“My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.” (James 2:1, ESV)
You carry a seating chart. You never wrote it down. You do not need to. It runs on its own.
On Sunday we opened James 2:1-13 together. The Seating Chart. This week we walk back through it, one thought a day. A sermon names the chart once. The week is where it actually changes.
James opens his second chapter with partiality. Of all the sins he could name first, he names this one. Here is why it matters. He calls Jesus the Lord of glory. The only glory any of us carries is the glory we receive from being joined to Him. The believer with the gold ring and the believer in worn clothes share the same glory. It comes from Jesus. Not from a salary. Not from a last name. Not from the row they sit in.
So favoritism is not a small inconsistency. When you rank people the way the world ranks them, you have forgotten where your own glory came from.
Watch your eyes this week. In the first second, before you say a word, your eyes do math. They read a person’s clothes. They read their car. They read their job. They decide whether this person is worth your time. That is the chart, running quietly.
Here is the hard part. When your eyes decide the person walking toward you is small, you have decided the glory of Christ in them is small. Favoritism is not first a behavior problem. It is a seeing problem.
James is not after your right answers. Most of us can recite the right words about Jesus. Lord of glory. Savior of the world. King of kings. James is after your eyes. A right answer about Jesus and a small view of Jesus can live in the same person. The week ahead is an invitation to close that gap.
Today: Watch your eyes for one day. Notice the first verdict they reach about a person before you speak. Name it to Jesus. Do not fix it yet. Just tell Him the truth about what you saw.