The Rhythm of Reliance: A Three-Way Devotion
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There is something remarkably dependable about a three-legged stool.
It is simple, balanced, and surprisingly sturdy. With all three legs firmly in place, it can bear a considerable amount of weight. Remove one leg, however, and its usefulness comes to an abrupt end. There is no negotiating with gravity. Two legs and optimism will not get the job done.
Missing pieces is a concept I am quite familiar with. Most of my formative years were spent moving every three years. My dad was in the U.S. Army, so he would get new orders about every three years, which would mean the life we had just started to create somewhere had to be left behind for the anticipation of a new one.
I had to say goodby to friends.
Goodbye to our house or apartment.
Goodby to town we live in.
Goodbye sometimes to my stuff because those government-contracted moving companies would magically “lose” some of my stuff. One time they “lost” my gaming system and games.
I still miss that Atari 2600!
Be that as it may, I’m not saying that some missing toys made me feel unbalanced. I’m talking about friends, schools, homes, etc. History.
A shared history.
There is something about staying in the same place for a while and developing a shared history with a group of people and a place. You develop stability. When you move a lot, you start to develop this transient way of seeing the world. You begin to miss stability and security.
Is today the day it all goes away?
Will tomorrow be the day something bad happens that shakes up my life?
I think this contributed to my desire to find faith. I needed something to hold onto that was more stable—more lasting—than what I had experienced growing up. I found Jesus! Now there is a table leg you can count on! Well, figuratively speaking, of course.
This brings us back to the sturdy little stool. I think we can find something similar in one of the most familiar lines of the Lord’s Prayer:
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
We can become so familiar with those words that we hardly notice what Jesus is actually teaching us to pray. This is more than a request that God make certain there is food in the pantry. Hidden within this simple petition is a beautiful picture of daily dependence and devotion.
In fact, I believe we can see three directions of devotion in these few words: our daily devotion to God, God’s daily devotion to us, and our daily devotion to one another.
Like the three legs of that stool, all three belong together.
Our Daily Devotion to God
The first thing that should catch our attention is the word daily.
Jesus does not teach us to pray, “Give us this year everything we are going to need.” He teaches us to come to the Father and ask for what we need today.
For Jesus’ original Jewish audience, the imagery would have been difficult to miss. It echoes Israel’s experience in the wilderness.
God told Moses: “Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day.”
—Exodus 16:4
Every morning, Israel walked outside and gathered manna—just enough for the day.
Then they had to trust God again tomorrow.
That arrangement was not evidence of God’s stinginess. Quite the opposite. God was teaching His people dependence. He could have provided warehouses full of manna. Instead, He taught them to wake each morning looking to Him.
I think most of us tend to prefer warehouses—at least I do!
We like full bank accounts, full refrigerators, predictable schedules, healthy bodies, secure jobs, and detailed plans extending comfortably into the foreseeable future. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. Wisdom prepares for tomorrow.
But faith recognizes that even the best preparation cannot eliminate our dependence upon God.
Perhaps that is one reason Jesus teaches us to pray for daily bread. Daily dependence keeps bringing us back into the presence of our Father.
Jesus later says in the same chapter: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
—Matthew 6:33
Christian devotion is not meant to consist merely of occasional spiritual emergencies. Prayer should not become the theological equivalent of breaking the glass and pulling the alarm.
We come to Him every day because we need Him every day.
But something wonderful happens when we begin doing that.
We discover that the God we approach each morning is not a reluctant provider whom we must persuade to care about us. We discover a Father who is already devoted to His children.
““Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?””
God’s Daily Devotion to Us
The second leg is easy to affirm theologically and sometimes considerably harder to trust personally:
God cares for us.
Jesus does not present the Father as distant, distracted, or irritated by our needs. Throughout Matthew 6, He presents Him as intimately aware of them.
Jesus points His disciples toward the sky: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
—Matthew 6:26
Birds do not spend much time developing five-year financial plans. Yet every morning creation continues to testify to the sustaining care of God.
Jesus’ point is not that Christians will never experience hardship, hunger, sickness, loss, or uncertainty. Scripture plainly tells us otherwise.
His point is that none of those things mean that our Father has stopped caring for us.
That changes the way we carry anxiety.
Paul writes: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
—Philippians 4:6–7
I am particularly struck by those two words: with thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving remembers.
When I thank God while bringing Him today’s need, I am deliberately remembering yesterday’s faithfulness. I am reminding my anxious heart that the God holding tomorrow is the same God who carried me through yesterday.
The promise is not that every request will be answered according to my preferred timetable or specifications.
The promise is peace.
And not merely the sort of peace that comes when circumstances finally make sense. Paul describes a peace that surpasses understanding—the peculiar peace of knowing that even when I cannot see what God is doing, I know the character of the One to whom I have entrusted myself.
But there is still one more leg to our stool.
And this one is surprisingly easy to overlook.
Our Daily Devotion to Each Other
Let’s look at Matthew 6:11 again carefully: “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Jesus did not teach us to pray, “Give me today my daily bread.”
The Lord’s Prayer is filled with plural pronouns.
Our Father.
Give us.
Our bread.
Forgive us.
Lead us.
Deliver us.
Apparently, Jesus never envisioned Christianity as merely a private arrangement between an individual believer and God.
The Father’s provision moves vertically into our lives and then horizontally through our lives into the lives of others.
That is precisely what we see happening in the earliest Christian community: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”
—Acts 2:42
A few verses later Luke tells us that this was happening “day by day” as believers gathered together, shared meals, opened their homes, worshiped God, and cared for one another.
Their Christianity had a decidedly we-shaped quality.
Paul expresses the same principle very simply: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
—Galatians 6:2
Sometimes God answers our prayer for daily bread by providing exactly what we need.
And sometimes He puts extra bread in our hands because someone else has been praying.
That “bread” may be literal food. It may be money. It may be encouragement, hospitality, wisdom, a ride to an appointment, help repairing something, sitting beside someone in a hospital room, listening to someone whose world has just fallen apart, or simply noticing the person everyone else overlooked.
God’s provision was never intended to terminate with us.
Grace has a tendency to overflow.
How Stable Is Your Stool?
So perhaps “Give us this day our daily bread” contains considerably more than we first imagined.
It calls us into a three-way daily devotion.
We live in daily devotion to God, bringing Him our needs and acknowledging our dependence upon Him.
We rest in God’s daily devotion to us, trusting the faithful care of our Father rather than surrendering ourselves to anxiety.
We live in daily devotion to one another, remembering that Jesus taught us to pray for our bread, not merely mine.
Which brings us back to that three-legged stool.
Take an honest look at your spiritual life. Is one of the legs wobbling?
Perhaps you love God, but prayer has slowly become a crisis hotline rather than a daily relationship. Then tomorrow morning, simply show up. Ask your Father for your daily bread.
Perhaps you pray faithfully but still carry tomorrow around on your shoulders. Bring that specific worry to God—with thanksgiving. Remember His faithfulness and entrust tomorrow to Him again.
Or perhaps your Christianity has quietly become you and Jesus, while the us and our of Christian community have faded into the background. Look around. Someone near you is carrying a burden. Ask God whether He has already placed something in your hands that could lighten it.
Three legs.
Our devotion to God.
God’s devotion to us.
Our devotion to each other.
That is a remarkably sturdy place to sit.
And tomorrow morning, when we need bread again, our Father will still be there.
The Midweek Table is a weekly blog made available by The Local to help us continue to press into Jesus and His mission for our lives. It may be a recap of the discussion from the previous week’s Local table gathering. It may be thoughts to ponder and things to help us grow in our walk with Jesus.
Each week, The Local meets in various homes around a table to eat, worship, read and discuss the Bible, and pray for each other and our community. Living on mission is our response to the grace and love Jesus has shown us. We share the Gospel and show love to those we encounter where we live, learn, work, and play.
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