When we ask:

Give us this day our daily bread

We’re saying:

protect us from

The blasting & mildew!

Don’t damage our crops with hail!

Haggai 2:17

Hail is destructive to our standing crops,

Hail beats down the precious grain on the ground!

We’re grateful when the corn is spared a terrible a ruin!

There are dreaded mysterious destroyers

Our crops can be assaulted with smut, bunt, rust & mildew.

This turns the ear into a mass of soot,

These render it putrid,

This drys up the grain, in a manner so beyond all human

control that the farmer is compelled to cry,

“This is the finger of God.”

Innumerable minute fungi cause the mischief

It is only goodness of God,

That the rider on the black horse doesn’t

soon scatter famine over the land.

Infinite mercy spares our food.

There are active agents ready to destroy our harvest.

Pests of every kind lurk and loom

We should pray & pray,

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

The curse can engulf us;

we have constant need of God’s hand of blessing.

When blight & mildew come

they are chastisements from heaven.

We must learn to bear the rod

It is our Lord that has appointed it.

Spiritually, mildew is no uncommon evil.

When our work is most promising this blight appears.

We hoped for His grace,

But then this strange apathy,

or an abounding disillusionment,

or a cruel hardness of heart destroys!

Look for unconfessed sin in us,

Look for deficiency of sincerity

Look for empty decisions

Look for the disappointing of our desires.

We need renewed dependence on the Lord,

We need prayer that no blight would fall on us.

We need deliverance from pride

We need the Lord of the harvest to remove the damage.

Mildew can attack our own hearts.

It can shrivel our prayers & rot our expressions.

Only God can avert serious calamity.

We need Jesus Spirit to Shine!

He is our blessed Sun of Righteousness,

He only can drive the blights away.

We have to have His showers of blessing!

We need His grace & peace multiplied for us!

Adapted from Spurgeon