The Image We Carry
The Image We Carry
by Jonathan A. Powers
During his career as a pastor, Rev. David Seamands would often begin pastoral counseling sessions by handing a person a blank piece of paper and asking them to draw a picture of God. He claimed that he could learn more about a person’s idea of God from that one activity than in multiple hours of conversation with them. What characteristics and primary features did they highlight? How did that play into what they believed about the Christian life? Apparently by the end of his career he had a file with hundreds of these pictures, which symbolized thousands of hours spent talking with people about the character and nature of God.
This practice has always intrigued me. I’ve often wondered at different times what I would draw. What would my picture say about how I view and relate to God?
Perhaps I would draw God seated upon a throne. Such an image might emphasize His holiness, power, authority, and sovereignty. Yet it might also suggest distance, judgment, or even an image of God as one who primarily demands obedience.
Or perhaps I would imagine the familiar image from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, focusing on God’s creative power, majesty, and His reaching out toward humanity.
Maybe I would picture God as a loving father or grandfather watching over the world with care and concern. Or perhaps, in an attempt to avoid limiting God to any single image, I would simply draw a blank white square as a reminder that God is holy, mysterious, beyond human description, and incapable of being fully captured by any image we create.
Then, of course, there is a humorous option made popular by the movie Bruce Almighty: Morgan Freeman. While the cinematic representation is meant to be humorous on the one hand, on the other, Freeman’s characterization points toward a God who is approachable, wise, kind, and comforting.
The reality is that no image can fully capture God. Every picture is incomplete. Yet every image of God carries with it certain assumptions about who God is and how we are meant to relate to Him. Even my blank white square says something. How we see God profoundly influences how we understand Him, and ultimately how we live before Him.
Seamands’s exercise remains a powerful tool for self-examination. But perhaps there is another way to approach the question. Rather than asking what picture we would draw of God, we might ask what picture of God is being revealed through our lives. Perhaps the image we carry within us becomes visible in the way we worship, serve, love, and respond to God’s grace. Jesus’ Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25 invites us to consider exactly that.
The Parable of the Talents
The Parable of the Talents appears near the end of Matthew’s Gospel, immediately before Jesus’ betrayal and crucifixion. These are among His final public teachings. Significantly, His focus remains what it has been throughout His ministry: the Kingdom of God.
From the beginning of His public ministry, Jesus proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt. 4:17). The Sermon on the Mount unfolds the values of that Kingdom. Now, as Jesus approaches the cross, He offers His disciples final instructions concerning the coming Kingdom and the coming King.
The surrounding passages reinforce this theme. The Parable of the Ten Virgins calls believers to readiness for the bridegroom’s arrival. The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats emphasizes final judgment and accountability. Nestled between them is the Parable of the Talents. Together, these passages remind us that there can be no Kingdom without a King. If we misunderstand the King, we will inevitably misunderstand the Kingdom.
For many of Jesus’ followers, the expectation was that God’s Kingdom would arrive through political power and military victory. They longed for a restored kingdom like that of David. Yet Jesus was moving toward a cross. A crucified king hardly looked like a victorious ruler. But Jesus was redefining kingship. He came not to rule through coercion but to reign through self-giving love. He would conquer not by taking life but by laying down His own. His Kingdom would endure forever because it was founded on sacrificial love rather than political power.
In the Parable of the Talents, a master prepares to leave on a journey and entrusts his property to three servants. One receives five talents, another two, and a third receives one. Each amount is substantial, far more than an ordinary servant could ever accumulate independently.
Upon the master’s return, the first two servants report that they have doubled what was entrusted to them. The master responds with words every believer longs to hear:
“Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”
The third servant, however, buries his talent in the ground and returns only what was originally given. Claiming fear of the master, he explains that he viewed him as a harsh and demanding man. The master rebukes him and removes the talent from his care.
The Parable Reconsidered
For the longest time, this parable bothered me. Every time I encountered it, I found myself confused, as if it pointed toward a works-based righteousness. It was as if Jesus’ point was primarily a lesson about stewardship and faithfulness. God gives us gifts. We should use them diligently for His purposes. Those who serve Him faithfully are rewarded, while those who do not are condemned. While there is an element of truth in that reading, the more I sat with the passage, the more I realized something about my interpretation: it was almost entirely focused on the servants. The story became about what they did or did not do, how hard they worked, whether they were successful, and ultimately whether they were acceptable to their master. In many ways, it became a story about performance. The emphasis seemed to be on what we do for God in order to earn His favor.
As I have revisited the parable over the years, however, I have become increasingly convinced that this is not where Jesus intends us to place our attention. After all, this teaching comes right before Jesus’ betrayal and death as part of his instruction about the coming Kingdom. And if the Kingdom is the focus, then so is the King. The parable is not first and foremost about the servants, it is about the master. It is about the kind of King Jesus is and what His Kingdom is like. Once I began reading the story through that lens, I started noticing many things I had overlooked previously.
The first thing the story reveals is a giving master. Before the servants ever act, the master entrusts them with extraordinary resources. They do not earn these gifts. In fact, each servant receives more than he could likely accumulate in a lifetime. Nor do they deserve them. Usually, a master would leave his family or his overseers in charge of such a large amount of money. However, this master freely shares his wealth with these servants. He empowers them with something beyond themselves.
This is a picture of grace. The story begins not with human effort but with divine generosity.
What we see, then is that the first two servants recognize both the gift and the generosity of the giver. They accept the gift and their lives are transformed. Their actions then flow from participation in the master’s purposes. Their investment is not primarily about earning favor but about responding to the generosity they have already received. As a result, they enter into the joy of their master.
The third servant, however, neither understands the gift nor truly knows the giver. His perception of the master is distorted. Because he sees the master as harsh and demanding, the exact opposite of what the master has truly done, he responds not with gratitude but with self-protective fear. His actions reveal that he has misunderstood the character of the one who entrusted him with such generosity.
Ultimately, the issue is not merely what the servant did with the talent. The deeper issue is what he believed about the master.
The God We See
Once we realize that the central issue in the parable is whether the servants truly know the Master, we are confronted with a deeper question: Do we see God’s gifts as something to earn His favor, or as a gracious invitation to share in His life and Kingdom?
Many Christians are tempted to define their relationship with God primarily through performance. We assume that our worth is tied to what we accomplish for Him. We serve, work, and strive because we hope to earn His approval. Yet, the first two servants were not motivated by anxiety over acceptance. They acted because they had already experienced the generosity of the master. They knew him.
The third servant also wanted to avoid displeasing the master, but his understanding of the master was fundamentally flawed. He could not respond in gratitude because he did not recognize grace when it was placed in his hands.
The parable reminds us that everything we have comes from God. We own nothing independently. We earn nothing apart from His grace. Every gift, opportunity, talent, resource, and calling is entrusted to us by a generous King.
As we come to know Jesus Christ, we discover a King who gives rather than grasps, who serves rather than dominates, who conquers through sacrificial love rather than force. And as we behold that King, gratitude naturally overflows into lives of service, generosity, and love.
The question, then, is not simply whether we are using our gifts. The deeper question is whether we truly know the One who gave them.
Perhaps the image of God that matters most is not the one we would draw on a piece of paper. Perhaps the most important image is the one revealed in Jesus Christ, a King whose life, death, and resurrection show us the very heart of God. When we fix our eyes on Him, we discover a God who gives Himself freely to us through grace. And when we truly see that image, we cannot help but reflect it to the world around us.
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