"Jesus answered, 'A person who has had a bath needs only to wash his feet; his whole body is clean...'" (John 13:10 NIV).
During the time I was growing up, my family attended a church that could be called "the guilt center." The unconscious thinking seemed to be, "One strike and you're out!" Every Sunday evening we had a ritual we secretly called "the charge."
At the end of the service we would all "charge" down to the altar and confess all the sins we had committed that week. Our Christian walk was a precarious balance between trusting God for His keeping power and our efforts and struggles to keep from failing the Lord and grieving Him by falling into sin.
When it becomes a matter of losing your salvation, the whole question of sin makes the Christian life a constant struggle with guilt, fear, condemnation, and insecurity.
In this verse Jesus is compassionately showing the difference between initial conversion and walking through this polluted world to the other world.
In the original Greek version, two words are used in contrast. The word translated bath is louo (loo'-o), the word used to describe bathing the whole body. Wash, the word Jesus used when speaking of the feet, is nipto (nip'-to), which refers to washing some part of the body such as the face, hands, or feet.
After you have bathed and are heading home, you only need to have your feet washed to clean away the dust of the road. To all of us this foot washing is a reminder of our need for cleansing from daily pollution.
We do not need a new salvation (a new "bath") every day, but we do need a cleansing ("washing") to rid us of the dust of the road we have picked up in our travels. This is what the foot washing represents—a removal of road dust.
Excerpt permission granted by Harrison House Publishers