Gracious heavenly Father, we come to You again, not merely because that’s what we normally do before a sermon, but because we really need Your help, I need Your help, that I would speak clearly, humbly, that Your Spirit would be at work to give unction and power to this Word, and we need help that we may hear and not be hearers only but doers. And so speak to us just what we need to hear, to correct us, to warn us, to encourage us, to save us. And we pray that Jesus would be glorified, and we pray in His Name. Amen.

For some strange reason, or at least it will seem strange to many of you, ever since I was in middle school I have really liked running. Yes, not just having run, but most days the actual act of running. I played one year of football in junior high and I realized I much preferred to be running away from people that running into people, and so since then, now for decades, I’ve been fairly consistent, though certainly not spectacular, runner. And over those decades I can think of several times when I realized almost too late that I was in somewhat serious danger.

One time was just a few years ago. I can’t recall if it was vacation or a pastors’ retreat. We were up by Ridge Haven, so in the western part of the state in the mountains, and I was running down a lonely dirt road, up and down hills, and went by a house that was sort of a house you might expect to see out in the hills and the mountains somewhere, and I noticed, now I’m not an expert on animals, but it seemed to me a pit bull was steadily marching toward me and no one in the house from which it was coming seemed to be concerned that their dog was running away or chasing down a pastor with many children to provide for.

I can never recall if it’s dog or a bear or when you’re supposed to seem really big and scary and when you’re not supposed to seem intimidating, but I stopped running, started slowly walking backward. It wasn’t sprinting at me, it was just a steady march with a sort of low growl and I started to think how hard could I kick. Probably not hard enough.

I turned around and sort of briskly started walking in the other direction and I could hear the pitter patter that the dog was following me and still sort of a low rumble. I didn’t dare to look back until eventually he must have figured that I was at a safe distance from his domain and he broke off his trot and turned around and went back to his home and I lived to tell the tale.

Another time I was running in a beautiful section of woods between Gordon Conwell, where I went to seminary, and Gordon College, where Tricia went to college. It was a crisp, sunny, beautiful, late fall afternoon in New England. It was an idyllic setting that I jogged off the trail and was scampering among the trees for some time. And at that time of the year, very late fall, the sun begins to set in New England around 4:30.

I remember one time the pizza place that I would always go to was mostly staffed by Muslims and I got to be friends with some of them and they said, oh, and Ramadan happened to fall in November or December, and talking to my friend about it, he said, “oh, it’s great to celebrate Ramadan here in New England in November, the sun’s never up, so I just sleep in and then I wait a few hours and I can eat.”

So the sun was setting and the shadows were getting long, and I realized that I had no idea where I was. Now this is before the days of GPS watches and smartphones. I didn’t have any running lights. I started to panic a little, wondering how cold I would be in my shorts as I had to, if I had to sleep under a pile of leaves. Decided that I would move as fast I could in whatever direction seemed to be going downhill. I was thinking if I go downhill, there’s a stream or a path or something that will eventually lead me back to something familiar,