Monday, February 5, 2018

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread.

Just as we need daily physical sustenance, the need for daily spiritual sustenance is just as strong. For the Children of Israel, manna was a daily reminder of the source of their blessings; today, we can remember Jesus Christ every day as we pray, read the scriptures, and meditate.

Jesus Christ gave a pattern for prayer that has become known as the Lord's Prayer. The same is recorded in Matthew as part of the Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew 6:9–13). Included in the Lord's Prayer is the petition “Give us this day our daily bread".

Jesus Christ is the bread of eternal life. By following Him, remembering Him, and having faith in Him we can change and become what we aspire to become.



Text from the video: (Voice of Elder D. Todd Christofferson) I think it's not by chance God has created us in a way that we have to have daily physical sustenance. The Children of Israel coming out of Egypt lived for forty years, approximately, on something called manna. They couldn't have lived from hunting, and their lifestyle was such that they couldn't be planting, so they really didn't have an alternative. God was in essence providing their daily sustenance. And I think at least one of His purposes was to teach them to remember Him, to think of Him, to look to Him, to have faith in Him, that He was the source of their life. He did in the way of making it a daily thing; they couldn't gather up manna and store it, it would only be good for one day. They couldn't forget who was the source their blessings. There's a spiritual parallel in our day. We all recognize the need for physical sustenance; hunger and thirst remind us very strongly if we forget. But the spiritual need for sustenance is equally strong, that comes not in drinking water and eating food but in our constant daily efforts of communion with God. We ought not to think that we can go weeks and months without spiritual sustenance and not suffer, and not have a deadening influence in our spiritual life. Acknowledging the reality of our need for a daily spiritual ministration, or manna, helps us increase in our courage to do the right thing, and to serve others, more than we would have if we ignored God. People sometimes think ""Well, those are such small things; prayer, immersing ourselves in the scriptures, pondering, meditating; how can that really produce a significant difference in a person's life?"" But it does. As small as those things seem to be, as daily, routine sometimes they may seem to be, these are the kinds of things that day by day, transform us.