If your teenager threw a wild party and completely trashed your living room, you wouldn’t be very impressed if they ignored the mess and instead sat in their bedroom reading a book on good manners. You would want them to come downstairs, apologize, and grab a trash bag. Yet, we often try to use our spiritual habits as a smokescreen to avoid cleaning up the messes we made in our active addiction. Jesus radically corrects this thinking. He tells us that we cannot ignore the wreckage of our relationships while pretending everything is fine with God. Making amends is so incredibly urgent that Jesus says we should pause our worship to go make things right. When we do the hard, humbling work of clearing our side of the street and apologizing without making excuses, we grab the trash bag. We prove our recovery is real, and we open the door to genuine peace. | 
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