It is not enough just to confess the sin to God, and yet to take no steps to be reconciled to your brother. True repentance involves more than just confessing the sin to God; it may also involve admitting your fault to another person, which you might find even more difficult; it involves apologizing, and making up your mind that you are going to stop some hostile course of action; it involves changing your inner attitude to that person, and aiming to obey Christ’s command that we love one another. Only then can you come back and offer meaningful worship to God.
It will not be hard to identify what these causes of offence are. When they happened, our conscience spoke to us, and we must not suppress them by arguing against them. We have got to be scrupulously honest with ourselves and with the Lord. This is still about anger, but anger gets mixed up with all kinds of other hostilities and disputes. We may manufacture grievances against others in order to justify our anger, and all these will also have to be set aside if we are to obey what Christ tells us here. Do I give some moments to think what I have done? If you are engaged in worship and you know there is some breach, deal with it.
This tells us that there is some preparation for worship even before we come into the house of God. In the graphic format of the illustration, the lateness of the realisation is not allowed to be a reason for proceeding anyway with worship; it must be sorted out first. This shows the importance of reconciliation to God. We may equally interpret this as a clear resolve to sort out the matter at the earliest possible opportunity. But it would be much better to have thought about this and resolved it out before we even came to worship. Coming into the house of God involves more than just using our legs; it involves preparing our hearts to meet with God.