Asking God expresses our need to God, and this attitude must remain. Our asking is not so that we will one day stock our individual cupboard so full as to gain independence from the giver. Our asking comes in the context of worshipping God the heavenly Father, in a prior relationship and participation. The asking for our daily needs comes in the context of our desire for God and God’s for us, so that our desire that our needs by met is part of our discipleship. The desire for God and for blessing by God will never end, nor should we wish for that. It is, according to Rowan Williams, ‘impure desire ‘ that desires to stop having to desire, to stop needing; it asks for a state where, finally, the ego can relax into self-sufficiency and ‘does not have to go on stuffing bits and pieces of the world into itself in order to survive.’

Intercessory prayer is a privilege and no matter of regret. It is part of worship, of a glad dependence which leads to maturity. C. S. Lewis regards our ‘need-love’ for God as vital, and the reverse as dangerous:

Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?

Asking as part of our approach to God expresses our ‘need-love’, but when characterized by Christ likeness it also displays a ‘gift-love’. The royal kingdom and the priestly sacrifice unite in such prayer, which is the church’s only power and her delight in making a self-offering to God and to neighbour. It is important to stress that praying for our daily bread includes the aspect of responsive love, the offering of love as a gift to God, so as to avoid the notion of the oppressive deity who wishes for a cringing and subdued creation beneath his heel. Such a view of God is deservedly criticized, and in their different ways Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer revealed its danger. The Christian petition ‘Give us today our daily bread’ is made in the security of divine love, and shares in its creativity.