Teach Us to Pray: The Essential Bread — Pastor Chris Oswald

What's in this sermon

The shape of the argument

13 units across exposition, application, illustration, theological claim, and conclusion. The pastor's argument is built from these moving parts.

Pastoral correction · unit #7

"Oswald issues a brief, direct application summarizing the first major section: we should ask God for provision. This serves as a hinge before transitioning to the second request."

Doctrinal loci· 10 surfaced

Soteriology · 4 Providence / Sovereignty · 3 Christology · 2 Ecclesiology · 2 Ethics / Moral Theology · 2 Theology Proper · 2 Bibliology · 1 Covenant Theology · 1 Doxology / Worship · 1 Hamartiology · 1

Bible citations· 8

Illustrations· 1

The Daily Bread of Morning Routine personal story · unit #4 — Oswald uses a personal story about his morning routine, his friend Tommy, and his mother's devotional habits to illustrate the concept of daily dependence on God. The story makes the abstract idea of daily bread vivid and relatable—just as Oswald depends on coffee each morning, we depend on God for daily provision. The reference to "Our Daily Bread" devotional explicitly connects the illustration to the prayer request.

Theological claims· 1

Jesus teaches us to pray for God's provision, asking our Father in heaven to meet our daily needs. unit #3

Quotations· 1

"Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, 'Who is the Lord?' Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God." — Proverbs 30 (unit #6)

Read it

Full transcript

18,282 characters 13 units ~20 min reading time

0 · Oswald frames the sermon by locating it within the "Kingdom Come" series and the ongoing exposition of the Lord's Prayer in Luke 11

We're going to turn our attention to Luke's Gospel. We're continuing or jumping back in after a week off last week to our series, "Kingdom Come." And we're in Luke 11. We're looking again this morning still at the Lord's Prayer. Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer. Now we saw the last couple weeks before this that there are vertical dimensions to how Jesus starts the Lord's Prayer. Specifically, He directs us towards God as He teaches us to pray. Now this morning, we're going to look at the horizontal requests. And we'll see that there's this beautiful balance. Oftentimes, I think part of what we do wrong when we pray is that we sort of assume a God-oriented position. In our prayers, we tend to run to those horizontal requests and we sort of lose sight of The fact that this is a God-centered world. And we're not just praying to God, we're meant to make God the center of our prayers. And that's what Jesus shows us when He teaches us to pray to a Heavenly Father. And that His name would be hallowed, that it be glorified and be seen as holy, and that His kingdom would come. It's making God the center of those prayers. Jesus reorients our mentality in that. Now this morning we see that Jesus pivots from praying for God's kingdom, praying for God's glory, to actually praying for our most basic needs. It's a beautiful reminder of the balance between God's transcendence, that he is holy and large and separate from us, and his imminence, that he is a Father who has drawn near. Who wants to meet every need that his people have. The holy God is our Father. The High King of Heaven knows our needs and reaches out with help.

1 · Oswald reads the primary text aloud—Luke 11:1-4—providing the biblical foundation for the entire sermon

Look with me now at Luke chapter 11. Hear God's holy and authoritative word. Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, And when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples. And Jesus said to them, when you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation. The word of the Lord. May He write its truth upon our hearts.

2 · Oswald signals the sermon's structure—three horizontal requests become three points

Now these horizontal requests we're going to look at this morning, they really break down into 3 very easy to identify groups. And rather than overly complicate things, we're just going to make those 3 groupings our 3 points this morning. We're going to look at asking God for provision, asking God for forgiveness, and asking God for protection.

3 · Oswald states the first major claim derived from the text: Jesus instructs us to ask God the Father for provision

So first, Jesus teaches us when we pray to our Father in heaven, we should ask the Father to provide. We should ask the Father for provision.

4 · Oswald uses a personal story about his morning routine, his friend Tommy, and his mother's devotional habits to illustrate the concept of daily dependence on God

Now, I'm not sure about you, but I would not be defined accurately as a morning person. My wife can attest to this. It's just not who I am. I can burn the midnight oil with the best of them. I can stay up to the wee hours reading my Kindle or reading a book. That's no problem for me. The trick is on the other side when the alarm goes off and I'm supposed to get up out of bed. That takes work. And morning people don't understand this at all. I had a friend who was the quintessential morning person. And when Tommy would talk about getting up in the morning, oh, it's the best thing in the world. Oh, I get up and the house is quiet. A lot of times I beat the alarm. Beat the alarm? Like, I don't know that's ever happened to me in my life. And he's just talking about, you know, you get up before the sun breaks the horizon and you start to brew your coffee. And I'm just thinking, I got this glazed look. I have no category for what he's talking about. It's because Tommy's a morning person and I am not. It's just the way I am. If I wasn't so cheap, I would invest in one of those really nice coffee deals that grinds it really fresh in the morning and I could set the timer and brew it. Because I'm cheap, I don't have one of those. What I'm really waiting for is somebody to invent something that'll not actually grind it and brew it, but somehow stream it just right into my mouth without scalding me while I'm lying in bed. That would really help me. Much more able to resist the snooze. But that's the reality, that the snooze is a temptation for me as a non-morning person. So on behalf of everyone in the room, I thank you, Tyler, for assisting us on Sunday mornings. This brilliant idea of serving coffee to serve the non-morning people. Because I'm not a morning person and because that snooze button's a temptation, when I've got an early morning meeting at 6:30 to go meet someone for coffee, it usually means I'm not sitting at the table having a bowl of Cheerios. It's me sprinting down to the kitchen to grab whatever fruit I can find on the counter as I run out the door. My mom was the daughter of a dairy farmer, which, if you know anything about dairy farming, means you are forced to be a morning person. So every day growing up, 5 AM, you were in the barn milking the cows. And so for my mom, She transferred that, forced it upon us as kids. You know, Saturday morning if we were sleeping in at 8, that was basically like we'd slept in until noon. Go confess your sin. But that wasn't our habit in my house. You didn't run through the kitchen to grab a banana out the door to school, right? We gathered every morning, went through our routine, and had breakfast together. Every morning. And at the end of breakfast, we would read God's Word. And I remember one of the things that we would do is we would read God's Word. There was little devotionals my mom would have. And one of them that she had, you may be familiar with it, it was called Our Daily Bread. Right? Our Daily Bread. It wasn't the most profound devotional you've ever seen. At least I don't remember it that way. But it was practical. It was a practical devotional. And the name of that devotional harkens back to this prayer request.

5 · Oswald unpacks the wilderness manna narrative as the background for Jesus' "daily bread" request

Jesus understands our needs, and he calls us to pray for bread. And at the most basic level, praying for bread is about praying and asking that God would provide. More than that, it's about confessing we need God to provide. We need God to provide. It's actually an allusion that Jesus is making to Israel when they were in the wilderness. If you remember the story of Israel, if you're not familiar with the story, think Moses and the Ten Commandments movie that used to get shown like 2 times a year on ABC or whatever channel. That's the story that Jesus is alluding to when God led His people out of slavery and bondage in Egypt. It's not just crossing a few blocks. It's not like going from here and crossing Metcalfe or crossing state line into Missouri, and that was the only distance they had to cover. They had to cover miles and miles. In fact, they had to cover an entire wilderness called the Sinai Peninsula. And so this massive group of people ends up in the desert. And when they end up in the desert, they realize they have no way to get food. So they start crying out to Moses, "We're going to starve to death. Why did you lead us? It'd be better if we were back in Egypt. At least there our bellies were full." You remember what God did. Each day, as an answer to their cry, when they would get up in the morning, the ground would be covered with this white substance that they called manna. It was manna from heaven. It was enough food given by God to sustain them. For one more day. See, that was the catch, right? If they took too much and tried to take enough for a couple days, what happened the next morning? It's just full of maggots and rotting. It was an object lesson for God's people. God was teaching them He would provide from His hand each and every day as He provided for Israel. They knew to trust in Him. And here Jesus echoes that language, "Pray that God would supply our daily needs."

6 · Oswald diagnoses the Western cultural barrier to understanding daily dependence—we live in a Costco economy that fosters hoarding rather than trust

It underscores the reality that every single day, if God didn't provide, we would go hungry. Now, is that the way we tend to think of it? I think there's an ancient-modern tension, or at least an ancient Western tension going on here. This is easy to understand in Jesus' day. This is easy for the widows in Pakistan to understand. For us, it's harder to conceptualize. We live in the world of Costco and Sam's Club, right? It's not even just that we've got supermarkets that we can go to. We've got supermarkets like Costco where you can buy in bulk. Forget about more than just one day's worth of manna. You can buy a month's worth of manna. Actually, in a month, some of those sizes, you won't even get through them with how big stuff is at Costco. But that's why we sometimes stumble over this idea of praying to God each day to provide. And yet, we do still know what it means. Because every time there's a forecast of a blizzard, what happens? Everyone tears off to Henhouse or Target or Costco, and you go and take pictures and the milk and the bread are completely gone. I don't really know why people do that. Like, for some reason when snow comes, you need massive amounts of dairy in your fridge. But when those storms come, it's like it touches on something, isn't it? Something deep down that we realize the storms are coming. There might not be access to the limitless food that we always take for granted. And so we've got to store it up. That's where Jesus instructs us. He calls us. Trust in God. Pray to God. What Jesus is teaching is that we would adopt an anti-Costco disposition. Now, I'm not saying Costco is wrong or that you shouldn't shop there. Any place that serves half-pound hot dogs can't be inherently evil, right? I'm not saying don't shop at Costco, but this prayer request is a subtle rebuke to our impulse to hoard, which is just a declaration, right? It's just a new way of saying, I don't trust God to provide for tomorrow. More than that, I have to accumulate without any regard for who's doing the providing. You ever walk through Henhouse or Costco or Target and before you get to the checkout line, just pause? Lord God, thank you for this cart. Thank you for this food and the funds to pay for it. I have to confess, that's not usually my posture as I'm sitting there impatiently in line at Target, right? I'm planning it as I approach, like scanning, you know, the game, like, Which line has the fewest people? But you got to know how to play the game because that might have few people, but that lady has like 17 carts. That's the thing I'm thinking of. I'm not thinking of gratitude to the God who provides. But God calls us to seek him daily, to ask. And I think that's why it's good to pray before meals. We pray before meals because it's an opportunity at every meal to pause. And to thank the giver of the gifts. So don't pray at meals when you're in a restaurant hoping some nice older couple will pay for your meal as like a throwback to the good old days. I've heard of that happening. No, we pray because we're grateful to God. He's provided. I love how Proverbs 30 puts it: Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, 'Who is the Lord?' Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. That is a biblical disposition. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Lord, give me enough for my daily needs, but Lord, protect me from having so much that I completely forget You are the One who provides.

7 · Oswald issues a brief, direct application summarizing the first major section: we should ask God for provision

So we ask God for provision.

8 · Oswald pivots from provision to forgiveness, linking the two themes through the motif of not forgetting God

And then Jesus calls us in the same way not to forget God when we gather around the table. Don't forget God when we interact with one another. He doesn't want us to forget the enormous mercy we've received in Christ. And He doesn't want us to forget that when we're in community.

9 · Oswald identifies the communal nature of the prayer ("us," "we") and addresses the liturgical confusion over "trespasses" vs

Communal elements to this prayer. Have you ever noticed that? "Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we forgive everyone who's indebted to us." There's undeniable corporate elements to this prayer. It's meant to shape how we think about ourselves as the people of God. Now, this is the spot, right, where everyone gets really tentative when they recite the Lord's Prayer? If you admit it, depending on the tradition you grew up in, everyone gets a little tentative when they get here because no one's quite sure which version are we going to pray here. Is it going to be, "Forgive us for our trespasses and those who trespass against us"? Is it going to be, "Forgive us for our debts and our debtors"? Everyone all of a sudden kind of listens and takes their cue from the loudest voice in the room typically. You know, so how does that work depending on the tradition you're from? Is it Lutherans need to be forgiven for poor financial stewardship, right? So debts for them, but for Baptists, they need to be forgiven for their sins. How are we figuring this out? Well, both ideas are there in the text. The first reference, the Greek word actually literally means sins, trespasses. The second word though calls to mind this image of being indebted to someone, to owing them. And this is actually really helpful.

10 · Oswald explains why Jesus uses the debt metaphor—because we cannot fully grasp the enormity of sin (none of us is God or perfectly holy), but we can all relate to the crushing weight of debt

One of the challenges that we have in understanding just the notion of forgiveness is that none of us really truly understands the notion of sin, because none of us is God and none of us is without sin. And none of us is perfectly holy, and none of us is ever the primarily offended party like God is. But when Jesus teaches us to pray, he gives us a tangible way of getting our minds wrapped around the mercy we receive from God. We can't fully grasp the enormity of sin, but every human being has an idea and they can relate to money concerns, right? More than that, we can relate to what happens when someone's facing crushing debt. Whether that's happened to you personally or someone who's close to you has gone through it, all of us have some association with someone who has significant debt problems. It's a terrible thing. There's just this crushing weight that you feel and sense when you're in debt. Right? It just seems to loom over you, just to hang on your shoulders. It hovers. Every credit card bill that comes, the future seems more hopeless. For the person in debt, they dread the phone ringing, fearing it's another creditor. You know, I've heard of people fearing repossession of their vehicles. They get ultra creative in how they park and parking away from their home, trying to hide where their vehicle's at. Because they fear repossession. It's a terrible way to live, but it also gives us a clear sense of what it means to be forgiven.

11 · Oswald unpacks the mechanics of gospel forgiveness using the debt metaphor: God doesn't just cancel our debt—He transfers it to Jesus and then fills our account with Christ's infinite righteousness

In Christ, God releases us from all our debts. He wipes the slate clean. Everything that we owe and could never possibly pay God in Christ cancels. The image is like God the Father transfers that million-pound burden, that million-pound debt from our back and then He puts it on the broad shoulders of Jesus. But that's actually only half the picture. What we see in the Gospel in the forgiveness that God provides, in the nature of how justification works, is that we're not just forgiven for our debts. It's not just like we owe an infinite amount of money that we can never pay, and God comes along and cancels the debt. That's not what happens in Christ. In our forgiveness, when God forgives us, He doesn't just cancel the debt. He then comes alongside and puts an infinite amount in the account. That's what the righteousness of Christ is. God cancels all of our sins. All of our shortcomings, all of those debts, and He fills our account with all of Jesus' obedience, with all of His perfections. The burden is gone, and there's freedom, and there's joy. You can breathe again. That is what Jesus calls us to pray for. But there's actually also an ethical dimension to this, isn't there? You notice how Luke puts it? Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. Reminds me a few chapters ago in Luke 7. Remember the story of Simon and the woman of the city? Simon invites Jesus over to to Simon's house and he's got the elaborate meal prepared and this woman, probably a prostitute, walks in uninvited and every head turns to look at her and she makes her way to Jesus and she grabs His feet and she weeps and she cries and she cleans His feet and Simon is horrified. This woman is in his house! Simon is horrified and all the guests are horrified. But Jesus looks at the woman and tells her she's forgiven. The whole point of the story, what's happening there, is there's this tension. Simon, in all his self-righteousness, has never felt a true need for forgiveness. And so he has no grace to extend to anyone, not even to Jesus as his guest. That's what self-righteousness breeds. But the woman of the city, the prostitute, she knows a level of debt and shame that would stagger us. And in weeping and clinging to Jesus' feet, she is totally changed by the forgiveness she receives. Jesus asks the question, Who will love more? The one who's forgiven little or the one who's forgiven much? The point for all of us is that if we truly understand our debts, we know that each and every one of us has been forgiven a massive amount in Christ.

12 · Oswald steps out of the expositional flow to address the congregation directly about the liturgy they just practiced—corporate confession and assurance of pardon

That's why we did that congregational reading this morning. That's why we did that prayer of confession. We want to walk out Jesus' instructions as a church to confess our sins before God, to do that corporately as a body. But you notice we didn't just read all the confessions of sins, right? How did we conclude that congregational reading? We heard the words of pardon. We heard the words of gospel assurance. That our sins and our trespasses have been hurled to the bottom of the sea. And now we have a great High Priest, Jesus, who stands before God and guarantees access. We don't have to come before God fearing that He's a creditor waiting to smash us and call in our debts. We can come to Him as a Father. Here are the words we read again. Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us. He will tread our iniquities underfoot. He'll grind them into dust. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. So let us now with confidence, because of Jesus our great high priest, draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace in the time of need.

Where this fits

Recent preaching context

The three sermons immediately preceding this one in the preaching schedule.

Not enough data yet — this preacher has fewer than three prior sermons in the corpus.

Earlier in the corpus ·

A prior sermon on Luke 11:5-13

You preached this same passage — 8 Luke 11 citations in that earlier sermon. Worth re-reading before the next time this text comes around.

Take it further

Discuss · apply · pray

Small groups

6 discussion questions

Ready-to-print leader brief with cross-references and landing-zone application. PDF available.

Daily readings

5-day reading plan

Mon–Fri scripture readings drawn from this sermon's citations.

Prayer

Weekly prayer prompt

A prayer drawn from this sermon's theological frame.

Family table

Sunday-evening conversation card

One prompt for the table; works for kids and adults alike.

Couples

Three questions over coffee

For married members — works as a midweek check-in or a longer date conversation.

Memorize

Luke 11:1-4

A verse from this sermon's primary text to commit to memory.

Where this was preached

About the church

Providence Community Church

Lenexa, KS
Sundays · 10:00 AM
About us · What we believe

Plan a visit →

Crawler & AI-search policy · view robots.txt and llms.txt

This sermon page is intentionally optimized for search engines and AI assistants. We've opted into being crawled by both. The crawler-config files at the domain root:

/robots.txt

User-agent: *
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://sermonsteward.com/sitemap.xml

/llms.txt

# Providence Community Church

A church preaching expository sermons through the books of the Bible.

## Sermons
- [Teach Us to Pray: The Essential Bread (Luke 11:1-4)](/ProvidenceLenexa/sermons/teach-us-to-pray-the-essential-bread)

## About
- [About the church](/about)
- [Plan a visit](/visit)

The page itself ships with Schema.org Article + Church markup (with real geo coordinates), Open Graph + Twitter cards for share previews, and a canonical URL. Transcripts are server-rendered HTML — no JS dependency for the readable body.