Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

The opposite of scarcity isn’t affluence. It's enough.

Public Theology is based on the work of Zach W. Lambert, Pastor of Restore, an inclusive church in Austin, Texas. Zach’s first book, Better Ways to Read the Bible, will release on August 12, 2025 and is available to preorder today. All of the content available at Public Theology is for those who identify as Christian, as well as those who might be interested in learning about a more inclusive, kind, thoughtful Christianity. We’re glad you’re here.

This, then, is how you should pray:

“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.”

Matthew 6:9-13

Back in the 1970’s, the average American adult was exposed to about 500 advertisements each day. By 2007, that number jumped to almost 5000.

Today, due to the widespread use of smart phones and the prevalence of advertising embedded into our social media, experts believe most of us see about 10,000 ads every single day.

10,000 advertisements with a singular message: “You need this.”

• You need this to be happy

• You need this to stay safe

• You need this to find inner peace

• You need this to be a good parent, partner, or pet-owner

• You need this to be the best student, teacher, leader or employee that you can be

What we need and why we need it are ever-changing depending on the product and the target audience, but the underlying message remains the same: you need to purchase ________ in order to have your needs met.

This messaging starts early. In 1983, marketers spent $100 million dollars advertising to children. Today, that number is over $15 billion.

10,000 times per day, ads tell us that we need something we don’t have. We’ve literally spent our entire lives being told we don’t have enough.

All this messaging helps create something in us called a “scarcity mindset.”

In her fantastic book, Daring Greatly, Brené Brown talks about a scarcity mindset.

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of.

Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack.

This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life. Scarcity is the “never enough” problem.

Brené Brown

There are many definitions for a scarcity mindset, but I like Brené’s the best. Scarcity is the “never enough” problem.

When we have a scarcity mindset, we falsely believe we’ll never have enough and never be enough.

I cant’t think of a more vivid example of the scarcity mindset than during the early days of the pandemic. We had to adjust to so many new things as the world shut down: new routines, new fears, a new pace. The thing that stands out most to me, though, is the hoarding. Remember how people stocked up on food, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and masks? I’ve read stories of people who had to rent storage units to keep all of the supplies they were hoarding as others struggled to find the most basic necessities.

Scarcity mindset is pervasive in our culture, but the problem is not unique to us. The Bible tells countless stories of those who wanted more than they had. Like the story of Moses. Maybe you’ve heard it, but here’s a refresher:

God sends Moses to Pharaoh to demand the release of the Israelites and other ethnic minorities from slavery. Pharaoh says no over and over again, so God sends a series of plagues. Eventually Pharaoh relents and grants the enslaved people their freedom.

But Pharaoh soon changes his mind and begins chasing after the Israelites. As they are fleeing the Egyptian army, the come upon the Red Sea. God miraculously parts the sea and the formerly enslaved people run through on dry ground. After the last of them is through, God causes the Red Sea to crash down upon the pursuing Egyptian army and the Israelites are granted their full freedom once and for all.

They don’t know it yet but the exodus is only just beginning. On the other side of the Red Sea, God begins leading them to the Promised Land, a part of the country filled with everything they will ever need, but hey start to grumble along the way.

“If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

Exodus 16:3

God has just rescued them from slavery under a ruthless and evil leader in Egypt.

They just watched God part the Red Sea so they could walk through on dry ground.

In the chapter right before this, they all sing a song about how God is worthy of their praise and trust.

Yet they revert back to a scarcity mindset as if God hadn’t proved his faithfulness in the most obvious of ways.

God responds to their grumbling:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day.”

Exodus 16:4

God gives them food, but only enough for each day. Moses gathers everyone together.

“This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Everyone is to gather as much as they need.’” Then Moses said to them, “No one is to keep any of it until morning.”

Exodus 16:16 & 19

The command is explicit: only gather enough for your needs and don’t try to save any of it for the future. God says, “I have given you enough for today and I will give you enough again tomorrow.”

But do the people obey?

But they did not listen to Moses. Some kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell.

Exodus 16:20

Even after seeing God provide for them over and over again, their scarcity mindset has convinced them that they don’t have enough. (I can’t help but remember the serpent’s lie in the garden here.) Even with the promise of daily bread, the Israelites try to hoard more than they need.

We see this lack of trust in the New Testament as well.

God designed the Lord’s Prayer as a communal practice for the family of God as we pursue the way of Jesus. It instructs us on the way we are meant to live and move in this world.

The first section covers our identity and our mission. The church is a radically diverse and inclusive family of siblings who have been tasked with bringing little pieces of heaven to earth.

The rest of the prayer gives us instructions on how to lean into our identity and live out our mission. Jesus prays:

Give us today our daily bread.

Matthew 6:11

In a callback to the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness, with which the audience would have been familiar, Jesus is teaching his followers that a core part of who we are and what we are called to do centers around fighting against a scarcity mindset and relying on God for our daily bread.

So what is this “daily bread”? Our first clue as we seek to answer that question is that the word Greek word for “daily” used in this sentence by Jesus occurs nowhere else in Scripture. In fact, according to scholars, this word is nowhere to be found in any ancient literature.

What does that mean? Well, it appears that Jesus made it up.

There is a Greek word normally used for “daily,” but Jesus doesn’t use it here. He seemingly creates a new word out of thin air. As you can imagine, there are a variety of opinions about why Jesus did this and what this new word really means.

Some people believe it indicates that the bread is only material. True, literal bread that we are to ask for from God each and every day. This group of people point to Jesus giving out the bread at the Last Supper.

Another group believes this new word indicates that the bread is only spiritual. We are to pray daily for God to meet our spiritual needs with spiritual nourishment. Folks who hold this view point to stories like Jesus feeding the 5000 (John chapter 6): “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

And then finally, there is a third group. These folks believe that this word was made up by Jesus to convey the daily need for both our spiritual and material needs to be met by God. The bread God offers us is both physical and metaphysical.

I land firmly in the third group because the Kingdom of God is always a combination of the physical and metaphysical. It is social and spiritual. It is concerned with both salvation and justice. Anyone who tells you the Kingdom of God is only about one or the other has a view of God that is much too small.

I find the examples used by the first two groups to be ironic in that both stories include Jesus meeting both spiritual and physical needs. He gives literal bread to the disciples around the Last Supper table, but he also makes it clear that the bread represents the sacrifice he’s about to make on the cross. Similarly, Jesus claim to be the bread of life in John 6, but this happens after he has fed literal bread to thousands of people.

As humans, we have both spiritual and material needs, and this line of the Lord’s Prayer is meant to remind us to rely on God’s provision for both.

God meets our needs in a variety of ways. Sometimes it’s miraculous like the manna in the desert. Many of us have stories of extra money showing up right when we needed it or being blessed with a free meal at just the right time.

Other times, God meets our needs through the talents and abilities he has given us. We work and are compensated in a way that allows us to have the things we need.

And still other times, God meets our needs through someone else: friends and family stepping in to help when we are in trouble, or a church family lending a hand when we are down.

The bottom line is this: God has given humanity abundant resources, enough for everyone to have what they need. More than enough. But not everyone does. Why not? What has gone wrong?

The answer is simply “sin,” a word that may cause many of us to grimace, but please keep reading. God desires for every person to experience fullness of life and he has given humanity more than enough resources to make that desire a reality.

Sin is anything and everything that gets in the way of that flourishing, that abundance, that enough-ness. A primary manifestation of sin, both in ancient Egypt and today, is this scarcity mindset.

Scarcity mindset causes people who actually have more than enough to believe they need more. It promotes the hoarding of resources. Instead of taking only what they need, people take more than they could ever use, leaving others with crumbs, or worse, without.

The hoarding of resources leads to poverty and oppression: when some people give into the scarcity mindset, it leaves other people without their basic needs met.

Just take a look at Haiti.

In 1791, self-liberated slaves rose up against French colonial rule and the Haitian Revolution began. It ended in 1804 with Haiti officially declaring its independence from France, but the French refused to recognize Haitian independence for another twenty years.

In 1825, King Charles X said that France would recognize Haiti’s independence, but at a price. Haiti was required to pay former French slaveowners 150 million francs (about twenty-one billion modern American dollars) because they claimed to have lost income when they could no longer enslave the Haitian people. Think about that.

The French delivered this demand by sailing fourteen battleships carrying more than 500 cannons into Port-Au-Prince. Haitian refusal would have certainly meant another war, possibly complete annihilation.

So Haiti agreed to pay 150 million francs to the French. A number that amounted to ten times more than Haiti’s annual budget. Guess who they had to borrow money from in order to keep from defaulting on their first two payments? French banks. The fees and compounding interest only drove the debt higher and higher.

Dan Sterling, a Virginia-based writer, is married to a Haitian national. He wrote about this in Forbes:

My father-in-law still recalls the patriotic song he was taught as a Haitian schoolboy, its poignant lyrics urging all Haitians to reach into their own pockets to help their government raise the amount that was still “owed” to France. Thanks to voluntary contributions from Haiti’s citizens, most of whom were desperately poor, that debt was finally settled in 1947.

But decades of making regular payments had rendered the Haitian government chronically insolvent, helping to create a pervasive climate of instability from which the country still hasn’t recovered. France’s demand for reparations from Haiti seems comically outrageous today – equivalent to a kidnapper suing his escaped hostage for the cost of fixing a window that had been broken during the escape.

While France still ranks among the world’s wealthiest nations, Haiti – with a per-capita annual income of $350, a power grid that fails on a regular basis and a network of roads that’s more than 50-percent unpaved – is plagued by drought, food shortages and a struggling economy.

Dan Sterling

Obviously, there have been other factors which have contributed to the conditions in Haiti today, natural disasters and corrupt governments to name a few, but 122 years of paying reparations to their former enslavers was absolutely crippling.

A scarcity mindset drove the colonizing French that they needed to extract as much money from this fledgling country as possible. They had already stolen so many resources and lives from both Africa and Haiti, but they were convinced they needed to hoard even more, and the results for the Haitian people have been devastating.

France had enough— more than enough— but a scarcity mindset convinced them that they still needed more. Today, Haiti’s per capita annual income is 1% of France’s, and the country is struggling mightily with violence and corruption. According to Britannica, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere by many measures with 80% of of its population living in absolute poverty.

Learning this helps us understand why tens of thousands of Haitians have sought asylum in the United States in recent years. It’s why my wife was convinced, while growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, that she needed to adopt a Haitian baby.

So how do we fix this? God has already given us the answer: daily bread.

“Bread for today is bread enough.”

E.M. Bounds

The Lord’s Prayer is meant to be a daily reminder to rely on God for our “enough,” and to give our extra to anyone who doesn’t have what they need.

It’s that simple. We receive only what we need and we help others get what they need.

We must expose the scarcity mindset for the lie that it is. There is plenty of bread to go around. If we will all stop hoarding resources and start sharing with others, we will find that there is enough for everyone.

We’ve made the grave mistake of believing that the answer to scarcity is affluence, but it’s not. The opposite of scarcity is enough.

In a culture that glamorizes affluence and encourages hoarding, receiving only what we need— and helping others get what they need— isn’t normal. Battling against the scarcity mindset takes courage and vulnerability.

In a world where scarcity and shame dominate and feeling afraid has become second nature, vulnerability is subversive.

Brené Brown

Fighting against the scarcity mindset with courageous vulnerability is subversive. It creates a counterculture in the most beautiful way. And even though it’s incredibly rare, it isn’t without precedent. 2000 years ago, the very first Christian church created a counterculture just like this.

All the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had. They sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Acts 2:44-47

How beautifully subversive is that? This is what it looks like to be a part of God’s family. We rely on Jesus for our enough, and we give our extra to anyone who doesn’t have enough.

We receive only what we need and we help others get what they need. This is our mission, inspired by Jesus, and our legacy, started by the early church and embodied in Christians for the past two thousand years.

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We’d love to hear from you!

Please share how you are attempting to extricate yourself from scarcity mindset and look to the needs of others. It takes all kinds of kinds, and your idea may be helpful to others here.

How do you see this playing out in the world around you? How can we opt out of the constant cycle of acquisition, of protecting ourselves at the expense of our neighbors? How are you seeking to do this in your own life?

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