Give Us This Day
Taken from The Lord and His Prayer
Description
Give Us This Day
CHAPTER THREE
The danger with the prayer for bread is that we get there too soon.
We come to prayer, aware of urgent needs, or at least wants. It’s tempting to race through the Lord’s Prayer, as far as ‘on earth as it is in heaven’, so that we can then take a deep breath and say, ‘Now look here: when it comes to daily bread, there are some things I simply must have.’ And then off we go into a shopping list. To do this, of course, is to let greed get in the way of grace.
When that happens, greed defeats its own object. If we don’t spend time adoring our Father in heaven, seeking the honour of his name, and praying for his kingdom, all our own desires and hopes will simply present themselves to us in a muddled and jumbled fashion, coming bubbling up to the surface in what C. S. Lewis, contemptuous of the later writings of James Joyce, called ‘steam of consciousness’...
Taken from The Lord and His Prayer by Tom Wright