BREAD.
UNIVERSAL SOUL HUNGER.
Suggestion:—Bread, rolls or biscuit can be used if thought necessary, and these can be used for refreshments later.
If the children are tired of "driving to church" in an imaginary carriage, let them drive in an imaginary sleigh, with imaginary bells, amid winter scenes.
MY LITTLE FRIENDS: I am sure that every boy and girl in this room knows what it is to be hungry. It is a part of our childhood experience to feel hungry almost every day. While the body is growing there is almost a constant demand for nourishment and food.
Loaf of Bread, Roll and Biscuit.
We have here a small loaf of bread; it is called a Vienna roll, and here is a small biscuit. Now, this is bread, only it is baked in small loaves. As people all over the world have hunger, so bread in one form or another has become the universal food of the world. When in the Lord's Prayer we ask God to "give us this day our daily bread," we mean not simply bread made of flour, but we mean necessary food, food of all kinds; and so the word bread has come to be used to signify all kinds of wholesome food. God gives us our food day by day, just the same as each morning the manna rained down from heaven for the Children of Israel while they were journeying through the desert. God does not send it to us in just the same way, but each day He furnishes us a sufficient amount of food to sustain our bodies.
Now, as there is universal physical hunger, and as God has made provision to supply the food necessary to satisfy the hunger of the body; so there is a universal hunger of the soul, and God has also made provision to satisfy this universal hunger of our higher spiritual nature. In the sixth chapter of the Gospel by St. John, you will find much said about the food for the higher, the spiritual nature. Jesus said, "Verily, verily I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from Heaven; but My Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He which cometh down from heaven and giveth life unto the world."