like a fine flower petal on the ground. So delicate and so fragile. It had to be very, very carefully picked up and put into Omer jars. You can imagine something as fine as frost, a flaky thing, and you pick it up. It would take you a long time to fill up an Omer jar of all this stuff. They had to pick it up carefully, and God kept His promise. You know what the Bible tells us? They got to Canaan, they crossed over the Jordan River, and that was the last day that manna fell from heaven. And you know what the promise for us is in that? Every single day, God will feed us if we go before Him and go out and gather up and feed ourselves. The promise is that the supply will never run out until we stand face-to-face with Jesus and the Word of God, the paper and text Word of God will be there and God the Son will be there, the Word of God in flesh. And we'll see Him face-to-face and all that we've learned about Jesus and all that Jesus has taken of His Word to make us more like Him will be finished in a moment and we'll stand face-to-face and we'll see Him exactly as He is. God will keep his promise to keep feeding us all the way through this wilderness journey, and it is a wilderness journey that we're on. I want you to notice also in verses 16 to 18, there is the responsibility for the men of Israel. For them, the men were to go out in the morning and gather each one according to their needs to minister in order to be able to feed and minister to their families. For us men, Start with us. Men, go and gather according to the need of your family and minister to your families. There is a tremendous responsibility and requirement for us of men to get up in the morning with a living God and the Bible open. It doesn't have to be in the morning. You can do it whenever fits your schedule. I like the morning. It's when my brain seems to work the best. Got to work with what you got, all right? Get up. They had to go out and gather it up. They had to gather it carefully. It wasn't just a scoop up mud and manna and toss it in the pail and go inside. They had to carefully pick it up. It was to be gathered. It was the responsibility of the men. Men, it's our responsibility to be gathering every day from the hand of the living God bread that we can feed our families with and sit down with them and open the word of God with them and feed them day by day, bit by bit. Our first responsibility is to pray. Our second responsibility is to go and gather. It's time in the word of God, gleaning from the scriptures to feed ourselves and feed our families. It's time searching the word of God to learn more of Jesus. We ingest and we digest the biblical food by reading it, by studying it, by meditating on it, by practicing it. He prayed, he mentioned at the end of the song service about putting it into practice. How quick we are, isn't it, to read it all up, study it all, outline it, highlight it, make notes and make up a sermon or two and get all a nice pile of notes and shove it in a binder and throw it on our shelf and go back to doing exactly what we did the day before. And what's James talking about? The guy who sees and doesn't do. It's exactly how God takes the Word of God and the Spirit of God takes that reading, that Word of God that you've gotten into your mind and into your heart, and He causes us to grow as we read and study and meditate and put it into practice. That's how we grow. So what's the message for us from Matthew 6 verse 11? Pray that God will bring the hunger necessary to desire the bread of life. Pray for each other. You pray for me that God will put a hunger in my life for me personally, not just pastor me, but the guy that sits there with his own Bible and his own family and his own wife and needs to minister to them. You pray that God put a hunger in my life. and I will pray that God will put a hunger in your life to get you to desire to spend more time in his word that you might grow to be like Christ. Pray that God of all grace will supply to us every single day the living necessary bread which will cause us to grow. Pray that God will give all of us It's not just about one person growing. It isn't just about you growing and being able to teach others. It's about every one of us growing. My goal as a pastor is to work myself out of a job. That's what I gotta do. to keep feeding and feeding and feeding until you can turn around and feed others and feed others and feed others and eventually the people from this church can go out and start other churches and keep moving out. That's the whole goal of it. It was never about building little empires all over the world. It's about building and spreading the gospel throughout the whole world. Pray that God will give spiritual growth to the members of the body of Christ. Go out and gather for yourself and those in your household, those in your sphere of influence. You got people you work with that don't know the Lord. You're amazed at what one verse will do. Just to give you an idea, my cousin, who was part of the Exclusive Brethren cult, and she was in it fast bound. And she went walking to the bathroom of the hospital where she worked, and lying on the countertop of the benchtop, sorry, of the bathroom, was a little tract with a Bible verse on it. And she picked it up and read it. And God saved her. And she got up and she actually left the exclusive brethren, which was just radical for them. They couldn't even understand why she would leave. She left because she got saved, because somebody put a Bible tract with one verse on it. You got friends you work with, don't know the Lord, a Bible verse that you share with them, that God has used to minister to your life and feed you and cause you to grow, to be like Christ, you share it with them. We go and we gather and we also gather to minister to others, to see the others grow too, and finally we pray that God the Holy Spirit will take the raw material of his word and cause the spiritual growth of the body of Christ. Jesus said to them, pray, give us this day our daily bread. Let's pray together and then we're gonna go to the Lord's table. Loving Father, we come before you again and we just stop and we stand and in awe, oh God, you are the God of all grace. Father, every breath we draw, every time our brain makes a movement. Father, every muscle we flex and move. Father, everything about our existence is because you have grace and you cause those things to work. And Father, we recognize each one of us as we look back into our own past for a moment and consider our own sinful history, we recognize how great we are as sinners, how great a sinner we were. And father, we realize that your grace was lavished on us and you saved us by your grace. You saved us because Jesus, the bread of life came. And father, as we look at that little loaf of bread on the table, it reminds us so much of Jesus body that was given for us. And father, we thank you so much for the Lord Jesus Christ who went into a grave, having suffered all the wrath that was due to us. And father, we rejoice and we give you thanks. So he triumphantly walked out of that grave three days later. And father, we marvel as well at the grace that you have given to us. You've given us not only the Lord Jesus Christ for our salvation, you've given to him, given him to us in order that we might grow father, help us to feed on Christ as we feed on his word. Father, we pray for the spiritual growth of this church. Father, for all of us, we pray that you would put a deep, gnawing hunger within us to know more of the Lord Jesus, to know more of his word. Father, to walk closer to him, to worship him with every part of our lives. Father, we cry out to you for growth, and we ask you, oh God, give us the strength to go and to gather and to feed one another. We ask you these things, father, giving thanks in Jesus name. Amen. Just take your Bibles. I'm going to flip over to first Corinthians 11.