First Impressions (Friday Devotional)

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.”

- Matthew 7:1

You never get a second chance, goes the cliché, to make a first impression. It’s practical, albeit pessimistic, advice—people make snap judgments the moment they meet you, so you owe it to yourself to put your best foot forward. How you look, what you say, and who you’re with determines what people will think of you upon introduction. And once the judgment is made, it’s hard to change it.

As pragmatic as that advice is when you think of yourself as the one being judged, it’s poisonous when you start to position yourself as the judge. No matter how good you think your intuition about people is, no matter what gifts of discernment you possess, people can surprise you. Indeed, God constantly works through the most surprising people.

Christmas is an annual reminder of this. If someone from Bethlehem had wandered into the nativity scene the night Jesus was born and made a snap judgment, they would have seen a teenaged mother and her cuckolded husband welcoming their baby into the world with no one to celebrate with but some rough-necked day laborers. They would have seen a couple so unprepared for parenthood that they hadn’t even gotten found a place to stay that night, much less a crib or a going home outfit. They would have pitied this poor child and assumed he was destined for a life of little value.

Armed with information and perspective, we know better than our Bethlehem bystander—we know that Jesus’s humble birth was God’s signal that He is with us, no matter our social station. We know that God chose people of humble obedience to raise the Son of God, that He welcomed shepherds to greet the birth of the Good Shepherd, and that both the goodness and the greatness of God were on display that holy night. But none of that comes across in a first impression.

In his famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus cautioned us not to judge lest we be judged. God makes a habit of working with lowly, messy, unexpected people to accomplish His purposes, and those who let their personal judgments determine people’s worthiness are liable to miss out on the chance to see grace at work. You may never get a second chance to make a first impression with some people—but Jesus’s birth, life, death, and resurrection remind us that we do not worship the God of first impressions, but the God of second chances.