| The Golden Gate of Prayer |
Chapter 11 |
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We ask God to give us bread. We thus recognize our dependence on him for it. It is not easy to offer this petition with real meaning when we have plenty in our hands and no fear of want. We can conceive of the very poor, with no bread, on the verge of starving, uttering the praying and putting their whole heart into it. The bitter sense of need makes the cry a real one for them. But for those who have never felt a pang of actual hunger, and have never been without a store from which to draw for to-morrow’s provision, it is not easy to realize the sense of dependence which the petition implies. This is one of the words of Christ whose full meaning only experience can teach.
Yet it is true that whatever abundance may be ours, we are actually dependent upon God for each day’s bread. The story of the forty years of the miracle of manna in the wilderness is but a parable of another miracle immeasurably greater — the providing of bread for all earth’s millions all the days of all the centuries. What we call the laws of nature are but our Father’s ordinary ways of working. The regularity of these laws in but the proof of divine faithfulness. Suppose that for a single year, or but for a week, God’s miracle of bread should cease from the earth, what would be the consequences? The unbroken continuity of God’s mercy of bread hinders our appreciation of its greatness and its meaning to us.
This prayer implies, also, that all the bread of the world is God’s. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” The bread belongs to him, and what we need can become ours only through his gift to us. We may take it and use it without asking him for it, but, if we do, we take that to which we have no right. Even if the food be on our table, ready to be eaten, it is not yet ours until we have asked God for it. Those who pray not, nor even think of God, seem to be fed, as well as the righteous, — sometimes more bountifully. God “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.” But there is a difference. Those who ask God for their bread get it as his gift and with his blessing upon it, while those who take it without asking for it, get it, and may be fed, but they miss the blessing of God that maketh rich, that giveth value to anything we have. This suggests the true meaning and the fitness of the Christian custom — is it waning now? — of asking a blessing or “saying grace” before a meal.
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