vv 23-24 “So if you are presenting a sacrifice at the altar in the Temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God.”
Jesus invites people to recognise boundaries in their own lives, and impose some kind of exclusion on themselves when they recognise their sin. Says Jesus, ‘Exclude yourself from worship until you put right a relationship.’ It is not someone saying to us ‘You are a sinner, so you can’t come into church to worship’. It is our own conscience challenging us about past behaviour in such a way that we exclude ourselves until we make an opportunity to repent and seek reconciliation with a person we have offended. It is a kind of voluntary exclusion rather like the way we excluded ourselves from social activities when we contracted CoronaVirus.
This kind of self-imposed exclusion is the very stuff of recognising and repenting from sin. It challenges us to listen to what the Holy Spirit might whisper to us, or our own conscience shout at us. To say I can freely worship God and yet ignore human relationships is a total misunderstanding of what it means to be a Jesus-follower.
Ask yourself today about any relationships that might need to be mended.
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