Our Heart in Worship

So if you are about to offer your gift to God at the altar and there you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar, go at once and make peace with your brother, and then come back and offer your gift to God.

Matthew 5:23–24

Christ’s focus in the Sermon on the Mount was to move religion from being a public performance to being a private and personal experience. He asked the tough questions — not how big is your public display of devotion, but how much of your heart have you let God have.

The “gift at the altar” referred not to some financial donation — those donations were made in special boxes of collection on the temple grounds, such as the one the widow placed her two “mites” in Luke 21:1–4. The altar was for the sacrificial lamb or another designated animal, and specifically was for the removal of sin. These sacrifices pictured the cross of Christ for our sins, and was the highest form of worship for the Old Testament Jew. But before that, even from Abel onward, people drew toward God in worship with the divinely given understanding that that could only be accepted through a blood sacrifice — “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin” (Heb 9:22).

To apply this in the New Testament era we live in today brings the issue to the sharing of Communion. If ever we come before the altar of God in our worship it is in this memorial observance to His death we call the Lord’s Supper, when we re-enact the sacrifice He made. There is the time that we enter into it not just for the sake of good luck in life, but to truly worship Him, to come before Him recognizing the death of Christ as our Sacrificial Lamb.

Yet for the worshiper, the right heart attitude was still essential. One may outward follow the dictates of the Word of God with precision, but God looks at the heart. David wrote in Psalm 51:16–17,

You do not want sacrifices,
or I would offer them;
you are not pleased with burnt offerings.
My sacrifice is a humble spirit, O God;
you will not reject a humble and repentant heart.

That Christ brought the matter of sincerity down to our relationships with our fellow humans is significant. This is why the Lord’s Supper is also called Communion, for it is to be observed in communion with other believers. Our relationship with others is still the most basic way to reveal what is going on in our hearts. What do we owe our fellow human? To live peacefully, to practice justice, to seek reconciliation, to forgive those who have sinned against us, to do unto others as we would prefer them to do unto us — these are the commands of scripture. The command here, however, is about what our brother thinks of us, not just what we think of him — if at worship we “remember your brother has something against you” are the words of Christ.

This speaks to the broken friendship, to the failed obligation, to damaging words spoken against another, to fractured relationships that have not been tried to be put right. That Communion calls us to get right with one another, to be reconciled when friendship and Christian obligation and fellowship have been breached, means it is of inestimable value. Paul wrote, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:18). There may be those who have something against us but do not say it publicly, instead they resort to anonymous letters, unsigned complaints, “poisoned pens” that leave us without the ability to be reconciled. Those brothers or sisters who write such things have the bigger problem, and we must settle in our own hearts whether there is any justice to their words. So we may not be able to resolve every issue, nor is God insisting this is required. “So far as it depends on you” means not that you make everyone happy — that is impossible anyway — but that you resolve in your heart not to live in conflict with others, especially those of the Christian family. That you forgive, and seek forgiveness when you have offended them.

John says that we cannot love God “whom we have not seen” if we hate our brother “whom we have seen” (1 John 4:20). The first test of the truthfulness of our worship is to be reconciled to our brother and sister, to be right with them in our hearts — not to hate — and in our relationship. On this matter God is unwilling to compromise.