“Give us this day our daily bread.”

Our consumer-oriented society is continually creating and marketing new things that we never realized we needed until advertisers convinced us we couldn’t live without them. Today's average supermarket carries more than 30,000 products.

We've come a long way from the day when Christ told us to pray for our daily bread.

Heinz ketchup has 57 varieties. Baskin-Robbins has over 100 flavors (Penguin Swirl, anyone?). We have dozens of bottled waters to choose from - - imported or domestic, spring, mineral, organic, flavored, vitamin-enriched, fluoride or fiber added. We even have endless varieties of trash bags. A single brand of trash bag, Hefty, has  21 different ways to dispose of our garbage. Maybe more. I stopped counting.

We have so many choices that the value of anyone choice is depreciated by the seeming abundance of alternatives. If our first choice doesn't satisfy, we simply try another one. But the plethora of consumer goods always leaves us wondering if we made the very best choice; always wondering whether there is something better out there that we just haven't tried yet. Far from satisfying us, the profusion of choices leaves us with an uneasy feeling of not being fully satisfied.

Our affluence also encourages us to make impulsive purchases because, if we make the wrong choice, all is not lost; there is always another choice to be made. Choice becomes our answer to everything, our God.

Often, the next choice is more costly. We may want a cup of coffee in the morning but we reach for a Mocha Grande Frappuccino. We may want an auto but we drive an Infinit QX56 SUV. We may want a new television set, but we take home Samsung's state-of-the-art fourth generation plasma screen TV with surround sound.

It's easy to confuse our wants and our needs. We're bombarded daily by advertising messages that boggle the mind and breed discontent. A typical half hour block of television programming contains eight minutes of advertising and as many as 16 commercials. If you spend three and a half hours a night watching television, you're exposed to almost an hour of advertising daily.

By the time you arrive at church on Sunday, you will have been exposed to 29 times more advertising messages than the message you'll hear from the pulpit in a 15-minute sermon.

When Jesus said we were to pray for our daily bread, He was encouraging us to pray daily so that we would have the wisdom and insight to know the difference between our needs and our wants. We need the daily devotion to prayer as a form of spiritual station break.