"The Image that Matters"

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently."

That’s a quote from Warren Buffet, one of the world’s richest men when speaking to the importance of reputation. Of course, a reputation is the overall perception or opinion that others have about a person or a group or an organization. And that opinion is based on things like actions, words, and character over time. It is how someone is known or regarded in society, often shaped by both personal behavior and external influences.

Someone who has been working to build a reputation is a twenty-six year old man named Jimmy Donaldson. Donaldson has amassed for himself an incredible following of 375 million followers on YouTube. Citing a poll from a few years ago, 70% of respondents said that they view Donaldson positively. Only 12% responded unfavorably. So that reputation that Donaldson’s built for himself has given him the YouTube account with the most subscribers and that has provided him a way to amass a net worth of over $100m. Of course, few know this man by his actual name, but know him better by the name MrBeast.

Now, let me tell you a story about a young woman who had carefully built her reputation at work. She was known as dependable, professional, and always put together. Her social media was spotless—every post crafted to reflect success and happiness. But behind the scenes, she was exhausted, anxious, and carrying burdens no one saw.

One day, an unexpected crisis hit—something she couldn’t hide. She made a mistake at work and that mistake led to harsh criticism. More than that harsh criticism, whispers about her “lack of professionalism” spread. The young woman felt like her carefully polished image had shattered. With tears in her eyes, she confided in a friend, “I worked so hard to build a good reputation, but none of it really showed who I am inside.”

That moment of brokenness revealed a deeper truth and an affirmation of what Buffet said: reputations that have taken time and careful effort to build and cultivate can be lost in an instant.

And that’s a bit of a fearful thing, isn’t it? It’s fearful because in 2025, our reputations map directly on to whether people think we’re credible. Our reputations influence opportunities. Our reputations even influence our earning potential.

And since the image that we portray and our reputations matter so much, let me ask you, what are you known for? How do your actions and words and character shape the opinion that people have about you? And when you boil that down,

Are you displaying what truly matters?

Well, today we’re going to explore what it means to display an image that truly matters and we’re going to accomplish this through the study of two passages of Scripture, one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament. The first will come from the Old Testament, so turn with me to the book of 1 Samuel. It’s from there that we will begin to address the first heading, which is

The Problem with Outward Image

Now, let me explain this term, “outward image” and how it relates to a reputation. Remember, a reputation is the opinion or perception that others have of us. A good reputation isn’t an evil or sinful thing, by the way. You’ll find God encouraging us to recognize that a good reputation is important. Take Proverbs 22:1 as an example, which says

Proverbs 22:1 ESV

A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.

So, a good reputation is important, but we’ve lost sight of the heart of what God is saying about the importance of a good reputation. So, at times, in order to influence the opinion others have of us…or saying that another way, to control our reputation, we can fall into a cycle like that young woman I mentioned a few minutes ago. We spend a whole bunch of energy and effort and time focusing on looking good. And I don’t mean just looking good in terms of dressing stylish when I say that. And we can fall to that trap because we live in a world obsessed with appearances. And no, this isn’t just for celebrities. Regular people are obsessed with keeping appearances! From carefully curated social media profiles that only depict ourselves in our best groomed and happiest times to resumes packed with achievements, people go to great lengths to manage how others perceive them. We filter our photos, rehearse our words, and carefully guard our reputations—hoping to project an image of success, confidence, and control.

So we try to polish up the exterior so that we look so great all because that reputation matters so much. But do you know what lays beneath that polished exterior for so many? Anxiety. Insecurity. The exhaustion that comes from the pressure to maintain the "perfect" image. Whether it’s in the workplace, at school, or even in church, there’s a constant temptation to be more concerned with what people think of us than with who we truly are before God.

Now, this obsession with appearances isn’t something new to humanity and I want to show you this from the book of 1 Samuel. I want to do a brief character study of someone named Saul that we’re introduced to in this book, and we’re going to only briefly interact with some key points in the book this morning, so first turn with me to 1 Samuel 8. We’re going to look at 1 Samuel 8:5, and while you make your way there, allow me give you some background.

In the time before the arrival of Jesus on earth, God had set apart a nation of people who were the weakest nation in terms of economic and military strength. This was Israel, the nation of the Hebrew people. In setting them apart from the rest, God was saying that the Hebrews didn’t need to worry about their image and their reputation in terms of what the other nations of the world valued because God was going to reveal himself through them and in so doing, give them an image and reputation that really matters. Their reputation on the world stage wasn’t going to come by the largest economy or the largest army because their strength was the Lord God himself.

And so one part of a unique reputation for the Hebrews was that they did not have a human being as a king. God was their King. Now, God did set apart human beings for specific leadership duties within the Hebrew nation. There were religious leaders known as priests who would serve as intermediaries between the people and God to deal with sin offerings so that the people could receive forgiveness from God. There were prophets who would hear the voice of God and speak the word of God to the people. And in the time of history that 1 Samuel is situated in, there were also leaders known as judges. Now, when you hear that, don’t jump to an image of men or women in black robes with a gavel in their hand. A judge was someone who God appointed for a temporary period of time to lead Israel out of the trouble they got themselves into and in so doing, the judge would lead Israel back to God. When the judge’s purpose had been fulfilled, that was it.

So the book of 1 Samuel comes in the era in Israel’s history when God was still appointing judges to deliver the nation and Samuel is a person that God actually appoints to serve in three roles: he’s a prophet of God, a priest of God, and a judge. So Samuel hears God’s voice, speaks God’s word, intercedes for the people, and is who God uses to deliver the nation from the hand of the Philistines. So time goes by, Samuel’s getting old and Samuel’s attempted to pass on some of his responsibilities to his own sons, but they turn out to be a couple of guys who abuse the power that came with their position and the rest of the nation knew that. And the rest of the nation also started playing the comparison game, comparing their outward image to the image of the other nations around them. Sin usually sees us do that comparison stuff because we have a deep-down fear of being different from someone else and before long, the people come to Samuel the prophet and judge and they said to him

1 Samuel 8:5 ESV

“Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.”

What are they saying? I think they’re saying two things. First, “We’re anxious about what life looks like when you’re gone.” And second, “There are a lot of kingdoms around us who appear to be more successful than us, so let’s make a change.” In other words, let’s try to control the image we project as a nation. That desire to control an outward image wasn’t just limited to the people.

So, if your Bible’s open to 1 Samuel 8, you’ll find that God grants the request for a king and if you look on to 1 Samuel 9, you’ll discover that the king that God selects perfectly meets the image that the Hebrew people want to project to the rest of the world. Everyone was ready to follow him. His name was Saul. What makes him someone that others were ready to follow? Well, we notice in 1 Samuel 9 that the Bible says Saul is a man who came from wealth. A rich king has got to be a positive if we’re wanting to influence the opinion others have of us, right? And what else we find out about him doesn’t hurt either. Saul’s a heartthrob.

So, this Saul is made king and right out of the gate, things are going well. Saul’s got some great bullet points for his resume. He leads the army in a victory against an enemy. That had to send a message to everyone, right! Then for the folks at home, he does the right thing by going right to church after that great victory.

Saul must’ve been checking all the right boxes because after all that, Samuel gives a retirement speech to the people. But, you keep reading, and things aren’t as rosy for Saul any more. Life gets difficult. All that outward image management Saul and Israel had been doing was being noticed by others, particularly the rival Philistine nation. God had worked through Samuel to deliver the nation from the Philistines before, but Saul was in charge now and the Philistines were going to test the new guy. And reports began to come in about Philistine troop counts and they greatly outnumbered Saul’s army.

So anxieties starting rising and according to 1 Samuel 13, people started scattering from Saul. And Saul starts to realize that the image he had as the heartthrob king from money was going to do very little to motivate an army to stick around. I have to think that Saul’s starting to think to himself, how can you be a king if there’s no one there to follow you? So, Saul has to do some image management. He’s got to enhance the opinion people have of him or else this whole thing about being king might go away before it every really got started. So Saul looks to the playbook he’s seen Samuel, God’s judge and prophet and priest, and Saul does something he had no God-given authority to do. Even though he is not a priest, Saul begins to make offerings to God himself. He’s manipulating people to believe that he’s got God in his corner and since if God is for us, who are the Philistines?

There’s so much more in 1 Samuel about Saul and his attempts to manage his outward image, but I’ll say this in summary… Saul turns out to be a royal mess. Saul is concerned with what people think about him. He wants to be liked and well thought of and have a bunch of people following him. He becomes enslaved to that and it costs him everything.

Now, I hope you’re starting to think about what this is telling us about God and what this is telling us about us. We know that God is perfect and all-knowing and so, we might wrestle and wonder, “Did God not know that Saul was going to fail?” Of course God knew! “Then why did God anoint him as king?” To show tell us something about ourselves. To show us that if we get wrapped up in managing the opinion that people have about us as individuals or even the opinion that people have of this church, it’ll be to our downfall.

It’ll be our downfall because what we’re doing in managing our image, managing what others think of us, is we’re seeking to glorify ourselves. We’re trying to show our greatness and at the root of that, we’ve bought on to the idea that we are self-sufficient. Our character has not been shaped by God and conformed to the image of Jesus, but our character is still looking like the image of the world. Look at what God says about the outward image we try to project and what really matters to the Lord

1 Samuel 16:7 ESV

“Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

You and I are prone to look at all the things that gives the appearance that they are the total package, right? We elevate good looks or physical strength or exceptional intelligence or eloquent speaking. And if we only have some or none of those, we still so badly want others to think we have it together and are complete, right? And yet, God isn’t looking at the outside stuff, is he? Where’s he looking? On the heart. And when the Lord looks on the heart, he’s looking for hearts that are submitted to him and have learned that God’s power is made perfect in what the world perceives to be weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).

So, that’s a warning to us about the danger of trying to control what others think about us. And so we ask, if we’re supposed to resist the idea of building a reputation based on what the world values, what then does God tell us we should be known for?

That brings us to this: we are

Called to be Salt and Light

Now, in addressing this heading, I invite you to turn from 1 Samuel to Matthew 5:13-16. And as you make your way there, if you’ve been following along with me thus far, we’ve addressed the concern about how any of us or even this church family may become obsessed with maintaining the perfect image so that we control what others think of us. And I want to bring balance to anyone who may be thinking that we should run to the other extreme and abandon any concern for our reputation.

We’ve already established that God does say that reputation matters. It matters because, whether we realize it or not, people are watching how we act and live and speak. This becomes an issue when we knowingly or unknowingly aim to project a reputation that brings glory to ourselves. In contrast, we must be known as people, who by our actions and the way we live and the way we speak, point others to Jesus. See, when Jesus saves someone, he calls them to follow him and live as a citizen of his kingdom for the rest of their lives. Jesus has put his name on every person he has saved. And because of that, Jesus actually has an expectation that in putting his name on us, that we would add to his reputation, not take away from it.

Now, listen to what Jesus is teaching on this subject. He’s speaking to people who are following him when he says

Matthew 5:13 ESV

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.

Think about salt for a moment. How do you use it? You use it as a preservative or you use it to enhance the flavor of something, right? Jesus is calling you and I who are Christians salt of the earth. We are the preservative and the flavor of earth. Our reputations as Christ-followers should be to preserve truth and to enhance the world around us by sharing the love of God.

Chew on that for a moment while we hear what else Jesus has to say to his followers

Matthew 5:14–16 ESV

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Let’s think about light now. What does light do? Light pushes back darkness! Darkness cannot exist where light is present. Jesus calls you and I who are Christians the light of the world! What we do and say and how we live should reveal Jesus to those around us like a bright and shining light.

The reputation we should have isn’t to be the best-looking or brightest or what have you, but to be salt and light. So, this works itself out in so many circumstances. Whether you’re a student or if you’re in a workplace where everybody gossips and backbites, as a Christian you can be light by establishing a culture of encouragement. When you hear that negativity, you can redirect that to positive conversation. There’s so much despair and division these days, but you and I can choose to be salt by serving the least of these in Devine. You can be light in your home by establishing a weekly family devotion time where you read a passage from the Bible and pray for one another. We are called to make Jesus visible to those around us! Are you shining the light of Jesus or are you blending into the darkness? Because we’re challenged to

Live for God’s Glory, Not Our Own

Let me recap some ground we’ve covered this morning.

We’ve seen from the example of King Saul and the nation of Israel, that it is so easy to align ourselves to valuing what the world values. So a takeaway for us from that was that we shouldn’t be caught up our looks, our strength, our influence, or whatever else falls under the sense of projecting a so-called desirable image and we should be more concerned with what God’s concerned with: our personal character. Where our hearts are at. Then we also just saw that what our reputation should actually be centered on is pointing others to Jesus by what we do.

Baseball’s back in season now and since it is, can I say that we should be “knocking it out of the park” every time we step up to the plate on matters of our hearts and our reputations? We should be the leading the moral wing of society, letting our God-shaped actions do the influencing of our reputations, right? But to actually pull that off is easier said than done. Even if you’re known as a good person, do you really think that you can do what’s right all the time? You have bad days. I know I do. The weight of projecting a great image that meets the expectations of this world is crushing when you recognize that you’re gonna make mistakes. You’re only kidding yourself if you think you’re gonna do what’s right all the time for the rest of your life. And if you can’t be perfect, well then…what will others think about you?

Keeping with the baseball theme, if you get a hit every time you’ve been up to bat, you’d have a perfect batting average. We’d say you’re batting a thousand. And in life, the sad reality is that no matter how much effort we put in, none of us will ever bat a thousand. And in eternal matters, even if we can dupe people into believing good things about us, we cannot dupe God because he looks at our hearts. And since none of us can ever be perfect, that puts us at odds with God. It leaves us separated from him.

But there is one Person who batted a thousand. There’s one Person lived life perfectly. Jesus. He is God. He’s always existed and everything was created through Jesus. All the power and knowledge and goodness and love exists in him and yet, counter to what someone might think, that stuff didn’t consume Jesus. If Jesus were physically walking among us today as he did two thousand years ago and he had a social media account, he wouldn’t post a perfectly filtered selfie with the caption, “Another perfect day! Perfect hair, perfect skin, and perfect character!”

Jesus’ heart is perfect. He has no flaw in him like you and I do. You and I are not perfect and the fear of being humiliated by our flaws is what drives us to control what others think about us. And in what is an aspect of great irony in the gospel is that though Jesus was sinless, Jesus was still humiliated, for us. You see, Jesus took upon himself all the sinful aspects of our lives, all the stuff that we wish stay secret and humiliates us. All the times we inflate our sense of self or we exaggerate our ability so others will think good of us so we might be glorified in the eyes of man — all that Jesus became. All of that he became, for us. 2 Corinthians 5:21 “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Jesus Christ willingly and gladly went to his cross, guilty of nothing, so that you and I, through faith in him, can be made complete. So that we can abandon the feeling of projecting an image to make ourselves look good because Jesus clothes us in his righteousness, covering our failures and flaws with himself. He did this so that through Jesus, we can have a relationship with God.

And with what Jesus has done for us, he’s extending to each of us the opportunity to be set free from our pasts and the opportunity to be set from from the chains of other people’s opinions of us. You see, this freedom that I’m talking about, it comes about by the forgiveness of God made available through the cross of Jesus. Forgiveness is powerful. And if we live our lives through the forgiveness that Jesus gives, then we’re liberated from the opinions of others because the opinion about you that really matters is well and good. There is no being greater than God and when you’re his child through faith in Jesus Christ, when he looks upon you and sees all your life, he sees only Jesus because Jesus has wiped your slate clean. That’s what the cross has done for us.

And every time we fall prey to becoming consumed by projecting a favorable outward image or when our reputation is about us and not Jesus, we are operating counter to the cross. But when we’ve come to Jesus, and live our lives through him, it’s possible to not fall prey to these things. You see, the more you seek Christ, the more you saturate yourself in his Bible, the more you let the Spirit God’s given you by faith work on you, the more the whole new set of desires and ways God has for your life will rise to the top and the more they will result in displaying an image that really matters. People will see Jesus in you.

See, if we don’t preach the cross to ourselves every day, we’re going to fall back in to territory where we want to live for ourselves and the fame that others give. But

Through Jesus, our hearts are set free to live for God’s glory.

So, you really need to ask for God to help you answer this: when people see you, who do they see? Do they see Jesus?

Imagine you walk into a house and see a beautiful mirror hanging on the wall. But when you look into it, it’s covered with dirt, dust, and fingerprints. The mirror was designed to reflect an image clearly, but because it’s tarnished, the reflection is distorted.

In the same way, we were created to reflect Christ to the world, but when we focus on our own image—our reputation, social status, or appearance—our ability to reflect Jesus becomes clouded. Jesus calls us to be the "light of the world" and the "salt of the earth," meaning our reputation should point people to him, not to ourselves.

What is clouding your reflection of Christ? Are you more concerned about how the world sees you or how God sees you?

This week, focus less on how the world sees you and more on how you reflect Christ. Ask yourself, “Would people recognize Jesus in me by the way I live, speak, and love?” Choose one way to let your light shine—whether it’s through kindness, integrity, or standing up for your faith. And, let’s encourage one another in our church family to reflect the image that matters.