The Lord's Prayer

(From Chapter Five “God Provides For Our Daily Needs”)

‘Give Us’: This is our request for God to help us. Satan wants to make this a personal battle between him and us. He wants God and Christ kept out of it. We need to pray for God to stay in the battle and fight it for us. But, if Satan can succeed in making us feel discouraged and defeated to the point we lose our trust in God, he has us right where he wants us. He will have us in a battle one on one with him. That is the way he wants it, and we will lose that battle with him every time. Our only hope is to keep our faith in God strong, allow him to fight our spiritual battles, and provide for our daily needs.
This is a prayer request to Almighty God to help us overcome anything Satan throws our way in addition to meeting our other daily needs. The Greek word ‘hemon’ is translated ‘of us’. This is our bread; the box of supplies has our name on it.
‘This day’—He is talking about His daily availability. Today, tomorrow, and every day, God is always present, available, and ready to meet all of our needs, no matter how many there are; no matter how big and difficult they may be; no matter how many times they are repeated or how fast they come. Our God is always ready and able to meet every need we have every day.
Luke 11:3 puts a little different slant on the subject of providing bread. He says in this passage, “Give us each day our daily bread.” The words transliterated from the Greek read ‘the bread of us—belonging to the morrow give us each day’.

There are several lessons for life we need to learn from this prayer:
1. The words of this prayer are not a license for laziness.
2. Work is very important, and it has always been a part of God’s plan. Before the fall in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were given the responsibility to dress and keep the garden. In Exodus 20:8-9 we are commanded to work six days a week.
3. When giving assistance to others, we must preserve the dignity of those who are helped.
4. We must teach personal responsibility. We have moved in the direction of a socialist, entitlement nation, and if this is not reversed, it will destroy America. Look at what it has done to the European Nations.
All of these are lessons we should learn, but there is one more lesson we must learn: We, as Americans, must repent of our sins and come back to God. We have an excellent guide if we follow the teachings of the Lord’s Prayer.

(From “About the Author and His Family”)
When I moved to Marshall, I had to find a place for my two little girls and me to live. There was one side of a duplex available that was in my price range, and is was reasonably nice, so I rented it. It had an extra bedroom, so I talked to some of the students at the college about sub-leasing the room to help pay the bills. I talked to a guy named Moody, and he agreed to rent the room. Moody could have qualified as an old maid 90 to 95 years of age.
When I left Needville, I had an automatic washer and dryer, so that saved me from having a laundry bill. One day I decided to wash some clothes. I had never used the washing machine before. After putting all the clothes in the washing machine (without sorting the colors from the whiles, of course), I picked up a giant box of Tide and said, “Moody, about how much soap should I put in the washing machine?” He thought a minute, and then said, “Man, I don’t know. I’ve never washed clothes before.” I then asked, “Do you think about half the box will be enough?” He said, “You can start with that, and if it is not enough, you can always put in some more.” So I put in half the box of Tide, turned on the washing machine, and went down the hall to do something else. I started hearing a thumping sound, but ignored it for a while. Finally, I became concerned enough that I went back to the kitchen where the washing machine was, and suds were pouring out the top of the washing machine and the entire kitchen was about 4-5 inches deep in suds! I got a broom and started sweeping suds out the back door, while Moody was trying to mop them up. We had a lesson in housekeeping that day.