Leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. The instruction is concrete and action-oriented: leave the gift, go, reconcile, then come back and offer. The gift left at the altar is not abandoned but waiting — the worship will happen, but only after the relational repair that makes the worship genuine. The sequence communicates the priority: reconciliation before religious performance, not because the religious performance is unimportant but because it is hollow without the relational integrity that should underlie it. Amos 5:21–24 records God's rejection of Israel's religious festivals precisely because they were conducted by people who practiced injustice — Matthew 5:24 is the personal-scale application of the prophetic principle.

COMMUNITY REFLECTIONS

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