S7E38 Daily Bread For Daily Need - Matthew 6:11

Have you ever wondered why Jesus says, give us this day our daily bread? Today we're gonna talk about a hard to translate word that unlocks the passage in a way you've never seen it before. You wanna stick to the end because we're gonna talk about a story from George Mueller which is always mind-blowing when you hear it, but applicable to everyday life. Welcome to the Forgotten Jesus Podcast. I'm your host, Adam French, here with Pastor Robby Gallaty and Candy Gallaty. We're on the eve of Easter. Yes. We got a lot of things coming up in the harbor. We got a little game we're fixing to go to in a few minutes here. And we've just been talking about before on the show We got a problem. We got a problem. We made Candy a button. Can you show what the button says? Okay. I have a question. That was what the button said. But it's probably been five, six, I mean, six, seven. I know, I'm a bit rude. Six or seven episodes since we heard a good question. Yeah. Maybe it's because we're explaining everything so well. You must be doing a really good job. It's so clear.

It's so clear. I feel like I'm making more statements than I am asking questions. I think we pulled the audience. She preached at Multiply Conference. And it was like she elevated her game a little bit. She did her testimony at CO. I mean, that's probably what it is. Now she needs to be leading and we need to be asking. Okay, so I got a question. Give me that thing. You don't have to ask me a word. Candygality. I'm sure more questions will come. Okay. We already sent her to Josie. That's kind of the story of my life. So. You and Josie are going to have to get your YouTube thing going. Because my channel just- Adam just launched today. Tell us about the channel so we know, yeah. The Adam French. The Adam French. And then it's thanks for the number four sharing. Thanks for sharing. And the whole idea of this is just an opportunity to speak into biblical recovery. They live, the world of recovery

lives in two different silos. You have psychology, secular where it's higher power and behavioral management, mindfulness, all these things. And then you have a lot of people that send this thing and say it's only the Bible. Yeah. The reason why you need, how are you going to overcome recovery or how are you going to overcome addiction? Just pray more. Just read your Bible more. And so I really want to have an opportunity to blend the power of scripture, biblical truths, and then how it actually connects with our emotional health, our mental health, and our brain. So the first episode is just about this whole idea that if God has all power, then why doesn't he take addiction from us? Why are we still struggling with addiction? That's a great one. So I'll talk a little bit about neuroplasticity, how addiction rewires our brain, but how God is involved in all of that. So anyways, if you want to know more about it, check us out. Well, yeah, if you know anybody struggling with addiction or you, yourself, or family member, friend, I would highly recommend that podcast. And the episodes are short, bite-sized. You can digest them.

Which is everybody in the world, by the way. Yeah, pretty much. Everybody's struggling for something. Everybody knows somebody, you know what I mean? Friend, family member, you know, it affects everybody. It's been a cool process. I mean, we were talking about that on the way in. And if you're thinking about doing something, if God's calling you to do something, you just got to do it. I was telling him, like when I finished the first one, I was like, oh, it's choppy, it sounds funny. And the funny thing is, I posted a little clip, and I had all these comments, and I was like, wow, this thing's blowing up. And they were saying, what's that noise? And I listened to it, and somehow, you could hear me eating. I was editing. I'm eating chips. And you could hear me eating chips? What? Oh my God. So I don't know how it worked. So I just started laughing. Well, I mean, I took that part out. Oh, I was dying. I was telling Joe this morning. But it's like, just go for it. And I always say this, fail forward.

Just get into it. Just go, just do it. Even this here, it didn't start out perfect. We've had all kinds of different things that we've done with Forgotten Jesus Podcast, but you just keep going forward with the Lord, and that's how he teaches. Yeah, most people suffer from analysis paralysis. They never get started. You analyze to, you can always edit. You can always make it better. Just start, yeah, that's good. Speaking of just starting, what if we start with our Sermon on the Mount section on prayer? Can we start back over with that? Scripture memory. All right, so we're starting in verse. Matthew 6, 9. We'll start in 9, Matthew 6, 9, and you'll quote through 11. Just quote the whole thing. We don't know how long we're gonna get, so. Okay, therefore you should pray like this. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one. She wanted to say it like Annabelle. She's trying to say it like Annabelle. I'm trying to say it normal. Yeah, oh gosh. So Jesus, we're gonna focus on give us this day our daily bread. And basically when Jesus said this line, give us. today, or this day, our daily bread. That resonated with the culture, why? Why was that such a big deal for them back then? Well, I would say because it's not, like, them eating was dependent on a lot of things and it was very, like, necessary. Like, it was very easy to have, like, droughts or famines and that sort of thing, and so to have just daily bread was not as easy or convenient as it is for us today. It was really something they had to depend on the Lord for. That's my answer. I was thinking just culturally, because everything they do is so connected to their religion, I was thinking about the manna, the kind of the beginning of the process with the Lord, manna come daily bread, so dependence on God, I think that's what they would first think. Or is it gonna be spiritual? Well, no, well, it's physical first. I think it's both, yeah, but I think first,

they would have heard it physically because they didn't have a subway where they could go get a footlong. I mean, they couldn't get bread at, you know, you couldn't go to Leidenheimer's French bread. You couldn't go to. Look at you pulling out. How do you like that, St. Louis? I don't even know what that is. Look at that, he's getting shouts out. That's how good po' boys make. A good shrimp po' boy, or a catfish po' boy, if you like catfish. All the East Coast, too, boy. Ooh, those po' boys are good. Okay, but they didn't have the luxury of going to a store. They didn't have the safety even of knowing they had food in the pantry. So they were dependent upon God. So bread can be physical bread, but it's also just a way to talk about dependence. Now, what they understand is, in the first century, they understood that back in the day, the people of the culture, not the Jews, but the people of the culture would pray for the gods and goddesses to give them food and provide for them. They prayed for, they had gods for everything. Well, there was a particular god in the Greco-Roman world by the name of Demeter.

Demeter was a god that they worshiped. It was an Olympian goddess, and Demeter was the god of the Greek cult of grain or bread, believe it or not. There was a goddess of bread in the first century. And they believed that this woman, this goddess, controlled fertility of the earth, not fertility of the human, but fertility of the earth. And they taught that in order to have your crops grow successfully, you had to worship her and pay homage to her and bow down to her because she was, this is crazy to think about, but this is the world, you gotta put yourself in the world they lived in, that if you want a grain or a harvest or a successful agriculture, you had to pray to her. All roads led to Demeter, okay? Now, in addition to that, so you have that, I'm gonna build a picture here in your mind. So you have that on the one hand, you're praying to the goddess Demeter. On the other hand, they knew that the Roman, the Roman world had conquered everything. And the Romans would import bread from Africa. They would import bread from Africa across the Mediterranean to Rome in order to distribute it to the people. They would import bread to about 300,000 people, which is crazy to think about, throughout the Roman Empire. You'd think it would rot, like on a ship, I mean.

Interesting, yeah, 1,700 ships circumnavigating the Mediterranean for the Roman army. So the Romans, in a sense, why is that important? So in the Greek culture, who provided bread for the people? Greek culture, it was Demeter. Who provided bread for the Romans? Or who provided bread to the Roman Empire? It was the Romans. So you see how, so they're not praying, those people are not praying to God, they're praying to a false god, and they're basically bowing down to the Romans. So when Jesus is saying, hey, listen, that's not where bread comes from. They may be a vehicle, they may be a means to an end, but you need to understand who's behind all this. God is behind all this. Now, Kandy, turn with me to John chapter 12. And Jesus is speaking to a crowd, you're gonna love this, he's speaking to a crowd who knows the Greek culture. They know the goddess Demeter, they know the Demeter cult. And they ask Jesus a question that is fascinating. Read 12 down to 1220, and then I'll tell you when to stop. John? John 1220, yeah, read this real quick. John 1220, okay, I'll pass it. John 1220. Okay, now some Greeks were among those Greeks. Greeks, who were the Greeks?

There you go. The Greeks knew the goddess. Greeks or Romans, or are they the same? No, the Greeks. Are different. They're similar in mindset, Greeks and Romans, like that Westernized, Hellenistic culture, but they're two different, yeah, but sometimes Greeks could be like a basket for all things Western, yeah, Hellenistic could be. Good question. Okay, now some Greeks were among those who went up to worship at the festival. So they came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida, in Galilee, and requested of him, sir, we want to see Jesus. Philip went and told Andrew, then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus replied to them, the hour. The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces much fruit. The one who loves his life will lose it, and the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me. Where I am, there my servant also will be. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.

Okay, so what is Jesus saying here? This is an interesting passage, but he's using a concept that they would have understood well. What is Jesus teaching here? You wanna take a stab at it? Adam, you take a stab at it. What do you think he's teaching here? They're asking a question about grain, or Jesus redirects them to a picture of grain, and he talks about a grain of wheat falling, which is how you make bread. A grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, but it must die in order to come back. What is Jesus talking about here? Well, can I have a question? You gotta press the button, you gotta press the button. Hallelujah, the world is back to normal. Back to normal. Everything is back, Chris, thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, so, but my question is at the start of the verse. It says some Greeks came and went up to worship at the festival. So are these God-fearing, believing Greeks that are coming to this festival? That's a great question. What do you think? I would assume, like why else would they be worshiping, coming up to worship? Yeah, they wouldn't be there if they're not believing.

So they'd be God-fearing. Yes, yes. Their Greek mind, it'd be like Hellenistic Jews. That'd be another way to talk about it. You ever heard him talk about it in that book, in the book of Acts, Hellenistic Jews. These are Jews from the Hellenistic world. It'd be like American Christians or, you know, in a sense like that. They just lived in that area, right? Yeah, they were influenced by that culture. So like American Christians are influenced by different things than Australian Christians or Indian Christians or, you know, Iranian Christians. We all Christians, but we have different influences, right? Whereas a Middle Eastern culture would be under the, or especially Southeast Asia, would be under the influence of pride and shame culture. You know, shame and honor. We wouldn't care. People here have no shame or, they don't care about shame or honor. They're ripping people in line all day long, no problem. But in China and that part of the world, they suffer from that or they struggle with that. Okay. So the thing Jesus is saying here is this. Jesus is saying bread doesn't come from the Roman government, obviously, but bread doesn't come from a false goddess.

There's only one person who can actually provide for sustenance of your soul. And it's the one who goes into the ground and dies and comes back to life. This is what Jesus is saying. This is why I'm gonna go to the cross and die. So that when I live, you live off of me. You are sustained by me. You are given daily bread by me. Notice when Jesus says, give me my daily bread, it's not singular. We miss this in the English. It's actually plural. Give us what? We always say, give me my daily bread. That's another thing about the prayer. Remember, the prayer is not my father who art in heaven, forgive me, it's all about me, my bread. No, it's always in the plural. Yeah, that's good. Our father, our bread. Give us our bread, the entire, why? Because God is a generous God who takes care of the community, okay? So then we get down to the word that's the hardest word to translate in the whole line. Give us this day our what? Daily. Daily bread. That's an interesting word. In fact, if I remember right,

it's not even a word that is used often. Some even think Jesus made this concept up or just this word up. Daily is this idea, we always say daily bread, like give me today's bread. But the best way to translate this is this. Give us today our bread for tomorrow. That's really what he's trying to say here. Give us today our bread for tomorrow. So what the idea here is, Jesus is keeping in mind with this kingdom mentality. Basically what he's saying is, I'm the embodiment of the kingdom today on earth, but I am tomorrow's bread that is given to you today. And basically this idea is, if that's the case, not only do you not have to worry about today's problems, you don't have to worry about what? Tomorrow's problems because I got you. Now, in a culture today where we can go to a fridge or to a gas station or to a corner store or to the new In-N-Out Burger that's about to be built in town. Anybody excited about In-N-Out, by the way, if you're in Hendersonville? Not one, but two In-N-Out burgers. Did y'all know this? There's one in Gallatin and there's one, or one in Hendersonville and one in Madison by the Rivergate Mall. Anybody knew this, by the way?

I didn't know. Right next to the Chick-fil-A. Well, my question would be, how good is In-N-Out Burger for your body? I've only eaten one time. There wasn't anything memorable for me, but who likes In-N-Out Burger, Chris? I've never had one, but. You know, it's been 20 years. I would say it's probably not healthy. We used to be out in California. We didn't take the whole crew. We gotta take the whole crew because it is gonna be special for me. I haven't been in 20 years. I'll be honest with you, Whataburger was underwhelming. I was all excited. about Whataburger, and it was, it was okay, but it was underwhelming, yeah. Speaking of bread, that's not Whataburger. We do go there after jail, though. When we go to the jail, we always go to Whataburger. Go there after jail, I think, come on, right, yeah. After we go visit the jail, yeah. Okay, so what Jesus is saying is, this is, yes, I'm taking care of your physical needs, but when he says this is tomorrow's bread today, there's a spiritual component here as well, okay? Tertullian, the early church father, Cyprian and Augustine,

anybody knows Augustine, believed that this was the invisible bread of the word of God. That's what they believed. It's not just physical, although it is, I think they understood that. Jesus is saying, I'm gonna give you the sustenance for your soul, which is way more important than your physical body, why? Because the physical body's gonna die one day, the soul will last forever. Now, how do we know this? The Bible tells us that in the wilderness, God provided the manna for the people as they wandered. Moses, did you bring us out here to die? We should go back to Egypt and build graves because you're gonna kill us. We're gonna die of starvation. And Moses appeals to God, and God says, I'm gonna give you bread for today, and then I'm gonna give you bread for two days on Friday to go through the Sabbath. When Jesus is being tempted in the wilderness by the enemy, and he's under excruciating attack, his stomach is empty, he's hungry, he's got hunger pains, and the enemy comes to him at the moment of weakness and says, if you really are, Matthew 4, if you really are who you say you are, by the way, just a sidebar here,

that's how Satan always works. He's always wanting us to prove ourself. He's always wanting us to impress. He's always wanting us to seek approval. If you really are who you say, oh, go ahead and show, go ahead and prove it to us. Go ahead and prove to us. And he says, if you're really the son of man, turn these stones into what? Into bread. That was a real temptation in Jesus' humanity, right? His humanity, he struggled. And what does Jesus do? He quotes back to him Deuteronomy. He says, man shall not live by bread alone, but by what? But by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Okay, now, if you study the passage he, or the concept he's referencing, it's the manna passage, and I want you to read this, Candy. Let's go back to Exodus 16, four, and I'll show you two insights about how bread obviously nourished their body. But I want you to listen here for how manna, or spiritual bread, nourishes our soul, and what that has to do with our Christian life. So, Candy, I want you to read 16, four, and on. Then the Lord said to Moses, I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day.

This way I will test them to see whether or not they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days. So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, this evening you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and in the morning you will see the Lord's glory because he has heard your complaints about him. Four. That's all we need. Okay, so what he's saying is God's gonna do this to show you he's gonna take care of you, basically. Okay, two insights. What does this have to do with our life today? This passage is about dependence and obedience. God is basically saying, will you trust me? Will you follow my plan or will you follow your own plan? Okay, this is right out the gate. He frees the nation and he gives them a test of obedience. Okay, here's the two insights I want you to learn. Number one is this. What did the people have to do in order to eat every day? What did they have to do? In Exodus. Right here in this passage. They had to go out and gather the food. Okay, they had to go out what? Work. Okay.

Work. They had to put work in. Each person had to gather for themselves. They had to gather. What if it was raining outside? Mom, I don't wanna go with Dad. Too bad. Too bad. You wanna eat? I'm tired. I wanna sleep in. Too bad. I want, it's hot outside, Dad. It's too humid. Nope, too bad. In the rain, in the sleet, in the cold, in the heat, every day through a sandstorm, through a windstorm, if you wanted to eat, you had to physically extend the effort and make the time to go find food. Number one. We'll come back to that in a second. Number two is the food they gathered was only good for what? That day. That day. Okay. So if they wanted, and they tried to, if they wanted to keep the manna for the next day, it had a short shelf life of less than 24 hours.

Right. I like to say it this way. There were no to-go bags at the desert dinner cafe. Right. There were no to-go bags. You can't take it home and eat it for tomorrow. What you gather is for that day. Except on the Sabbath, which God gave them too, but that was a reason. Now here's what this means. Think about, this is just totally a side note here. Okay. You gotta ask him a question. Two things, actually. Somebody came up in the line this week, this was so funny. Oh boy, here we go. And they said... You know, we wanna write a book one day, Kandi and I are gonna co-author a book, Conversations from the Line After Church. It will be a bestseller, Robert, I promise you. No one's ever told me this before. The one's in a hand-to-hand. But I just realized I did it, and I thought it was so funny. The guy said, I love how you interrupt Robbie all the time. And I was like, do I interrupt him all the time? That was my first win, first win on the podcast.

Because normally they say, people will say, Robbie interrupts me, or doesn't let me talk or something. No, I've been working on that. And I'm like, you're the first person that's ever told me that. And I'm like, do I interrupt him? But I totally just interrupted you. So I'm sorry. Thank God for the honesty of Robbie. He was like, he thought it was funny, because he said he also has ADHD, and if his wife or whoever was to interrupt him, he would totally lose his train of thought. No, Robert knows. We've got not one letter, but two letters from the same guy, I think, over time, who said, that is so rude, Robbie. Remember this, Robert? That you interrupt Candy all the time. Like, I don't even know I'm doing it. I'm just excited to talk about it. He's talking, yeah, he's hanging out. But okay, but what I was gonna say about this was, think about this. Now, I know God is obviously proving a point by the dependence factor. Like, when he rains down the bread, they're not supposed to store it up, because it's going to ruin.

But think about this. It's gonna rot in the smell. Think about just naturally how fresh this bread is. It's so fresh, and it's so pure, that if you try to store it more than 24 hours, it's going to go bad. True. You don't get better bread than that. Oh, boy, that was fresh bread, baby. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, because you know, you think about something like, the more our food, like, you have to put preservatives and additives and stuff in bread to keep it fresh today. Do you know what I'm saying? It was just like so fresh. Ain't no additives in there. Anyway, I just thought. I mean, that's right from heaven's oven, delivered to your front door. I mean, it doesn't get better than that. I mean, that was the original door dash from heaven. You know, here's what's wild about it. God door dashed it, all right. Right. The wild thing about that is, is they got to a place where they complained about it. I know. That's the first thing I was thinking is, is that how negative we can be. You know, Jesus is really starting to say,

is like, I'm the source. The Savior's the source. He's trying to show us where the blessings come from. I read an article this week. I tried to keep this really short, but it's wild about negative thoughts. They took a group of people and told them two sets. They said, hey, you're going to have a surgery. And they told one group, this has a 70% success rate. And they said, do you view this negative or positive as a good thing? They said, oh, this is great. This is a positive surgery. Then they took the other group and said, hey, this is a 30% fail rate. Same thing. What do you think? They all viewed it negatively. Then they took it a step further. They flipped it. They went back to the 70 and said, hey, we want you to know this has a 30% fail rate. And all the 70 were like, oh, no. They viewed it negatively after that. Even after they viewed it? Even after they already chose. Wow. Here's what's wild. The 30%, they come back and said, hey, this has a 70% success rate.

And they still said, not having it. Why? Because negative thoughts stick in our mind. And we literally train ourselves to think negatively about what God's giving us. It's almost like Jesus is saying, hey, listen, everything you have, let me let you know where the source came from. It didn't come from bunny bread. It came from when God dropped a little seed on the ground. So it's like, he's the source. The Savior is the source of our satisfaction. Nothing's gonna satisfy my soul. I'm gonna keep my spirit, or my flesh, wants one thing, more, more, more. That's good. And the world really trains our mind to put that on repeat. I talk about that a little bit in the pocket and the YouTube thing. It rewires our brain to say, we want more, we want more, we want more. And Jesus is saying, wait a second, you're wanting more of the wrong thing. Let me take you all the way back to the beginning where the first bread came from. Right. And he's also saying, don't get ahead of yourself here. Like, you're gonna get it every day. Right.

Slow down. There's enough. You're gonna get it, and you're gonna get it the next day. And so it obviously puts so much into the trust and the dependence for the daily sustenance. But then you think about the prayer where it says, give us today our daily bread, which is for tomorrow. Right, is what you said. Tomorrow's bread for today, yeah. I like that. Yeah, that's kind of weird for me to try to think about what that means. Well, it's hard to even translate. That's the best translation the scholars come up with, get close to the Hebrew. Or close to the Greek. But what it makes me think of is like, you're trusting God for today, and you're also trusting God for tomorrow. And then later in the passage, where they talk about, Jesus is talking about anxiety, you know, and he says, don't worry about tomorrow, because today. brings enough trouble of its own. And I think we get into this mindset of fearing things that haven't even happened yet or worrying about something. It's like how much of our life is spent worrying on something that may never happen

or that hasn't happened yet, right? Instead of just today. No, I think all worry is that, most worry is. It's future tripping, you ship on the future. You can almost identify. It's like when you start realizing, or I can anyway, and it's like, wait a second, why am I worried about this when it hasn't happened yet and it may never happen, you see? So like I try to live by this philosophy of don't worry about it unless I have to. So like if, you know, whatever that may be, you know, like test results of something or whatever. I'm like, I'm not worrying about it until I know it's something I need to be concerned about. Because it helps me to not live in that state of stress, fear, worry, anxiety, because I'm just having to trust the Lord through it. If I have to worry or consider or do something about it, I will eventually, but I'm not gonna live my life dreading something that may or may not ever happen. Does that make sense? Yeah, well, you need to save all that because we're gonna spend a whole section on worry in a couple weeks because Jesus talks a lot about, well, Jesus talks a lot about this and for good reason. But it shows us, one more time before we move on, it shows us that you can take a good thing and even a God thing and not appreciate it because that's what they did.

They're not appreciative of what God's done for them. So good. Going back to what she said, even if you've ever had a panic attack, the way they train you to come out of it is what? You start naming what you see around you. You start saying, you start talking, like you start speaking out loud. You come back to the present. Yeah, you're coming back to the present. I can't tell you how many times I've sat down with people and they're just, oh man, I don't know what I'm gonna do, da, da, da, this, and I'm like looking at them and I'm like, you got shoes on your feet, you got clothes on your back, you got money on your back. Like I try to get them like, actually right now where your feet is, everything is okay. Actually right now, God is providing the daily bed for today. You got a home over, you got a roof over your head, you got a meal, you got your family that love you, yeah. And then start, and just getting them to like, I've only had one true panic attack in my life, but trying to get them to just breathe, right? Just breathe. And we know when you just breathe, the breath that God gave you in your lungs, you're breathing in and out his name, right? And so it's like- It's more like a song.

It's, right? Selfless plug for our Long Hollow worship team with our song Yahweh. But it's so true. The only thing that got me through that was breathing. It's in the moment. And I mean, there were people surrounding me in the moment. Thank God Robbie wasn't there because he would have flipped his lid. I would have flipped my lid. I don't know. You would not have known what to do with me in that moment, I don't think. I was scared. Because he doesn't even like for me to cry. I would have been worried. You need to help me, no. Anyway, we'll save that story for next time. We're gonna have a lot on there. There's a whole story. That'll be like a month of episodes on the word. Between the three of us, God, we got- We got a lot of experience. We got anxiety. We got panic attacks. We got seasonal depression. I mean, we gotta do it all. Let me make the point and then we'll move on. We're almost done here. But Jesus is making the point

by saying man shall not live by bread alone. And he's connecting the physical manna with spiritual food of the word of God. Two things you have to understand. Just like the Jews back in the Old Testament had to make time and extend the effort every single day to gather food for their bodies, we need to extend time, make the effort to gather spiritual food for our soul, the word of God. This is why, if you're listening, a daily time with the Lord is non-negotiable. I tell people, you can delegate a lot of things in your life. You can delegate your emails. You can automate your responses. You can delegate your scheduling. But you cannot delegate your devotional time with God. Here's what I mean. Nobody can read the Bible in your place for you, period. They can't. Nobody can also, you can't delegate your time discipling your children or being a husband or a wife to your husband or a husband to your wife. That's a job you have to do. And so non-negotiable time with the Lord, and I like to say it this way. To create a sacred space, you need a specific time and place. To create a sacred space, there's nothing sacred. I mean, it's not like you walk in the sunroom where I sit or Kandi's chair where she sits in the morning.

You're not gonna be like, oh, look at the angels coming in. This is all, not gonna see that when you walk in. It's just gonna be a place. But for me, it's sacred. It's set apart. It's holy in a sense to me because that's where I meet with the Lord. And so to have that, you need a specific time and place. Every time, I'm either here at the office with the Lord. It's just non-negotiable. Second thing is this. Just as the Jewish people gathered manna every day and that sustained them for the day, today's manna is not gonna be good for tomorrow. And yesterday's manna from God, His word, doesn't really sustain us like we need to today. And sadly, some. be listening are trying, your reason why you're malnourished in the Word is because you're trying to live off of last Sunday's sermon. Right. It's good. Some of you wonder why I'm angry and negative and critical and judgmental. Well look at the intake of the Word of God. You know D.L. Moody used to say this, the Bible will keep you from sin, but sin will keep you from the Bible. You know when we were, we had boys when they were little, Adam you appreciate this too, Candy always had this innate ability to determine why they were so upset. Like our boys would get fussy and they would get ornery or mad and I would say, what is wrong with him? And I'd say, why are you so mad? And Candy would say, he's hungry.

I'd say, he's hungry? Well how do you know he's hungry? And she would say, no he's hungry, that's why he's acting this way, that's why he's tired. And sure enough, we'd feed them and they'd feel right. Now here's the thing, when you grow up, you never grow out of this. It's just called hangry. When you get older, you get, you've been hangry. Vivian, you've been hangry before? Now Vivian never been hangry, but but I know Ben has. Ben's been hangry before. I've been hangry many times. Hangry is when you're hungry and you become angry, right? And I would say that's the reason why some of you are the way you are. You are spiritually malnourished. Yeah. You know, you don't have a regular intake of the Word of God. Yeah and you get, important thing is the rhythm. Because I love what you talked about Sunday, and we'll just take it to food. If you gorge, if you just gorge and eat and you eat, you know, everything, you know, all the chips, all the ice cream, all the donuts, everything, you're gonna feel bloated, you can't hardly move, the next day you feel terrible, you know, and it'll last you for a little bit. And then you go a whole week and you don't eat. And then you gorge again. That's not a healthy rhythm. It's not good. Your body needs a steady track of nutrition. And it's the same thing with spiritual. You have to have a steady daily rhythm of nutrition for your soul or, or what? We get sick. Yeah. You get run down, you get tired, you get headaches. Like there's consequences. Right. We feel those physically, but sometimes, you know, we always try, we don't get to the root. Like if Josie and I are, you know, having issues consistently or, you know, it's everybody else's, I'm upset with everybody, you know, most of the time it's, what's my spiritual condition like? Most of my problems starting in with me and my spiritual condition. And you say this all the time, I love it, you always get me, you say, when's the last time you didn't have a rushed quiet time? Yeah, an unhurried.

Yeah, that's what it is, she knows it. An unhurried quiet time. That, I love that, by the way, go ahead. No, you can speak to that. I mean, that is so important. It's a different place when, and I did this a little bit this morning because I was spending time with Josie or whatever, but it was a little bit, all right, I got a certain amount of time and I set my phone, you know, and that's good and that sustains me, like that's, that's okay, but I don't want to do that every day. Yeah. I want to get up early enough most days where it's like, yes, God, what are we doing? Got an hour. Yeah. Let's hang out, baby. It's good. No, that's like, it's my absolute favorite, like to, so I try as much as possible, which everybody's schedule is different, you know, people who have to be at the office super early or, you know, everybody has to figure this out for themselves and what it looks like, you know, but for me, it's, I know in my mind what time I need to go to bed at night in order to be able to wake up and have an unhurried time. So, my goal is an hour every morning that I want to sit down and have one hour with the Lord before everything gets going. Occasionally, it don't have that long, right? I mean, it's like, life is what it is, but I am shooting for, I know in my mind I need to physically feel good eight hours of sleep. What do I need to do to get into the bed in order to go to sleep and have eight hours of sleep and then wake up to where I know before I leave this house, I've had an hour that I can sit down and be with the Lord. And so, that is number one priority for me and I've always done it in the morning because if I don't, it's not doing, it's not happening. So, for me, it's morning. It's not lunch. It's not afternoon. I just don't do that. Now, occasionally, I'll sit down the afternoon and catch up on something if I didn't finish, but it's in the morning. And then, everything

comes after that. So, workout, work, whatever, all comes after the time that I get in the morning. And if I didn't have the hour, that's fine. Sometimes, it's 30 minutes, but that, and that's okay. I still enjoy the time, but I would really like to be able to sit there and be unrushed, you know, and just have the time to do it. Yeah, some people would say, I don't have that time. I wish I had it. Well, maybe you're driving to the office in a car. Here's a novel idea. Turn the radio off and pray or listen to a Bible app for your, for, I used to have a 15-minute drive when we first moved here and even in Chattanooga, and I would listen to my Bible reading in the car on the way there. And then, I get to the office and sometimes do hear journals when I got there, but I would listen on the way, pray on the way. And I think at the end of the day, what we're saying is you just You have to make time to spend time with God. You have to figure out the priorities in your life and adjust accordingly. So, and I'm not one like, how do I say this nicely, but don't throw at me a lot of excuses when there is 24 hours in a day that you can determine in some form or fashion where you can spend 20 to 30 minutes with the Lord. And if you can't do that, you have a way bigger problem. And I mean, and I've discipled women for what, over 20 years now. So I've heard all of it, you know, with time management and stuff. I remember, I will never forget one time trying to help some, a girl years and years ago,

think of through how to do her quiet time. And I said, okay, let's talk through your day and let's just see what it looks like. Where can we fit this in? And it was, no, it wasn't that, it wasn't that. And she was like, I said, well, what about in the morning before like you go to work and the kids go to school or whatever? And she's like, no, cause I can't do it then because if I do it then, then I don't get to work out. I'm like, okay. I'm like, well, work out's important. So I'm like, all right, you work out then. I'm like, what about like on the way to school? Like, can you listen to the Bible? What are you doing? That sort of thing. No, because I'm preparing like for the work day. Okay. What do you do in pickup line when you're like, you know, or whatever? And it was like every, it was like, well, I'm putting on my makeup for later that night or I'm doing like, everything was something. And I was like, okay. I said, well, what happens when the kids go to bed? And you know, you have like a little time at night. Well, I sit down and I watch TV with my husband and I'm like, okay. And I'm like, well, that's important too.

I do the same thing. And I said, however, if you go all the way through your day and it's eight o'clock at night and you have spent no time with the Lord, then you need to take some of that TV time and you need to set it aside. Like there is time, but it's like thinking through like, what does that look like for me? And you know, yes, you want to take care of yourself physically and you want to get your sleep that you need to. And you want to listen to your body and all those things. But there, if you can tell me that in 24 hours in a day, you can't some way figure out how to read your Bible and spend time with the Lord. Like that's a big, big problem. Well, they don't have to answer to you. They're going to have to answer to the Lord one day. I mean, that's the reality. What are you going to tell God? I mean, when you, you know, John Piper said, the reason God allowed social media and Twitter and Instagram is so that when we stand before him in heaven, we'll have no excuse. We won't say we were too busy as an excuse for why we didn't pray. Yeah. And another part of that. So social media is the proof that you do have time. You just don't want to.

Oh, listen, I could teach you all about, all about picking up that, that cell phone and exactly what you do. But let me just say this one thing, because for young moms, I'm sorry, because, because I know what this is like. When I raised two boys that are almost 16 and 18 now. And so I know what this is like, but if you're a young mom and you really have a hard time because the babies are up all night and you're up all night. And it's like, how do I have any time with the Lord? Years ago, someone said this to me and I did this occasionally, but I mean, I always tried to set my alarm like again, an hour before I knew the boys were waking up. So if they were waking up at six, I was up at five. It's just the way I rolled. But if I had, for some reason, couldn't do that, you would leave the Bible open on the table. So wherever you're feeding the kids or whatever, even if you're reading one verse, one verse in the Bible would never be a waste of your time while you were sitting there feeding your child or folding your laundry or whatever. It doesn't matter the quantity of what you're doing. It's the fact that you're choosing to do it in the first place. One verse, you know what I'm saying? Two verses.

What can you do to nourish your soul and to make it through the day and the season of life that you're doing? So don't be overwhelmed that you have to spend an hour or you have to read a whole chapter. Feed your soul in bite-sized chunks if you have to, and eventually you will find that you have more time to do that as the season changes. If you don't feed your soul, you're gonna lose it. I tell you, I was sitting by the creek. We had a prayer time this week for our church, right? Sat for an hour in silence. I sat for 55 minutes. The last five minutes, I was hidden by the woods, had my shoes off, all this stuff, just Tom's soaring it up. I look out there and what do I see? A three and a half foot poisonous stake, three inches wide with his head sticking out of the water. He saw me before I saw him. And we don't understand the importance of it. We're not reading so we can say, Pastor, I read. We're reading because we're in a spiritual battle, and you, I mean. Every day. Divorce rates, you can go on and on and on and on and on and on, and it's proven that couples that pray together, couples that read the Bible, couples that do, people that do this, not only do they stay together as couples in marriage, their kids have more likely not to go to prison,

more likely not to struggle. The statistics are there that show that having that spiritual life, the consequences are totally different. And so it's not just like you find a time because it matters. I can remember that having two kids and Josie's schedule was different. She worked downtown so we had to stay up or I wouldn't get to hang out with her. I did my quiet time every day when I worked for a medical company at lunchtime. And it was a sacrifice because I couldn't hang with the guys. I had to go and hide and read my Bible in quiet. And I never hung with the guys. I wasn't one of them. I always felt like an outcast. But you know what? I was better for it. And I don't know what that protected me from. I don't wanna find out. Yeah, that's good. I don't wanna find out what it protected me from. So anyway, that's why it's so important. I think it's what Jesus is saying too. And that's what you're saying. Yeah, that's what you're saying. It's that the spiritual sustenance, the daily bread, we need it physically but we need it spiritually.

As well, yeah. Well, George Mueller is a missionary who took this literally into the extreme. He literally started a ministry to care, the Lord put in his heart, started a ministry to care for orphans. But that was just a front for him to display God answers prayer, okay? And he wrote in his journal, the first and primary object of the work of the orphanage is that God may be magnified by the fact that the orphans under my care are provided with every need only through prayer and faith without asking any one of my fellow laborers for help, whereby showing God, this is his exact words, God is still faithful and he still hears prayer. Amen. So Mueller starts this orphanage. Regularly, they would run out of money. Regularly, they couldn't provide food. At one time, he was caring for an orphanage of 300 children. He had 300 miles to feed every day. They had no food in the pantry. At this day, they had nothing to drink. They had no money in the bank account. And Mueller summoned all the kids. He had them sit down with a plate with their utensils. Nothing on the plate. They had nothing, right?

And he said, he started to pray out loud in front of the kids, because he was showing this example. He says, dear father, we thank you for the food that you're going to give us. Now, that is literally what Jesus said. We're thanking you now for the food in the future that you're gonna give us. Watch this. We're thanking you now. He said, immediately after the prayer, knock at the door. A local baker shows up and says, Mr. Mueller, I quote, I couldn't sleep last night. Somehow I felt that you didn't have breakfast for the kids, and the Lord wanted me to send you some. So I got up this morning at 2 a.m., and I baked some fresh bread and brought it over enough for the kids. Mueller thanked the man, and then looked around and told the kids, we not only have bread, here's typical Mueller, but we have the rare treat of hot, fresh, baked bread. Almost immediately, another knock at the door. The milkman shows up who delivers the milk. The milkman showed up unannounced, and he said, listen, I'm sorry to bother you, but my truck just broke down in front of your orphanage. I don't have anything to do with this milk because if I don't give it away now, it will spoil.

Do you have any need for milk? Daily bread, baby. See, here's the problem. Yeah, the problem with modern Christianity, and the problem with many Christians today is not unanswered prayers, but unoffered prayers by believers. Money, say that again, say that again. The greatest tragedy is not, God's not answering your prayers. The greatest tragedy is that you're not spending a lot of time praying and seeking God in prayer. So that's why I love what we did this week as our staff. As we led up to Easter, we decided, Mark Hopkins, our prayer coordinator and our lead team, we said, hey, what if we spent an entire day before the work that's coming, and boy, Easter's a lot of work. If you're in ministry, you know. We said, what if we spend a whole day in worship? Worship before work, working from worship, not for work, you know, from work. And man, I can't tell you how, I mean, everybody in this room. Y'all should do that more regularly. Well, I know, I know, I did say, Robert. Like once a quarter at least. We might need to do it every week, but. Every quarter. Definitely gonna do it every Easter, maybe Christmas,

but we need to do it probably once a quarter. It was so refreshing. So good. Just a day with the Lord. Such great perspective, you know. It shows them what's important to you. Yeah, so the question as we close, what is satisfying you? What are you reaching for for your satisfaction? The bread of heaven or the bread of the world? One's gonna leave you satisfied, the other will leave you empty. And so I would just say, make time, extend the effort, you know, put it on your calendar daily that I'm gonna spend time with God and watch him nourish your soul. So good, so good. Thank you so much for joining in. Remember, if you're enjoying this content, and if you're growing in any way possible, if you wanna help us, please subscribe, like, comment, share it with a friend. We want more people to learn about the forgotten Jesus. You