mod_rewrite - forward slash 403

I did a mod_rewrite to remove the .php url extension. Works great except for when I load up pages with trailing "/" its returning a 403 error. This is the message in the logs:

[authzcore:error] [pid 10363] [client 47.17.42.195:38623] AH01630: client denied by server configuration: /var/www/html/example.com/publichtml/services/.php

Is there something wrong in the rewrite i'm overlooking?

Let me know if you need more details. Any help is greatly appreciated!