Sunday message · If My People (A Call to Prayer) series
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Message Summary
In the fifth message of the If My People series on prayer, which uses the Lord’s Prayer as its pattern, Pastor Phillip Santillan turns to Matthew 6:11: “Give us today our daily bread.” He confesses that he hates Subway after a college summer touring Midwest churches with a team that ate it every day for three months. Familiarity breeds contempt, he says, and a favorite song played too often fades into background noise. Memorized prayers like this one can go the same way. Phil hopes the study will deepen each person’s faith and give the church a framework for praying together as it seeks to be the church, not just go to church.
The prayer sits within the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus shows what it means to follow him: realigning our desires and repurposing our rhythms toward what God wants to accomplish in the world. The key word in this request is “us.” Faith is deeply personal, but Jesus teaches his followers to pray “our Father” and “give us,” and repeats it in Luke 11. Religious people already know how to bring God their own needs; Jesus had to teach them to pray with the whole family in mind. Drawing on N.T. Wright, Phil says that truly praying this prayer means praying for the needs of the whole world. So he has asked the church to pray this year for what it most needs: to bear spiritual fruit and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28).
So what is daily bread? The Greek word usually translated “daily” is so rare that scholars still debate its meaning. Through Scot McKnight, Phil cites Dale Allison’s list of options, from bread for the current day to the Eucharist, spiritual food such as God’s word or Jesus himself, and the bread of the coming kingdom. After studying about a dozen scholarly works, Phil lands closest to Cyprian, who became bishop of Carthage in 249 AD and read the request both literally and spiritually: Christ is the bread of life, the bread of those united with his body.
Rather than stopping at personal needs, Phil asks how deep our prayers go for us, the family of God. At a listening session in his home the week before, the church named its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Its deepest spiritual need is more of Jesus, at the center of everything and receiving all the glory. It also has literal needs: a thriving student ministry for middle and high schoolers, a budget shortfall as many faithful givers have moved away, and aging equipment that keeps needing repairs. What weighs on Phil most is that no one has crossed the line of faith through the church’s shared disciple-making efforts since COVID.
He closes by inviting everyone to use the prayer guide during this week of prayer and to join him in asking God to provide for the church’s needs, praying for God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done, and then watching God do what only he can do as Jehovah Jireh, our provider.
