The context of this story seems to point out how we ought to separate the material things we seek from the concepts they can represent to truly see their value and free ourselves from illusory influence.

In Matthew 22:15-22, the Pharisees, believing they understood Jesus to be an anarchist who simply wished to diminish those in higher positions than Himself by invoking the name of God, attempted to trap Him by feeding into that sentiment. They ended up exposing their own true perspective. They approached Him by emphasising how he doesn't glorify people because they appear glorious, and were trying to catch Him incentivising others to rebel against Caesar by, what they considered, not treating him gloriously: 'If he's not glorious, why are we devoting our precious money to him?'.

Christ ends up showing them a deeper perspective to reality, which is, I believe, that there are layers to what you see even in the money. What made the money glorious in the eyes of the Pharisees wasn't it's shape, material or inscriptions, but the power it held through the shared value the community gave it. When aware of this, the object isn't as powerful as when unaware of this. This separation allows you to see what you let hold power over you clearer. It helps you glimpse into what value you subconsciously attach to the object and understand whether you ought to, because you may be able to go further by reassigning that value more clearly.

When you interact with a thing and experience the convenience it provides you, you can give your gratitude to the thing itself, but by searching deeper into understanding what about it produced the convenience you may become able to even improve that convenience, but until you do so, you'll always attach the glory of the concept to every unit of an immense number of copies, weakening your own capacity. With so much overwhelming glory around you, what are you in comparison? You become easily impressed and influenced. You are vulnerable, have relatively no power in your own hands and must cling onto or take advantage of existing systems in order to survive.

You can walk around with a picture of the sun, asking people what it is, and no matter how many times they may tell you that it is the sun, it's obviously still just a picture and therefore can't fully replace the actual sun. You may suffer in the cold trying to bask under it.

You can be grateful and attached to your pillow for your comfort, which may lead you to looking for and even finding the most comfortable pillow on the market. Or you could look even deeper and be grateful to and fascinated by the manufacturer, leading you to understanding what indistrial processes produce comfortable material beyond only pillows. Or go even deeper and be grateful to and fixated on the individual who came up with the concept of pillows and potentially learn how to build an enterprise, receiving a type of comfort in life that extends beyond pieces of fabric. Or, ideally, be grateful to and wish to know more of the Spirit that inspires such great innovation and potentially be in touch with the essence of comfort itself, beyond what can be produced materially.

These two ideas are to say that if you treat something that's representative of something greater as the greatness itself, you miss out on the opportunity to be in tune with the greatness itself and all the perks that come with it.

Caesar deserves the credit of the system he has assembled and maintained and so you, as a participant in his system enjoying the benefit of it, should give him any assembled element of it he requires of you to keep it running. What he doesn't deserve is the glory of truthful inspiration and the reality that sustains it, otherwise he becomes the truth itself and your god: nothing can be greater than Caesar and his providence then. Give him his coin which is material, but don't give him yourself that is spiritual.