Do I Need God?
I was reading preparing for a sermon a couple of days ago in Matthew chapter six, as Jesus lays out the Lord’s Prayer, and He makes a profound, and difficult statement. It’s found in Matthew 6:11
“And Give us this day our daily bread.”
It’s a short simple sentence, but one that I think is so difficult for us in this culture today to understand. What Jesus was saying was for us to pray simply for the things that we and those around us need in order to survive today. It is the idea of praying for your daily ration. Think about people today in our culture…when is the last time we actually prayed for water, or bread, or a place to sleep. What Jesus is reminding us of in this command to pray for our daily needs is that we are one hundred percent completely dependent on God for everything in our lives.
The difficulty is that in there are unique cultural barriers that we face in our world that hinder us from recognizing our dependency on God.
The first cultural barrier we face is…we live in a culture of abundance. We don’t really have needs. We have options. We don’t think about if we will eat, but where we will choose to eat at. I counted this past week and there were over seventy five different cereal options at the local grocery store. No doubt we live in a culture of abundance, and if we are not careful, we will be blinded by our stuff into believing that we don’t truly need God.
The second cultural barrier we face is…we live in a culture of entitlement. Everybody owes us something. When we think we are owed something, we begin to believe that we don’t need anything, and quickly think we don’t need God.
In this short passage, Jesus is challenging us to pray for simply what we need for that day, even though we already have the provisions to provide those for ourselves. Why would He do that? I believe its because he wants it to serve as a daily reminder of our need and dependency on God for everything. I pray that you can rise above these cultural barriers that we live in, and recognize that James 1:16-17 is true, that every good thing comes from God above, who wants to provide our every need. Let us not grow blind because of the cultural barriers in our lives to the truth that we owe everything to God, and He is who we are completely dependent on.
