1-4: The Father wants us to ask: for His glory and our comfort
5-8: The Father freely gives what we only grudgingly give
9-13: The Father gives more than we could ask or imagine
Communion Meditation:
The need for “bread” or “food” figures heavily in our passage today. Christ teaches us to pray for our “daily” bread—or as we saw, our ongoing “bread of tomorrow.” The man in the parable asks his neighbor for “three loaves of bread.” The human fathers at the end don’t give serpents and scorpions to their sons, but fish and eggs.
Our Heavenly Father gives just what His People need, not just for today, not just for the body, but for sustaining us and drawing us towards the life of His eternal kingdom. As we pray in the full prayer for His Kingdom to come on earth even as it is in heaven, so this includes our bodies as well—our whole persons!
And so when we pray for “daily” bread, we are asking for the resurrection life of Christ. We are praying that He sustain us and move us towards our heavenly tent—our new bodies. We are praying, indeed for a union of heaven and earth.
In the Lord’s Supper, we aren’t eating and drinking mere physical food and drink. And we also aren’t getting merely a spiritual reminder of what Jesus did for our souls. Heaven and earth unite here in pledge of Christ’s final victory and His universal and eternal reign, when we will uchangeably dwell with God as our Father and with our whole family.
Here our Father shows His grace and favor in Jesus Christ, and is present with us by His Spirit, showing us that He feeds our body with physical food and our souls with spiritual food: that He has saved us and is bringing us towards eternity.
Come and eat some of “tomorrow’s bread” and drink some of “tomorrow’s wine.” The kingdom has come in the person of Jesus Christ; redemption has come in His sacrifice on the cross; and He now invites us to feast in His joy, as we await the kingdom’s fulness and our redemption’s finality.