[SERMON] You Good, Bro?

In this Father's Day message, Pastor Ryan — a Marine combat veteran and new pastor at Heart o' the Lakes Church — delivers a raw and personal sermon on the difference between being good and looking good. Drawing from his own years of brokenness after returning from Iraq, he unpacks how people develop "rackets" — heart-level strategies to manage their image and avoid vulnerability — as a substitute for real transformation. Using Matthew 23:27-28 (the "whitewashed tombs" passage), Proverbs 4:23, and Matthew 12, he challenges the congregation to identify where they're spending their energy on appearances rather than authentic connection with God and others. He closes with a call to yield to God, embrace vulnerability with a safe, godly person, and trust that true peace lives on the other side of "looking bad."

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

I'm Pastor Ryan. Um, you just call me Ryan. I'm new pastor, but I guess you call me Pastor if you feel you need to. But I'm Ryan. I'm so glad you guys are here today. This is uh a special opportunity for me to get to talk, and I have my my sermon is is personally, I love it. It's called You Good, bro. All right? That's its title. So check this out. I I when I when Kyle asked me to talk on Father's Day, and I got thinking, I was like, okay, Father's Day, like, how do I how do I glorify God the Father? How do I really like send this message off in a way that is profound? And and I kept coming across this statement, like, God is a good, good father. And then my squirrel brain goes, okay, that's great, but what does that mean? And so then I start digging into this word good, and I get into scripture and I start looking, and and the word good is in scripture like over 700 times. God sets out what good is on such a profound way for us that we don't have to sit around and wonder what it means, right? It means he's always with us, always conspiring on our behalf. He's gives us an unlimited amount of grace and mercy and love, right? That is what it is. So when we hear good, good father, what we're really hearing and what we're really talking about is being good. Now, as humans, we seem like we can take something beautiful and shumble it up and mess it up and cloudy it and make it mean something crazy, right? And so if we think about the word good, just consider this word good in in our normal everyday lives. We use it as like a clarifying statement. We say things like, like, um, you good, bro? Right? Or we say things like, Oh, that that Taco Bell was not good. You know what I mean? Like we we say, we even we are so muddied with our language, we even ask people if they're good when we know they're not, right? We say, Are you good? You know they're not good, they're having a bad day, right? And so how I see it is we really, when we think of the word good, we really have two two kind of schools of thought. We have a godly school of thought and we have a worldly school of thought. The godly school of thought is like being good. The worldly school of thought is this idea of looking good, right? Looking good. So here is my definition that I created for us on what looking good is. Looking good is a is a uh strategic, is it yellow? Oh, cool. Let me try again. Looking good is a is a strategic. It is a condition of the heart, it's an internal thing, all right, that focuses on appearances, impressions, and reputation to gain approval, avoid criticism, pervert per preserve status, and protect a desired identity as a mouthful, right? It's very wordy. It's supposed to be because as humans, we need definitions. We need to come together and have mutually agreed upon terms, otherwise, we goof it up because we make ourselves so great, right, that we decide we know what things mean. So for the purpose of this sermon, we got to get together and get on the same page. This is what looking good looks like is a condition of our heart in which we are constantly trying to manage how the world sees us. Okay, looking good allows us to circumvent God, right? Because we want to be good, but we can't figure out how, or often maybe we don't want to because we're lazy because it's hard, right? It's hard to submit. So, what we do is we do this thing where we present ourselves to the world. So, in reality, looking good is really just our attempt to manage our fears by managing our image. Consider that one. Yeah, it's our attempt to present ourselves so we don't actually have to transform. It's our attempt to go out to the world and go, hey, I'm transformed. But in reality, bro, you ain't, right? Looking good gives us that that space to elevate ourselves and and lower God. It really works on our connection, really beats up our connection with God. Now, I don't tell you the guys this from like some grandiose space, like, oh, like I got it all figured out. I spent almost two decades profoundly lost. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm a I'm a Marine, I'm a combat veteran. And when I was in Iraq, I experienced some of the most ugly, ugliness of the world. And when I came home, I was lost, I was broken. I had no God in my life, I had no community to lean on. So what I did is I started leaning on my own understanding. I started going, wow, you're you are messed up. Well, we can't show that world, we can't show the world that because I gotta eat, I gotta survive. So what I did, I learned how I said, bro, you ain't gonna be, you ain't never good. You're eternally broken. So the next best thing is to maybe look good. Because if I can look good, maybe just maybe I can figure something out. Maybe just maybe I can become good, right? And so during this time, something I learned real quick was that I just couldn't walk around um announcing my deepest fears to the world, right? I I couldn't do that, I couldn't be like, like, hey Dan, I I have crippling anxiety, you know. Or like, you know, hey, hey Frank, I'm afraid if you knew all the things I've seen and done, you'd never want to be my friend, you know. I can't do that, right? Because the world will make us wrong for that. So what we do is we create these strategies. We create strategies, and I think looking good encompasses all the strategies that we have. So this idea of looking good, it doesn't, I'm not talking about the idea that we wear like nice clothes or we drive a fancy car, we got a big house, or we got a fancy job. I'm not talking about that so much. That can be a byproduct of looking good, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's a condition of the heart. So oftentimes what we get out of looking good is we get to be right. Or we get to avoid being wrong. Right? We get to we get to dominate, right? We get to be in charge. Maybe, you know, we get to dominate, we, or maybe it's just to avoid feeling like the world is gonna dominate us, right? Because the world has this scarcity mindset. This world has this mind, this idea, this concept that says there's not enough. You can't get what you want, you can't keep what you have. So these payoffs help us protect all that. They help us be right, valid, justified. They help us look good, they help us avoid looking bad. Here's the problem with that. Because there's a catch, there's a caveat. The problem is that there is a profound cost to looking good. There's a huge cost. And what that cost is, is it costs us our our aliveness, it costs us our connection with our with our with our community, with the people we love most. It costs us our full self-expression, right? Because those looking good makes us never show who we are, right? We don't show who we are, and then we go, oh, nobody knows me. There's your cost. And above all, what it costs us the most is our connection with God. So with this, I have another term of art for you. Because if you talk to me for more than three minutes, you notice I talk funny. I I like to define what I think things mean because I think we all are making up our own definitions, and I think we got to be on this all on the same page. So here's a new word for you: it's called a racket. You know what a racket is, like a racketeer, like running two sets of books. This is what I call a racket. It's a strategy. So we could say, looking good, this condition of the heart. A behavior. Okay, so we feel like we are not good inside, but we have to look good. So now we have a behavior. Now I'm just gonna make you all laugh so you don't know that I'm crying inside. In reality, I'm crying inside. There's the persistent complaint. Everybody thinks I'm funny, nobody knows I'm crying inside. Everybody thinks I'm connected with God, I'm couldn't be farther away, right? Because here's the deal: these rackets they show up in so many different ways, often by looking good or avoid looking bad. And you can encompass everything underneath that. So the rackets, what they really help us do. Because if why are we doing this, right? We're doing them for the payoffs, but we wouldn't keep doing it if they didn't actually help us in life, right? So rackets help us manage our appearance without actually addressing our hearts. Now consider this, right? I don't know about you, but me. I want to be seen as a as a good dad, right? You guys that are parents out there, you want you want to be known as a good parent. Um good husbands. It's Father's Day. Like we want to be known as good husbands. In reality, we're building a plane as we're flying it, right? In reality, we're working, trying to manage our own stuff and our own our own things while also leading our family. It's hard. We want to be good Christians, right? We want to show up and and and actually be good. Oftentimes, our rackets tell us that looking good is easier, and that's why we hit on that. Um, we want to be good leaders, and above all, we really want to be good people, right? Because the context of good, when we say good, we're thinking about being good. In reality, the world says, yeah, just look good. It's much easier. So, what we do when we are looking at this stuff and we're trying to look good, we do this thing where we chase and we chase. We chase after more, better, different. Now consider this. Consider this idea of more, better, different. All right. If I'm if I'm looking for my gold in the world, if I'm trying to find my peace in the world, I go, uh, maybe, you know, maybe I just need a a better job to make more money, right? Oh, well, that's not working out. Maybe I need a different job. Okay, maybe I need more money. Okay, oh nope, that's not enough. Maybe I need, maybe I need a better house, a better, uh, a different wife. And this thing goes like this, and all it does is go more, better, different, more of the same. Because that's all a racket does. The racket, it promises peace, right? It tells us if we just get more, better, different, we will be happy. But we always end up feeling hopeless, defective, and alone because it is a worldly thing. Because you're leaning on yourself and you're making yourself greater. The racket always promises peace. It only ever delivers more of the same. That's all it does. And the reason why that is, and and really hear these next words here like hear this the right way. Internal problems cannot be solved with external solutions. The issue with your heart cannot be solved with the world, it can't be solved with another car or another kid or another college degree or another drink. It's not there. That's why you can't find it there, right? It's a condition of our heart. Now, here's the thing for me, it's not like I just stumbled upon that. When we read scripture and we look at scripture, Jesus spends the majority of his ministry talking about this. Like he's constantly warning people and warning people and warning people. And he isn't going after the low-hanging fruit like people like me. You know, he's not going a guy that can't get out of his own way. He's going after the Pharisees, he's going after the scribes. And if you don't know those scribes, like back then they didn't have like uh, I don't know, whatever it is, probably some cool online app now. I say Kankos. They didn't have a Kinko's where you could go and just print off the Bible, right? Or print off the word. So these guys, these scribes, and they wrote it all down. And then you have your Pharisees, which are your like religious leaders. Um and so Jesus goes after these guys. And so where we pick up here on Matthew 23, 27, 28, uh, this is this is shortly after Jesus rode into town, and that's when he wrote in on the donkey, foot the tables, you know, he was he was making a big scene. But this is where there's like crowds, um, and they're really they're really curious and they're really into what Jesus has to say. And this is what he says: he says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Now, this might, you know, if depending on how much you read the Bible and how much you know the history of it, like this is like this is Jesus calling them out hardcore. Like he's been he's been poking at them in many situations along the line, but this is a big deal. This is from a big crowd, and this is him calling them out, all right? This idea of hypocrites actually comes from a Greek word, and it and and what it actually means is actors, because it's it's referring to Greek theater and actors. And if you know anything about Greek theaters, how they change their character is by changing their mask. So in reality, Jesus is looking at the the scribes and the Pharisees, and he's going, bro, you're like you're like a bunch of actors. Like you're like a bunch of actors, spiritual actors, and you're wearing this match mask of righteousness, and he's like, You're all dead inside. Now, what about this idea of whitewashed tombs? For a lot of us, whitewashed tombs probably don't mean nothing. Probably like, I don't know, what was that all about? Well, don't worry, I'm gonna tell you. Because it meant something at the time. Like it would have been like a huge slip. Um, it would have been like Jesus really like giving it to them. Because during Passover, they would take and they would paint all the tombs, all the graves, all those kind of things with lime, and it would make them bright and white. Because everybody would come from all over the place. All these travelers would come and they would come to feast and celebrate, and they would see those tombs from far away, and they'd be like, Oh, those are beautiful. By the way, they're full of dead, right? They're full of dead decaying bodies. There's nothing but nastiness inside of there. So, on some level, Jesus just told the Pharisees, Yeah, you look great, but you're dead inside. And these are the most religious people, these are supposed to be the most spiritual, high, closest to God people around. And he's going, Hey, I'm tired of you denying me. You must be dead inside. So, really, what Jesus was telling them is that they were substituting their appearance for actual transformation. And he was calling on them to repent. That's deep. And now, and and like I said, this wasn't something that this was like a culminating moment. If we back it up, when we look at the timeline, it's hard to tell this next verse on Matthew 12. It's hard to tell like how long ago it was, probably somewhere between three to eight months before um before that last scripture this took place. So Jesus goes and he's got this demon-possessed dude, and and uh he's blind and he's mute, and Jesus heals him. And a bunch of people see it, and they start going, oh snap. Like, he's like, are you the son of David? They start asking him these questions, like, are you God? Are you the son of Davis? Are you are are you are you the Messiah? Which Messiah in in Hebrew just really means like Christ. Um, and and they start, they start really getting all excited about this, and then the Pharisees come in and they just squash it. And instead of recognizing this beautiful miracle, Jesus just did, just just did, they go way out in the left field and they tell them, they say, No, this is the power of Satan. They say Jesus is the devil, right? And and that's where we pick up in this scripture right here. So let's roll with this. The good person out of his good brings forth good, and the evil person out of evil treasure brings forth evil. So he's really hammering at their their this dead part inside of them. He's really going after the the the Pharisees on this because this idea of treasure, when we get into the Greek word in the Bible, treasure is really just talking about like our storehouse. What do we value? Our most valuable possessions, what we value most in life, we keep in our storehouse. And really what he's talking about is our heart. So he's really just hitting at the condition of the Pharisees' heart. He's not talking about how they look. He's saying, bro, you look bad. Your heart is jacked. That is what he's saying, right? So when we really break this all together, Proverbs 4, 23, I think. I love Proverbs because it's lots of little like tidbits of wisdoms, little little one-liners, and I think this really ties it all together well. So I need you guys to read the yellow parts. Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life. That's everything we're talking about here, right? Like, and I gotta ask you, like, if we can see that, I mean, it really needs very little explanation. If we can see that looking good is a strategic condition of my heart, that focus makes the world greater and makes God less, then I know all I gotta do is guard my heart. How do I do that? Right? And and that's why I gotta tell you, like, what is Kyle always says, like, what does this mean to you? And I'll say, like, what does this mean to me? What does this mean to me? This means I have to guard my heart above all else. I have to constantly check myself and ask myself, what are your rackets? Where are you looking good at? Where have you put all your energy in the world having being okay with some you know image of you? Where do I cut off parts of myself to shove myself in a box for somebody else? And so after all my travels and all after everything that I've learned, I I came, I have this idea, right? And really how I see it is the degree in which I'm willing to look bad to the world is often a space of divine transformation. See, when I allow myself to look bad to the world, God shows up to me in a profound way. I mean, it is crazy when when we can stop trying to impress the world with how cool we are, and we can just admit that we're ordinary, average, insignificant people, just building the plane as we're flying it, bumbling through life, trying to do the best we can with what we got. God shows up and goes, okay. Three and a half years you can stand on a stage and talk to people about this. It's crazy, right? And so I want you guys to really consider that. So when we when we when we go to that space, then I gotta ask you, what does this mean for you all? What rackets in your life are you running? Where are you pretending that you're not pretending that you're focused more on looking good than actually being good? Maybe it's always needing to be right. Maybe you're that person that doubles down on being right even when you know you're wrong. Maybe it's humor. Maybe you try to, you you figured out how to eat and survive and look into the world by being so funny. Oh, you're so funny, you're so funny, but inside you're dying. Maybe it's success. Maybe it's maybe it's hey, I got that promotion, I got that promotion, I got that promotion. Yeah, me too, for a lot of my life. And then it was more, better, different, more of the same, because I always ended up feeling hopeless, defective, and alone and disconnected with God. Because that's what rackets do. What about busyness? Anyone in here just can't sit still? Yeah, like you're sitting at home and you got 20 minutes of downtime, and then what do you do? You go, right? You're like getting on there and doom scrolling. I think that's what Kyle calls it, doom scrolling, right? Um what about what about being the strong one, dads? Yeah. What about trying to manage everything and pretend like everything's fine when we're trying to figure out how to pay the bills, how to fix the car, how to get the kids to where they need to be, how to how to honor our wife, how to how to honor our God, and how to do it all at the same time. And sometimes that balance can seem impossible. We don't have to figure it out, we don't have to be perfect all the time. God doesn't call us to be perfect. That's where the racket lies. Where it says you have to show up perfect. No, you don't. You just gotta be honest. You gotta start being honest about your dishonesty because that's what a racket is. What about biblical knowledge? What about this idea of like, oh, I can quote scripture. All day long. But also in my head, I'm judging everybody that I see. Right? Consider that. If that's you, maybe that's a racket for you, right? Um, and then this is like catch-all of pretending we're pretending that everything's fine. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. Next time you say, I'm good, it'll never, it'll never land the same way for you again. If you actually showed up today and you were actually playing this game with me and listening to what I have to say, it won't land the same, I promise you that. So, what what all this means, what I'd have to say is that space where we bear our soul to God, and here's the part you're not gonna like, and a safe, godly person is where profound peace resides. See, it ain't it ain't just that we have to bring it to the altar and give it to God. We also have to say this out loud to a safe, godly person. I'm talking about your rackets. I'm talking about your unsharables, I'm talking about that thing that happened that you promised you're gonna take to the grave. You gotta get rid of it because it's what's keeping you away from God. You're one step, one, one step away from looking bad, of being closer to God than you've ever been in your life. Just on the other side of all that flutter, all that that scaredness inside of you of actually being known is everything you've ever wanted. Because here's the deal the gospel, it doesn't invite us to become better at hiding, right? It doesn't it God doesn't say, oh, you just need to be better at looking good, you just need a little bit more, or a little bit better, or a little bit different. It doesn't say that. He actually invites us to step in the light and start coming clean and start being honest about who we are and who we are. Now imagine if we could do this. Just imagine as a church potty, right? Like if we could exist in a space, we could just be, we could just be, we could just be good. We wouldn't have to worry about looking good. Maybe we could just have enough faith that we could move past that. Because looking good will always be a thing, but if we can move past and choose God, imagine what we could look like as a church body. Folks that are folks that are rocking it and are okay with themselves, man. Imagine how much you could lift up those people that aren't. Imagine how inspiring we could be as a church, as a as a family, if we could, if we could lean on these people and go, hey, look, I look bad. Here's a whole lot of bad things, you know. I can't pay my bills, I'm gonna lose my house. I need help. There, God shows up in those moments. Trust me, I'm living, breathing, proof. I'm standing here. All right. So at the end of the day, what I want you to get out of this is transformation matters more than appearances. Thank you, Julie. I need like three more before this is over with. Um that doesn't count. Um, but transformation matters more than appearances. It just does. That's all God's telling us. Lean on Him, lean on Him. So I gotta get at least a couple of you follow me along this uh rabbit trail of goodness. And so what I need you to do is I need you guys to search your hearts. I need you to consider where in my life am I running rackets? Where in my life do I have things that I'm doing, and then immediately after I have this persistent complaint? I'm not enough, I can't get what I want, I can't keep what I have, um, you know, I look bad, I I'm I'm losing, the world is taking advantage of me. Those persistent complaints, where in your life do you have a behavior and then that shows up? Because that's a racket. God's waiting there just on the other side of you, acknowledging that to transform your life. 95% of transformation is getting the heck out of God's way. Because we don't need to do too much other than just step aside. So if you can see it and you can see these things in your life, because we all got them, if you got a heartbeat, me too, if you can see them, then I want you to write yield on your connection card. I just want you to write yield, and I'll know that you're gonna promise, you're making a promise, because that's all we got as people is our word. You're gonna make a promise that you're gonna yield, you're gonna get out of God's way. You're gonna make a solid effort this week to just step back and go, all right, God, I guess I'll look good, I guess I'll look bad. And then I got a little challenge for you on top of that. If you're super motivated, if you're like a savage and you really want to like transform, you really want to have a profound connection with God, then here's your challenge. Go to God in prayer. And not in the way that you would normally do it. Go to God in the most raw, honest way that you've ever done, in a way that you've never done before, and give him everything. Give him all these unshareable things that you you said you'd take to the grave. Give him all these insecurities that you have, give him all this fear and sadness that you're just holding and saving up for a rainy day inside of you. All these resentments that you have about the past that you're holding, give it to God. Here's a challenge. You can do that. Here's the challenge. Then find yourself a safe, godly person who you know not wants nothing from you but everything for you, and bear your soul to them. Share some of this stuff. You'll see, you'll see in a heartbeat that just on the other side of that fear of sharing is all the peace you ever wanted. Because that that that unshareable thing for you is like a cinder block you're carrying around and it's weighing you down. When you take that off and hand it to somebody else, it's a feather to them. So consider this. If you're willing to take that challenge, do it. I don't have a prompt for that because it's none of my business unless you bring it to me. And the only people that are gonna know is you, God, and the safe, godly person that you chose. And so I challenge you to do that. So make sure you fill out your connection cards, and with that, I'd like to pray for you all if that's cool. So let's bow our heads. God, thank you for this opportunity for us to all come together as uh as people, as husbands, as fathers, as moms, as dads, as kids, as grandpas, and in all these different roles that we take in life. And we'd ask that you just move in our hearts. Help us understand that in our life we have put so much effort into fitting in and and looking good that it costs us so much. And God, we're tired of running. We know we don't have to hide anymore, and we want you to take this this opportunity, this this new set of knowledge, this this new term of art and words, and we want to take it and have you soften our hearts and have us be bold and fearless to the world and be profoundly fearful towards you. And God, we'd ask that you you help us remember to remember that the main thing is you and that transformation comes through you with you, and through you, all things are possible. We ask this all in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.