Tracking in Mud

 

And Moses said, “Here I am.” “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”;

—Exodus 3:5

Nothing makes a mom crazier than having an unaware dog or unaware child with muddy feet run across her newly mopped floor. You can just hear her shout: “Stop! Stop! Stop! You’re tracking in mud! Take off your shoes!”

Have you ever spent time in prayer when you suddenly got interrupted by something or someone? And, before you could get back to prayer, you realized that you had already said or done something for which you needed forgiveness. Our feet get muddy so quickly that we barely notice. We easily become as unaware as that dog or child running over mom’s clean floor.

After the Passover Meal, on the night Jesus was betrayed and arrested, He began washing the feet of His disciples. When He came to Simon Peter, Peter objected to Jesus’ work. John 13:8-10 records what happened next:

Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

“Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”

Jesus answered, “A person who has had a bath needs only to wash his feet; his whole body is clean.”

What did Jesus mean?

It seems that those who had been baptized into Christ—had accepted the washing He gives to make them new creatures in Him—didn’t really need to continually come back for a thorough cleansing. In contrast however, Jesus realized that feet, in open sandals that walk the dusty roads of Palestine, get muddy over and over again.

We need this same spiritual cleansing today. We go to places we shouldn’t go. We step on others’ feelings. We wander away into enemy territory. We run after things that we don’t need. All our wanderings often act like quicksand to pull us down. We even suffer wounds to our spiritual feet that need cleaning and binding up.

No wonder, in Exodus 3:5, God told Moses to take off his muddy sandals. Like Moses, we need to realize that when we come before God to talk with Him in prayer, our muddy shoes carry the smell of sin. Jesus may not want any part of us at that moment. But, He never turns us away. He merely asks us to allow Him to wash our feet. When we do, we become accepted by Him and enabled by Him to wash others’ feet—to treat them as God has treated us—and to share fellowship with Him.

Like the hymn reminds us, we are “prone to wander, prone to leave the God we love.”¹ How marvelous it is that Jesus, even before He took our sins to the cross, reminded us, through this incident with His disciples, that our feet get dirty more often than we realize.

Daily, we personally need to take account of our sin and submit to the washing before we enter His holy presence. Likewise, when our church congregations come together in His presence, we corporately need to take account of our corporate sin by the “Confession” and receive God’s blessing through the “Assurance of Pardon.” In so doing, we remember that we need the “washing” by the hands of our Savior. Jesus wants to use us with clean shoes and feet!

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1 Robinson, Robert. “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Public domain.