Other Scriptural passages
Genesis 18:20-33
Colossians 2:6-15
Psalm 138
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. (Psalm 19:14)
There’s a poem entitled, “Footprints,” that illustrates our walk with Jesus. Many of you may even have a copy displayed in your home. It begins:
One night a man had a dream.
He dreamed that he was walking along the beach with the Lord.
Across the sky flashed scenes from his life.
He noticed two sets of footprints in the sand:
one belonging to him, the other to the Lord.
When the last of his life flashed before him,
he looked back at the Footprints in the sand.
He noticed that many times along the path
there was only one set of footprints.
He recalled that it happened at the very lowest
and saddest times in his life.
He questioned, “Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you,
you’d walk with me all the way.
Then why during the most troublesome times in my life
When I needed you most, would you leave me?”
The Lord replied, “My precious, precious child,
I love you and would never leave you.
During your times of trials and suffering,
when you see only one set of footprints,
it was then that I carried you.” (Anonymous).
I’d like to add to that image, because I believe there are other times in our lives when there should be only one set of footprints, but for a different reason.
During the times of temptation in our lives, often our footprints wander away from those of Jesus as we leave the path he’s on and wander into the dangers of the surf zone or the rocks.
There are hazards and dangerous creatures living in the rocks and under the water in the surf zone. I’ve seen many injuries from people slipping on the rocks or stepping on sting rays in the surf. But I’ve never seen an injury from someone walking on the flat sand at the edge of the beach.
During some of the times of temptation in our lives, we don’t wander away from Jesus. There is one set of footprints, because we are walking in his footprints, following him exactly, living as he lived and doing what he did.
When we choose to follow Jesus, we are walking in his steps.
When I was being taught how to clear a minefield our instructor told us to step precisely in the footprint left by the person in front of us. The concept was simple: since the person in front of us stepped on a spot that didn’t set off a landmine, the only spot guaranteed to be safe was the ground under that footprint. Stepping anywhere else meant risking death.
The person at the front of the patrol is called the “point man.” His job is to make sure he clears any mines or booby traps before moving forward. Everyone else’s job is to walk where he walks and step where he steps.
When we say we’re following Jesus, living as Jesus lived and doing what Jesus did, we are letting Jesus be the point man in our lives.
Our Collect today refers to God as our protector, who will guide us through the dangers of this temporary world so we can enter the joy of the next eternal one.
Walking in someone else’s footprints is also often easier than trudging through new ground.
Anyone who has walked through deep snow recognizes that it’s easier to walk along snow that’s been packed down than through a snow drift.
Unlike our own, Christ’s footprints aren’t always easy to see, are they? We can’t see them from a distance. We have to be right there with Jesus or they fade away. And when you’re walking that closely with someone, you’re usually communicating with them aren’t you?
You may not be talking about anything really important, but you’ll be talking to the person you’re walking with. Can you imagine walking that closely to someone that you can actually step in their footprints, without talking to them?
Or driving around without speaking to anyone else in the car? Silently strolling through the mall with someone? Weird isn’t it? Yet that sums up the prayer lives for most of us who claim to be walking with Jesus.
Prayer was important to Jesus; it kept him close to the Father. We can learn a lot from his example. After all, his disciples did.
They saw Jesus praying all the time, and noticed the benefit it had for him. He would go off by himself and then come back refreshed and recharged, ready to do the Father’s will. The standard repetition of scripture that they had known all their lives did not have the same effect, so they asked Jesus to show them how to pray.
He began with “Abba” or “Father,” which really translates more accurately in our culture as “Daddy.”
He reaffirmed his recognition of God’s glory and his belief in the final day of judgment in which God’s glory will be displayed before all of creation, undeniably, by saying “hallowed be your name.”
He told the Father of his longing for his perfect heavenly realm by saying “Your kingdom come.”
He recognized God’s providence from the time of Moses and the manna he provided each day for the Israelites, as well as our need for the Father’s sustenance in our own lives each day by saying, “Give us each day our daily bread.”
Then Jesus broadsides us with a requirement for action on our part. He says, “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” Do we really?
Sin is choosing to do our own will instead of God’s will. It’s a short, concise definition that is also found on page 848 in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Usually when we recite the Lord’s Prayer, we use the word “trespasses” for both our actions against God and the actions of others against us.
In Matthew’s Gospel he uses the same word for each, ὀöåßëïíôé (“Hop-SAY-loh”), which means “to owe.” But Luke describes our indebtedness to God as “sin” or “missing the mark” as in an archer missing the target he’s aiming at. Luke chooses the word ἁìáñôßáò (“HAH-mar-tee-as”).
We sin against God, but we become indebted to others when we wrong them. Logically, we really can’t become indebted to God, because we have no means by which to pay any debt. Being “extra good” doesn’t remove the black marks on our souls. We’re supposed to be “extra good” all the time.
And even though other people have the means to repay what they owe us — to repair whatever wrong they have done — we are supposed to forgive or actually “send off” what others owe us for their wrongs against us. We are asking our heavenly Daddy to “send off” the sins we’ve committed against him.
I’m not going to get too deep into grammar, but I discovered something that I think is very important for us to realize. When we are asking God to forgive (ἀößçìé) our sins, the verb tense in Greek is one that means both now and continuously ongoing. We don’t have a verb tense like that in English, but they do in Greek.
The verb tense for our forgiving others is just simple, present tense. It’s over as soon as we do it at that moment. So we are asking God to obligate himself to continuously forgive us based on our agreement to forgive everyone who has wronged us at the moment we say this prayer.
Jesus is telling us that our Father in heaven will forgive us forever, if we will just commit now to giving up the grudges we are carrying against others. That’s a pretty good deal.
The last line of the prayer Jesus teaches his disciples is “And do not bring us to the time of trial.” Avoiding temptation is the best and only guaranteed way to resist it.
Notice that in this prayer all the pronouns are plural. It’s a family prayer, not an individual one. Even when we pray alone, we are praying for the whole family of God when we say it.
The disciples realized the importance and the power of prayer. We, as more modern and educated people, tend to forget or even reject the concept.
Prayer is an ongoing connectivity with God, not a “honey-do” list for the creator. God wants an ongoing relationship with us. The apostle Paul says we should pray continuously, without ceasing, and many people mistake that to mean we should recite formal prayers over and over again.
It doesn’t mean that at all. We should be like teenagers on the telephone. They spend their whole day with their friends, and then come home and call them to talk about things we think are really unimportant.
Our prayers with God should be a lot like that. When we see something that catches our attention like a sunset or forest or mountain, we can tell God we like it. After all, he made them for us. When we’re frustrated or hurt, we can vent at God like King David did in the Psalms.
Philip Yancey writes in his book, Prayer, that
“… Keeping company with God also includes expressing the times of trial and frustration. In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye keeps up a running dialogue with God, giving credit for the good things but also lamenting all that goes wrong.
In one scene he sits dejected by the side of the road with his lame horse.
“I can understand it,” he says to God, “when you punish me when I am bad; or my wife because she talks too much; or my daughter because she wants to go off and marry a Gentile, but … What have you got against my horse?!”
Sometimes we misinterpret the purpose of a prayer. The response we expect isn’t necessarily the response we get. Anyone else experience that?
Tony Campolo is a well-known Christian preacher and writer. He tells about the time he was asked to speak at a Pentecostal college.
Before the service, eight men had Tony kneel so they could place their hands on his head and pray. He was glad to have the prayer, but each of them prayed a long time, and the longer they prayed the more they pushed on Tony’s head.
And then they even seemed to wander in their prayers. One of the men didn’t even pray for Tony, he prayed for some guy he was concerned about.
He began to pray and said, “Dear Lord, you know Charlie Stoltzfus. He lives in that silver trailer down the road a mile. You know the trailer, Lord, just down the road on the right-hand side.”
Tony wanted to interrupt and tell him that God already knew where the guy lived and didn’t need directions, but he just knelt there trying to keep his head upright. The prayer went on: “Lord, Charlie told me this morning he’s going to leave his wife and three kids. Step in and do something, God. Bring that family back together.”
With that, the prayer time ended and Tony went on to preach at the college chapel. Things went well and he got in his car and began to drive home. As he drove onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he saw a hitchhiker and felt compelled to pick him up.
As Tony recalls it, “We drove a few minutes and I said: ‘Hi, my name’s Tony Campolo. What’s yours?’ He said, ‘My name is Charlie Stoltzfus.’
I couldn’t believe it I got off the turnpike at the next exit and headed back. He got a bit uneasy with that and after a few minutes he said, ‘Hey mister, where are you taking me?’
I said, ‘I’m taking you home.’
He narrowed his eyes and asked, ‘Why?’
I said, ‘Because you just left your wife and three kids, right?’
That blew him away. ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.’
With shock written all over his face, he plastered himself against the car door and never took his eyes off me. Then I really did him in as I drove right to his silver trailer.
When I pulled up, his eyes seemed to bulge as he asked, ‘How did you know that I lived here?’ I said ‘God told me.’ (I believe God did tell me.) When he opened the trailer door his wife exclaimed, ‘You’re back! You’re back!’
He whispered in her ear and the more he talked, the bigger her eyes got. I said with real authority, ‘The two of you sit down. I’m going to talk and you two are going to listen’ Man, did they listen . . . That afternoon I led those two young people to Jesus Christ.”
Somebody prayed a believing prayer Faith is what moves the hand of God. (Sermoncentral.com)
Prayer keeps our eyes and ears and hearts open to seeing God at work in our lives. It helps us learn to recognize his voice. It helps us to see his footprints so we can walk in them.
Before we get too cocky and think that because we’re walking with Jesus we’re some kind of special Christians who are way ahead of everyone else, take a look at the last sentence of our Gospel passage for today. Jesus says, “If you then, who are evil …”
Jesus is talking to his disciples who have been following in his footsteps as he travels from town to town spreading the Good News about the kingdom of God! These are the same disciples who just two paragraphs before were asking Jesus to show them how to pray. They had left there homes and belongings to follow Jesus, and he describes them as evil.
It’s not a misprint. We are all evil. Left to our own inclinations we will choose what we want to do over what God wants us to do almost every time. We are evil because we sin.
Sinners are evil people and we are all sinners. We are saved by the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, not by anything we can do, and definitely not by being “good persons.” We cannot be “good persons” because we commit sin, and the commission of sin is evil.
We tend to set the bar for evil so high that only a handful of people like Josef Stalin or Adolph Hitler meet the criteria, while the rest of us merely commit some “youth indiscretions” that God will understand and forgive once we explain them to him on Judgment Day.
The truth is that Jesus has set the bar for evil where it really belongs: so low that we step over it continuously.
The apostle Paul tells us in Romans that no one is righteous, not one of us. He also tells us that God chose to save us while we are still steeped in sin, in other words, while we are evil — not after we get our act together and clean ourselves up.
We need to understand that following Jesus is what we should do because we have been saved by him, not as a means to become saved by him.
As disciples of Jesus Christ it is our duty to walk in his footprints and follow him. It’s not just a good idea, it’s our obligation. Our actions are the salt and light for others in this world. If our faith in Jesus Christ doesn’t make us behave more like him, then our faith is meaningless.
We must pick up our cross and follow Jesus each day, through all the challenges we face at home and at work. We must live as Jesus lived and do what Jesus did if we are truly his disciples.
It’s not easy to choose to follow the safe footprint in the sand and ignore the rocks and surf zone that this world offers us. Rather than “go along to get along” we should take a stand when people use God’s name as a curse around us. Or when someone is mistreating their spouse or child.
Jesus is our guide and protector, leading us to eternal safety. Many times he leads us through temporal danger on the path to eternal joy. When we walk in his footprints, we must stand tall as we walk our Christian journey, no matter where that path leads us.
While I was searching for the Footprints poem, I found a reprise that someone else had written:
Buttprints in the Sand
One night, I had a wondrous dream;
One set of footprints there was seen.
The footprints of my precious Lord,
But mine were not along the shore.
But then some stranger prints appeared,
And I asked the Lord, “What have we here?”
“Those prints are large and round and neat,
But, Lord, they are too big for feet.”
“My child,” He said in sombre tones.
“For miles I carried you alone.
I challenged you to walk in faith,
But you refused and made me wait.
You disobeyed, you would not grow,
The walk-of-faith you would not know.
So I got tired and fed up,
And there I dropped you on your butt,
Because in life, there comes a time,
When one must fight, and one must climb,
When one must rise and take a stand,
Or leave their butt prints in the sand.”
(Author unknown. The Storybin from ozsermonillustrations.com)
God bless you all.
