Your kingdom come! Give us this day our daily bread! These are but two of the six petitions in what we know as the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:7-15). Does their juxtaposition jolt you like it does me? The range of these requests is breathtaking: from the cosmic dominion of God’s rule and power all the way down to what you and I eat for lunch today. Continue reading . . .

Your kingdom come! Give us this day our daily bread! These are but two of the six petitions in what we know as the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:7-15). Does their juxtaposition jolt you like it does me? The range of these requests is breathtaking: from the cosmic dominion of God’s rule and power all the way down to what you and I eat for lunch today.

No one has given expression to this more clearly than Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Lloyd-Jones was the long time pastor of Westminster Chapel in London. He died in 1981. These comments are taken from his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount.

“Is there not something extraordinary and wonderful about the connection between this request and the previous requests? Is not this one of the most wonderful things in the whole of Scripture, that the God who is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, the God who is forming his eternal kingdom and who will usher it in at the end, the God to whom the nations are but as ‘the small dust of the balance’ – that such a God should be prepared to consider your little needs and mine even down to the minutest details in this matter of daily bread! But that is the teaching of the Lord everywhere. He tells us that even a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without our Father, and that we are of much greater value than many sparrows. He says that ‘the very hairs on your head are all numbered.’ If only we could grasp this fact that the almighty Lord of the universe is interested in every part and portion of us! There is not a hair of my head that he is not concerned about, and the smallest and most trivial details in my life are known to him on his everlasting throne. This is something you find only in Scripture. You go straight from ‘Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,’ to ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ But that is the way of God, ‘the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy’; who nevertheless, as Isaiah tells us, dwells with him also ‘that is of a contrite and humble spirit.’ That is the whole miracle of redemption; that is the whole meaning of the incarnation which tells us that the Lord Jesus Christ takes hold of us here on earth and links us with the almighty God of glory. The kingdom of God, and my daily bread!” (The Sermon on the Mount, 2:70).