Bible Text: Philippians 4:19 | Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:19, KJV

“Give us this day our daily bread,” were the words of Jesus when His disciples came to Him with the request, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Nothing is more basic than food, and when you lack it, you go one on one with God, asking Him to meet that need. When He does it in such a way that you know it was He who did it, your faith grows.

Guy and Audrey Duffield had that experience the year before God gave them a baby girl, who some 23 years later became my wife. Here’s how Pop described it. “In the year 1935, Mrs. Duffield and I were pastoring a small church. It was our first church after we had been married. After several years there we felt that our ministry in that place was finished and so we talked with the district supervisor about the possibility of a move. He offered us another pastorate. The monthly reports from this church showed that it had a considerably larger membership than the one which we had been pastoring. I am not going to say that this did not influence our agreeing to go there; however, upon our arrival we discovered this larger membership was only on the monthly reports. They were certainly not in the church pews. In fact, the actual membership was much smaller than the church we had left.

“To our surprise we found that our weekly salary was to be $10. Those were the Great Depression days. Only one man in the church had steady work. We were, of course, considerably taken aback by these circumstances, and we wondered how we were going to make out.

“We had only been there a few days when a farmer backed his little white pick-up truck into our yard and unloaded a one hundred pound sack of potatoes into our shed. And he, Mr. Smith, said, ‘When these are gone, let me know and I’ll bring you another sack.’ We thanked him from grateful hearts and bade him good-bye.

“One hundred pounds of potatoes! We felt like millionaires. We were rich. You can do so many different things with potatoes. You can boil them, bake them, fry them, hash-brown them, scallop them, stuff them, au gratin them, etc. We really enjoyed those potatoes.

“But after some weeks had gone by I noticed that the potatoes in the sack were going down and down. And then I remembered what Brother Smith had said, ‘When these are gone, give me a call and I’ll bring you another sack.’ I do not know,” wrote Guy Duffield, “whether it was pride or stubbornness, but I could no more have called Brother Smith and said, ‘Brother Smith, we need some more potatoes,’ than I could have jumped off a cliff. But I did get down on my knees and prayed, ‘Lord, will You tell brother Smith that we need some more potatoes?’

“Do you know, it was less than two weeks after that, that the little white pick-up truck stopped at our back door and Brother Smith unloaded another one hundred pound sack of potatoes for our use, and put it down by the other sack. And when I looked in the first sack there were exactly two potatoes left.

“Did we get blessed! Just to think that we had a God who loved us enough to even keep track of the number of potatoes in our sack! That simple experience has given me faith to believe God, in the years that followed, to raise tens of thousands of dollars for the work of the Lord.”

Paul was right when he said, “But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19, KJV).

Resource reading: Philippians 4.