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Overeating and Our Daily Bread
Give Us This Day Our Daily Portion?
I can’t imagine a Thanksgiving meal where we barely had enough to eat. The turkey comes to the table stuffed, and we leave the table stuffed! Many have echoed that definition of gluttony is one bite more than we have eaten. Despite the humor, let’s talk about a serious topic – over eating. This would be easier to discuss if I didn’t need to lose 25 pounds!
Jesus said to pray for our “daily bread”. What is our daily bread? Jesus is echoing the daily bread called manna when he illustrates that we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”. Concerning their daily bread, the Israelites were instructed,
Exodus 16:16 (CSB) This is what the LORD has commanded: ‘Gather as much of it as each person needs to eat. You may take two quarts (lit., omer) per individual, according to the number of people each of you has in his tent.’”
God determined how much bread each person needed daily – their daily portion. No doubt living in the desert brought its own food challenges: finding it, hence the need of a daily miracle; and the amount needed to survive. So this is not about measuring our food as if on a perpertual diet – perpetual denial. It is about living on our daily needed portion.
Exodus 16:18 (CSB) When they measured it by quarts, the person who gathered a lot had no surplus, and the person who gathered a little had no shortage. Each gathered as much as he needed to eat.
Eat what you need. Need what you eat.
While daily bread was a lived, real experience for the Israelites, “daily bread” as a phrase only occurs twice, both times in The Lord’s Prayer. Daily bread is, “the bread of our necessity” for that day, or “daily portion”. We can see the connection to the daily bread provided in the wilderness and twice the amount on the 6th day. Each day they gathered what they needed that day. No more, no less.
We see this same idea in Proverbs 30:8, “feed me with the food I need”.
How much do we need to eat versus how much do we want to eat? Are we giving in to the lust of the flesh more often than we know?
This is not a call to start weighing one another! Neither is this a denial of different types of bodies, some more stocky than others. The Bible also supports celebrations where goodness is abundant such as in the return of the wandering, prodigal son (Luke 15).
We are greatly blessed in this country, including with food. We don’t need to pray anymore that God give us our daily bread. Our pantry is full. However, maybe we need to pray that God give us control to eat no more than our daily portion.
Except on Thanksgiving! And Christmas. And birthdays. And snacks…and I better read my article again!
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