Praying Before Eating?

What The Bible Says About Your Tough Questions: Should Christians Pray Before They Eat?

The Bible doesn’t implicitly say Christians should pray before they eat. However, you will find many examples of Jesus giving thanks for food before it was eaten. (Matthew 14:19; John 6:11; Luke 22:17-19; 1 Corinthians 11:23-24) You will also find in Jesus teaching his disciples how to pray, he instructs them to ask God to,

“give us this day our daily bread”. (Matthew 6:11)

So what does this all mean?

Well, it is not a sin for one not to pray before a meal. You will not reap eternal damnation for forgetting to pray before you dive into your pizza or sub sandwich. What praying before your meal reveals is how you view God.

In Jesus’ day, meals were literally earned on a daily basis. In other words, most people didn’t always know where the next meal was going to come from. Many cultures around the world today, are experiencing the same situation. So how we pray to God about food, and how they pray to God about food is totally different.

For you and I, the rich Americans who have many meals stored away in our freezers, our prayer before a meal acknowledges that we didn’t earn this meal with our own strength and work. Instead it is God who gave us the ability and the opportunity to even have a job as well as have an abundance of food to choose from. Our prayer before a meal moves us (people) from the center of life and puts the focus back on God—the true giver of all good things. So while it is not a "sin" to not pray before a meal, it is a good discipline in helping remind all of us that God is the center of everything in our lives.