Nothing to say, yet
Transcription
The speaker begins with a prayer, thanking God for the opportunity to study and learn from the Lord's Prayer. They introduce themselves as Daniel Sharpless and explain that they will be discussing the phrase "give us this day our daily bread" in the Lord's Prayer. They mention the sources they have been using for their study, including books by J.I. Packer and Dr. Albert Moeller. The speaker briefly recaps the previous phrases they have studied, emphasizing that the focus of the prayer is on God. They explain that after acknowledging God's lordship, the next step is to request for the things needed to live according to that commitment. The phrase "give us this day our daily bread" is then examined, with the speaker discussing the implications of the word "give" and the dependency of humans on God for sustenance. They provide examples to illustrate this dependence and quote Packer and Moeller to support their points. The speaker concludes that humans have never been and will never be se The last few folks trickle in and find our seats, we'll go ahead and get started. So let's begin with a quick word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this morning that you've given us to focus on the Lord's Prayer and learn as much as we can from it. We thank you for this series where we're able to look into how Jesus taught us to pray and take lessons and applications from that into our own prayer lives. We pray that you would help us to be studious, to pay attention to the teaching and the preaching of your word this morning, and to worship you in spirit and in truth. I pray that you would help me to teach clearly and truly, in Jesus' name we pray, amen. So good morning, and for anybody who does not know, I'm Daniel Sharpless, and I'm very happy to be talking with you this morning about the Lord's Prayer. We've been going through and looking at each phrase in the Lord's Prayer and just talking about each phrase, what it means, unpacking it, and taking a look at some of the implications that we don't often think about. It's been a good series so far, and I'm very pleased to be looking at the phrase, give us this day our daily bread. So before we just get right into it, I do want to quickly acknowledge just the sources that we've been looking at, I've been looking at for this series. The first is Praying the Lord's Prayer by J.I. Packer. The second is The Prayer That Turns the World Upside Down by Dr. Albert Moeller, and all the scripture quotations, of course, are from the ESV. Those are two great books, they're very short and accessible for anybody who does want to take a look through them. I highly recommend both. So just to give you an idea of what we'll be looking at today and how we'll be breaking it down, we'll just do a quick introduction, kind of recap where we are in the Lord's Prayer thus far, take a look at what we've studied thus far, and very, very briefly. And then we'll just go through word by word. I'm going to break it down, not exactly in order, but you'll see there's a rhyme and reason to it. And we'll take a look at a final example from the Bible, from the Old Testament, and we'll just close with some closing thoughts after that. So thus far, we've seen this portion of the Lord's Prayer, we've looked at, on three Sundays, we've looked at Our Father in Heaven, we've looked at the phrase, Hallowed be your name, and your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In the first phrase, we see a few things, and again, this is just a high-level summary, of course, I'm not covering everything that was covered, but we see God's relationship to us. He is our Father. Jesus calls Him our Father. We see that He is transcendent, that is to say, He is above everything, ordering everything. He is omnipotent. By referring to Him as in heaven, we see His transcendence and His omnipotence in reference there. We look at the second phrase, Hallowed be your name, so we see Jesus ascribing glory to God. He's calling out His character and His being as worthy of our worship. In the third phrase, we've seen, of course, by petitioning for God's kingdom to come here on earth as it is in heaven, we are declaring that God is king. We're affirming that God is king. And of course, we acknowledge His sovereign lordship, and we pray that our wills will be in alignment with His, and that His will will extend over the whole earth. So if I'd ask you, based on what we've looked at thus far, what's the focus, and it's not a trick question, what is the focus of the prayer thus far? God. Yes, God. It's God. Everybody's right. So that's intentional. As we look at this prayer, of course, the primary, the first focus is God. It's not on ourselves. It's not on what we need. It's firstly acknowledging God's lordship and all the things that we've talked about thus far. So now what? What do we do with that? To quote Packer, those who truly pray the first three petitions, thereby, or in other words, in so doing, in so praying those first three petitions, we commit ourselves to live holy for God. And so, after we've prayed those phrases, the natural and logical next step is to request for the things that we need in order to be able to live by that commitment. And we should note here, of course, looking at that phrase, give us this day our daily bread, that our needs are physical, and we'll touch more on that and unpack those implications later. But for now, we will turn our attention to what it looks like to model our petitions to God for all of our needs on Christ's example of prayer in the Lord's prayer. So looking at the first word, we'll start with just the word give and unpack what it means for the first word of this petition to be give. So what does it imply? And from our perspective as Christians, some of these answers, I admit, should be and usually are a little bit obvious. But even just before we unpack it more, we can think of this word give, and it implies two things. One, that there's a giver, and two, that there's a recipient. I think it's pretty obvious which place we're in and which place God is in. But so to examine kind of what we mean when we say give, or what we should mean when we say give, let's ask some questions. Can any person in this world sustain himself or herself? As Christians, we know the answer is obviously no. We rely on God for everything, and we'll see that more as we go through this lesson. But what about from the perspective of a non-Christian? I think that it's safe to say that a lot of people out there just kind of think, yeah, I go about my daily life. I do my job. I get paid. I buy my groceries. I pay for my housing. And it seems pretty well to me like I am in control of my life. At least at this point in my life, I'm pretty self-sustaining. But the answer is still a pretty clear no if you just take even a step back, even from the perspective of a non-Christian. So just from birth, take a look at where you were at birth. All you have to do is go back to your birth or any person's birth and see that you're totally dependent, totally dependent upon someone else. Even if you don't think it's God, you're dependent at least on some other person for your needs. So you're reliant on your mother to feed you, clothe you, protect you. Today, we have medical interventions like infant formula. So you might not actually need mother's milk in order to survive, but guess what? Someone has to manufacture that. Someone has to distribute it to you. Someone has to buy it. Someone has to feed it to you. You can't just, as a baby, go out and get yourself and feed yourself infant formula. That's going way down a rabbit hole, but I think you can see the point. Throughout life, yeah, we have a job, we have income, but we are reliant upon an endless supply chain, if you will, of stuff and things and money in order to get the things that we need. And most of us, Lord willing, if we live to a ripe old age, we'll rely on the care of others as we age and approach closer to death. I would say even the most rugged mountain man, you picture Bear Grylls kind of person living in Alaska, is dependent upon the times and the seasons for the fish to come upstream and he expects them to be there right where they are so he can catch them and eat them. And we expect for those things to happen because there's a pattern to them, but what if they didn't? He would be, and is, even though he doesn't realize it, totally dependent upon God for his provision. So to give a couple of quotes, Packer says, we live in an age in which we assume nature to be self-sustaining. I thought about this a little bit as I was studying, and I realized, you know, if you think about, like, the corn on the cob that you get during the summer, as you eat that corn on the cob, you think, I know I don't, you think about where that corn came from, the fact that a farmer had to grow it, the fact that a distributor had to bring it to your grocery store, and you had to go buy it, and all those fun things. But it's easy. We just think, ah, well, every summer I have corn on the cob, and I don't really think about how God comes into that particular equation. But if you just keep following that line of logic, it's very easy to see how Packer is exactly right. We go through the motions of life. We live in an age in which a lot of processes have been streamlined and made possible that weren't possible before, like mass distribution of food to all different parts of the world. We can get tropical fruits in places that are far from tropical, all that kind of thing. So we just, we get to the point where we assume nature is self-sustaining, it just perpetuates in this endless cycle, and then we, guess what, have problems with this idea that God is real and that he's the one ordering and sustaining all the things that we count on on a day-in and day-out basis. Albert Muller says Jesus's shift here in the prayer, that is his shift from focusing on God to focusing now on our needs, serves as a clear and unmistakable reminder that we are merely creatures, which is to say we are created beings. God is the creator. We are needy, and God is the provider. What about taking a step back even further? What about before the fall? Was man dependent before the fall? Absolutely. Absolutely, man was dependent before the fall. I mean, yes, we look at the fact that God created man, and a man's existence is dependent upon God. But even after that, even after man was created, it was Adam and Eve who were expected to do the work of tilling the ground and keeping it, but it was God who gave the growth. And that, like many other things, did not change with the fall. We were still dependent. We were still dependent as a species, as mankind, before the fall. So the answer is still no. We've never been, we never are, we never will be totally self-sufficient. It's a good baseline for understanding where we are at this point in the prayer. Dr. Muller says sin did not create our dependence. We are dependent simply because we are creatures. That's a really good way to put it. Rather, in the fall, we moved, mankind moved, from abundance and ease to scarcity and toil. God still provides, but his provision is not exactly the same, it's not identical to how it was before. And that's a result of sin. Dr. Muller goes on to say, after the fall, we become even more dependent upon God for our daily sustenance. We are no longer merely creatures in need of provision, we are also sinners in need of the Creator's mercy. And that's very, very true. So that moves us from part one, of looking at this word give, and the implications of what we mean when we say give, to what I call part two, the giver, our generous Father. So we've already seen Jesus referred to God as Father, right? Seeing our dependence clearly should bring us to our knees in humility. If we have an honest look at where we are, the state of our need, the total state of our need, the unconditional state of our need, it should bring us to our knees in humility. But the beautiful part of this, God does not leave us there on our knees. So how does Jesus begin his prayer? I've already touched on this. He begins it with the phrase, our Father. So, as is wise, we use scripture to interpret scripture. What does scripture have to say elsewhere about fathers? Matthew 7 says, if you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him? So this is an example of arguing from the lesser to the greater. You know, Jesus says if even, he goes out right and says evil, if even an evil father here on earth knows how to give good gifts to his children, to provide for his children, how much more will our Father in heaven, who is perfectly good, provide for us all that we need? You know, he also says if a child asked for a stone, he wouldn't give bread. If a child asked for fish, another common staple, the father would not give a serpent. The bottom line is that we are creatures, we are in need of provision and God is our creator and father and he is willing to provide. It profits us a lot just to think about how needy we are and how richly God gives to us in order to meet our needs. So we look at give, now let's move on to the pronouns. So we see, give us this day our daily bread. So we're going to take a look at the words us and our, what that means for our study of this phrase. So what do these pronouns imply? You might guess from my little subtitle here. The petition is for the needs of the church collectively and not merely, not just our individual needs. In our very hyper-individualistic age, I don't think that's any secret, it's very easy for us to get in a rut of praying something like, God please help me to have enough money to pay the rent this month. Please help me to land a better job so that I can stop living paycheck to paycheck. Many many other examples of prayers like that, but that's not how Jesus teaches us to pray. Our prayers should be ordered in the same way that Jesus orders his prayer, of course he commands us to do that. And so primarily our prayer for provision should be for the prayers of the whole body, of the church, ourselves, individually included, but the prayers of the whole church. Does that mean that those examples that I gave about praying for a better income, better job, are they axiomatically wrong? In other words, are they wrong because Jesus says that we should pray, give us this day our daily bread? No, that's not the implication. However, I would say that those kind of prayers are part or evidence of a trend that is not towards what Jesus is teaching. His intentions were clear when he said, pray like this, as a command, give us this day our daily bread. And if we cease, if we stop praying for the whole body of Christ collectively, and focus exclusively on our own individual needs, then we're not praying as Christ would have us pray. So we have to first chiefly pray as Christ taught us to pray, and then pray for individual needs, things like that. That should give us pause. It should cause us to reflect and examine, what does our own prayer life look like? Am I focusing entirely on my laundry list of needs? Which again is not to say that that is axiomatically wrong, but our focus should be where Jesus would have it be. It should spur us on to better prayer, which is to say, it should spur us on to prayer that is modeled after Jesus' prayer. So again, what does Scripture have to say? Here's an example from Scripture of the sort of communal scope that we're talking about. And I'll caveat this before I even read it by saying that, of course, some people look to this text in Acts chapter 2 and think, ah, well, this is evidence that we should have a communist worldview. And that's not what I'm trying to imply. I do think that this is different, this is not the same as the world that we live in today, but it should serve as a helpful example for us. Acts chapter 2 says, and all who believed were together, they had all things in common, they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, there's a focus on bread, they received their food, their physical provision, with glad and generous hearts, praising God. One of the standout examples of this communal scope is, of course, this example in the early church in the book of Acts. Notice that we focus on a few things, their togetherness, the way that specifically their physical needs were met, that's important, that it was noted specifically that their physical needs were met and not just their spiritual needs, and their collective response. Their collective response and the way that they praise God in response to their provision is helpful for us as an example. We can also think of the way that Paul addresses his audiences in many of his epistles. So it's not uniform, of course, but he often writes in the first person plural, we, as in we pray for you daily, and he uses the third person, excuse me, the second person plural too. So when he says you, he means y'all. I'm a big fan of that word, by the way. And if he does switch from we to I, there's usually a specific reason, like he's addressing a person in particular, like Timothy, or expressing his personal feelings, because he knows that the church is a body, and just like we see in here in Acts, he's addressing the church as such. Although it's composed of many individual members, just like we all are, the whole is more important than each individual part. So we should strive to order our prayers in the way that Jesus did. Oops, I'm sorry, I went backwards. So having landed here, we've seen now the give and the emphasis on the pronouns, us and our, so we see, hopefully we've seen thus far, our dependence, our need, our collective nature of our need, so now we can focus on this day and daily. The temporal scope of Jesus's petition, so we're looking at what it means in time, what it means for us in terms of when he commands these things. So how should we respond? That is to say, if Jesus commands us to pray like this, how should we respond when he says give us this day our daily bread? The use of these phrases, this day and daily, they show us something about when. That's helpful, that actually is really helpful, because he didn't have to tell us when exactly to pray, but he does. We should recognize that we ought to entreat God daily for our needs. In other words, we shouldn't come to God with a request like, please give me what I need for this year, and I'll see you in 2025, amen. If we do not approach God daily, conscious of our need, we tend, just like we tend to think that nature is self-sustaining, we tend to think or drift away in thought from our need. We fall into the trap of the materialist, the atheist, who thinks that pretty much everything is self-sustaining, what we see is here, and it appears that there's some order, but if there is, then it's random, and it seems like it's going to keep going on like this, and I don't need to acknowledge anyone for it, or thank anyone for it. So think about that. There's some implications for this. Do I, when I pray, do I only approach God when things go wrong, or when I have a particular need? Am I only praying, for instance, when I have a loved one who is sick? Am I only praying when I have a big exam tomorrow? Things like that. If we're only approaching God on an as-needed basis, rather than daily, for everything that we need, we're not recognizing the scope of our own need, we're not recognizing God's provision for all things, and we're treating God like a fire hose. We want to put out a fire with prayer, and then move on, and then we don't think about it until there's another fire. And that's not how we should pray. That's, again, Jesus says, pray like this, and if we're not praying like that, then we're not following what Jesus commands. Excuse me, I'm going backwards again. But wait, you might say, why daily? Why this frequency? Why not another frequency? Why not, like, give us this week our weekly bread, or give us this hour our hourly bread? In fact, why does God command us, why does Jesus command us to pray at all? There are two excellent answers to this question, and the first is because He said so. He says pray like this, we should pray like this. But beautifully, mercifully, He said so because He knows what's best for us. We can trust that if He says to pray and to treat Him daily, there's a reason for that. I would surmise, and I think I'm pretty, I think it's pretty intuitive here, you know, are we dependent upon God every second, every millisecond? You could keep subdividing seconds down to the millionth and billionth of a second. Are we dependent on God for our very existence? If He were to stop upholding the universe for a millisecond, what would happen? We would be obliterated. We are dependent on as frequent of a basis as you can imagine. Is it within our power to pray on a millisecond or second basis? No, it's not. I'm reminded of the hymn, Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven. There's a line, well our feeble frame He knows. He does know this kind of frequency, daily approaching Him in prayer. It is frequent enough to place our minds, place our focus where they should be without being a burden to us. He could very well have commanded, give us this hour, our hourly bread. Is it within our power to pray hourly for our hourly bread? Absolutely. It would be inconvenient when, you know, you're overnight and you're sleeping and all that, but possible, yes, but that would be burdensome and mercifully, gracefully, God does not command us things that are burdensome. None of His commands are burdensome. All are intended to bring us good. Matthew 6, 34 says, do not be anxious about tomorrow, which is not to say that we should be anxious in the sense of nervous or fretting about today, but we can use today to think about and pray about the needs of today. Psalm 104, speaking about all of God's creatures, everything that He's created, says, these all look to you to give them their food in due season. So we see a seasonality. There's an appropriateness and timing and frequency to the ordering of the universe just as there is an ordering and frequency and appropriateness to the ordering of our prayer life. So now we can move on to the last word, bread, which speaks about the physical scope of Jesus' petition. So you may have sensed a pattern here. We sense our need. We sense God's provision. We have observed the commands to look to Him daily. We understand the logic and the reasoning and the grace behind that, but bread? Really? Not like money? Not anything else that could have been in place of bread? Yeah, really. He really did mean bread, and He means it, as we already understand, in both a literal sense and a figurative sense. So literally, bread as that which sustains us, you know, it's been bread for the longest time throughout human history. That's sort of the staple food, keeps people alive, healthy, and well. Not exclusively, but it literally does mean bread, at least in a literal or almost literal sense. But also figuratively, as anything, that which meets all of our material needs, because we do need other things in order to survive beyond just bread. We do need a roof over our heads. We need clothes. We need money in order to provide all of those things. So bread here does serve as a stand-in for all of the things that we need, all the things that we count on from God on a day-to-day basis. So here's a helpful point. God does not deem our physical needs as undignified. They're not below Him. They're not unworthy of His attention. You know, I think maybe not all of us, but some of us certainly are inclined to think, well, I need to grow in grace, but God doesn't really care about what I eat for dinner tomorrow. That's not true. And if you really follow that line of logic all the way to its end, you will be a Gnostic, which we talked about in sermons past, and the theology of the New Testament actually does spend some time refuting the theology and the ideas of the Gnostics. In fact, God knows our limitations, our weaknesses, and our needs. He created us with them. He created us with those limitations and those needs. And in fact, beyond that, He created us to be dependent on Him, to know the richness of His provision. That's one of the things that we get to experience by His grace, to know His provision and the richness of it. So likewise, we must not also therefore deem our own needs, our physical needs, the minutia, the day-to-day needs of our lives, as unimportant, because God doesn't either. This logic refutes what the Gnostics would have taught, which is that there's a division between the body and the soul. There's a division between the physical and the spiritual, and the physical is not good. We should put it off, deprive it in order that the spiritual might be furthered, because that's what's important. That's what is good. Their teaching would have emphasized asceticism, that is denying yourself things like food, and that's contrary to the teaching of Scripture. Clearly refuted, even in just these words, give us this day our daily bread. Dr. Muller says, our lives are not divided between spiritual activities and earthly activities, but rather, every activity must be lived for the glory of God. So once again, we can look to Scripture, and what does Scripture have to say about that? Romans 12, 1 says, I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies, physical bodies, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual act of worship. Isn't that interesting, to think about our bodies being tied together, wrapped up in identity with our spirits, and what we do with our bodies being a spiritual act of worship? When we obey Paul's command regarding the right use of our bodies, this is indeed spiritual worship. That's something that we may not ever fully understand in this life, but important. But wait, there's more. By the same logic, on the same topic, you remember my question about the word bread. Did Jesus really just mean bread? The answer was yes, in both a literal sense and a figurative sense, and guess what, the answer is also no. What else does the Bible have to say about bread? What does Jesus say about himself? Bible says in Deuteronomy, and Jesus quotes it later, man does not live by bread alone. So there is a spiritual aspect to, even when we think about bread, and our daily provisions, our daily needs. Man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. And Jesus later says in John, I am the bread of life. We can take that logic there and see the connection. So we must, just as we rely upon God's provision for our food and our physical needs, we also rely upon God's provision for all of our spiritual needs and our spiritual food. And using that same analogy, we feed on his word, which is what in Deuteronomy he calls food. We feed on it daily, and it sustains our spiritual lives just like physical food sustains our bodies. As we pray for our daily bread, we should be reminded of our daily need for Christ to forgive our sins and empower us for obedience. So yes, there is indeed a very poignant, powerful, spiritual dimension to this petition, give us this day our daily bread. It is indeed all-encompassing. So the last example that I want to talk through and unpack, if you think back through the Bible, there's many instances, many examples of God's provision, and in some cases, miraculous provision, in many cases, miraculous provision for his people. And there's one in particular that stands out to many people, myself included, and the authors of these books included, and that is the example of the Exodus, God providing manna and later quail for his people to meet their physical needs. So let's take a brief look at this and think about how we can apply it to our personal lives and tease out some of the implications of this particular example. We all know the story of God giving the Israelites manna in the morning, quail in the evening, while they were wandering in the desert. There are no abundant natural resources for such a vast number of people, and so it was truly a miraculous provision. However, if you think that this means that there are no touchpoints, implications, or applications that we can make to our own lives, then I'm happy to tell you that you're wrong. So let's ask and then answer some questions to help us tease out those implications. Was there enough food for everyone? What does the Bible tell us there? Yes, there was. In fact, each family had not just enough, but exactly enough. The Bible says whoever gathered much had none left over, whoever gathered little had no lack. How often did God provide this food? Daily, that's right, except on the Sabbath. It's important to note, it's actually very important to note. God provided daily, but not on the Sabbath, and what did he do on the day before the Sabbath? He provided extra so that God's people would be provided for on the Sabbath and not have to work. In other words, God provided not only for their physical needs, but he also provided means by which they could obey his command, and we already looked at the fact that God's commands are for our good, none of them are burdensome, rightly followed, none of them are burdensome, all of them are for our good, so that had important implications for the people of Israel, just as it has important implications for us. Did people still manage not to trust God? Why, yes, they did. Those who gathered more than they needed saw their hoard go to spoil. We should take very careful note of why they gathered more, because it's really tempting to look at them and say, well, they were just trying to make sure that they would have enough, you know, that maybe in a bad day or a thunderstorm, I don't know, something like that, they just wanted to make sure that there would be provision for their families in the event of some kind of unforeseen disaster, but the problem is they were disobeying God. They were hedging their bets, so to speak, in case God didn't actually keep his promise, and we saw that before the exodus, and we continue to see that after the exodus. When people don't trust God to keep his promises, bad things happen. Bad things inevitably happen. This is different, I would point out, from being good stewards of what God has given us, so it does not mean that having a savings account is a bad thing. Being a good steward is not the same as disobeying God's commands. I think that's the clearest way to say that. So what can we learn by looking at, asking these questions, and answering these questions? There's a few things. Number one, God's provision is perfectly sufficient. It's neither too little to really fill us, nor is it too great so as to be wasted. It is indeed perfectly sufficient. Number two, God's provision is not just sufficient in general, but it is sufficient in particular with regard to the Sabbath. That's important for us to note. He gives us what we need so that we can order our lives around his day of rest. It's not always perfectly easy, but it is nonetheless good. Again, God's command is being good for us. His command to observe rest on the Sabbath is also a good command. To put it differently, he provides us, just as he provided the Israelites, the means in terms of physical provision to fulfill his commands regarding resting on the Sabbath. And finally, number three, God's provision leaves no room for us to be greedy, that is to say, hoping to keep more than God would portion for us, and it also leaves no room for us to be lazy, hoping to simply, so to speak, let God put the food on our plates and bring the spoon to our mouths. That is not how God orders the world. That's not how we are to respond when we ask, give us this day our daily bread. We're not to simply sit around with our mouths open waiting to be fed, literally or figuratively. Just as Israel was expected to gather in God's provision of manna and quail, so we are expected to gather in God's physical provision for our own lives through the work that God has given each of us to do on a daily basis. So at the risk of taking the record for fastest Sunday school from Ryan last week, to ask it another way, how shall we then live? Where does that leave us? It leaves us aware of our need, hopefully more aware of our need, fastidious in prayer, that is to say daily in prayer, approaching the mercy seat daily to ask God for his abundant provision, his rich provision, and having asked, trusting that he will provide as he promises that he will. I think there's a, Albert Muller puts it really beautifully when he says, if we were to look back on our lives, at the end of our lives, as if from God's perspective, we would see that God's provision was perfectly sufficient each and every day. For our needs at the time, it was neither too little nor too much, it was not inappropriate, it was never something that we didn't need, it was always exactly what we needed. So knowing that, if we know that we will one day be able to look back with that perspective, it should affect how we live today. We should be able to, even from our limited vantage point today, we should be able to trust God, having asked for his provision, trust him to provide it. Another implication of that is that when God withholds something, that he withholds it for a good reason. His provision is perfect, all that he gives is what we need, all that he withholds is specifically and exactly what we do not need. That's not easy, not easy to trust him in that, to that extent, nevertheless it is what we're called to do. Questions? Great question. Yeah? You started out talking about the sort of group idea of plural pronouns, but then at the end you went to use plural pronouns to individualize the instruction, and I'm wondering where and why that came from. The reason behind it is perhaps part of the problem of the church is what I call the narcissism of modern faith, where we're looking at the individual as opposed to the provision for the church. Maybe we're just a bunch of cells that can die off without affecting, in fact we need to die off in order for the larger organism to be healthy, where we focus all of, this is all about me, I need to be fed so that I can produce, well that's true, but the focus is on the body, not on the individual within the body. I'm just curious why you made that transition, because I was tracking very well at the beginning Sure. So you're saying I switched from plural to singular? Yeah. You know, I don't disagree with your point, and if I did it was probably unconscious, and I blame it on the system. No. Honestly. No, there is, as I mentioned, there is the sense in which we must pray like Jesus prayed and pray for the needs of the body, and you're exactly right, and that's exactly why I included that section. There is also a sense in which we must recognize that God does provide for individual members of the body. You know, the provision is chiefly on a collective basis, but it's also individual, and Sure, I guess where I come a little bit after this is when you said, when we look back on our life, we can see where God is perfectly provided for. I don't think that's true. Lots of people die very young and very young, and I don't think that's God's provision. So are you saying that God gave someone something that they didn't need? I said we don't understand why God does what God does, but maybe it's understandable in the collective. So I'm not trying to lead you to an answer, because I don't have an answer, but there's a lot of weird things going on in Christendom that I just don't understand. So I'm looking for a new model to understand those weird things. Yeah, no, and I'm not going to pretend that I have the time or have the forethought right now to really fully tease out all that I feel like I would want to say about that, but looking at specifically Romans 8, we do see that maybe the caveat that I should have made is that for those who love God, which is to say true Christians, His provision is perfectly sufficient, because the Bible tells us it is. Does that mean that if a Christian dies young of some horrible disease that God didn't provide, I don't think you can biblically say, yeah, God didn't provide. And I am going to stick with what I said about if we could look back, if each Christian, each person who truly loves God could, I'm not saying that we can or will even, I'm just saying that if we could see from God's vantage point and look back over the course of our lives as Christians, we would see God's provision as being sufficient, sufficient for our spiritual needs, and particularly sufficient for His glory, which is our chief end. And if a non-Christian could look back over the course of his or her life, he would say, I got the fruit, that I sowed sin and I reaped disaster and death. And that too is sufficient for God's glory, because His justice will be executed. And that's not really easy for us to think about sometimes, but it's nonetheless true. Anybody else want to add anything? Go ahead. Absolutely. Okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you for eloquently putting what I summarized. I appreciate it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
