21 days Prayer & Fasting:
Day 14: Prayer precedes, yet requires action

Our anchor scripture for today is found in Matthew 6: 11 (NET) and it reads: “Give us today our daily bread,” This represents the first prayer request where Jesus instructs his disciples to pray for their needs. The placement of their needs after praying for the will and Kingdom of God is telling. Nevertheless, Jesus affirms that godly prayer also includes a time for requests to be made to Him. More importantly, Jesus instructs us that these requests be made daily. He urges us to use the Lord’s prayer to remind us that we depend on him for life. In the Bible, bread is symbolic. Jesus wasn’t only asking his disciples to ask for bread in the literal sense.  In our culture, we consider someone who provides for the needs of a family a ‘breadwinner’. The phrase breadwinner comes from the understanding that bread is symbolic for all the things we need for sustenance.  Jesus is telling his disciples to ask Him for all the things we need for sustenance, physical, emotional, etc. We should not be shy when asking God for the things we need. God invites us to do the same. When we take this posture, we are reflecting our faith that God sees us and knows the things that we need.