Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Today's episode is the introduction to a five part series called The Father Factor. We will be unpacking God's vision for fathers, the role of a father, the signs and symptoms of a father wound, the difference between an orphan spirit and sonship, and the different seasons of the father wound.
Creators and Guests
What is You Can Mentor: A Christian Youth Mentoring Podcast?
You Can Mentor is a network that equips and encourages mentors and mentoring leaders through resources and relationships to love God, love others, and make disciples in their own community. We want to see Christian mentors thrive.
We want to hear from you! Send any mentoring questions to hello@youcanmentor.com, and we'll answer them on our podcast. We want to help you become the best possible mentor you can be. Also, if you are a mentoring organization, church, or non-profit, connect with us to join our mentoring network or to be spotlighted on our show.
Please find out more at www.youcanmentor.com or find us on social media. You will find more resources on our website to help equip and encourage mentors. We have downloadable resources, cohort opportunities, and an opportunity to build relationships with other Christian mentoring leaders.
You can mentor is a podcast about the power of building relationships with kids from hard places in the name of Jesus. Every episode will help you overcome common mentoring obstacles and give you the confidence you need to invest in the lives of others. You can mentor.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the You Can Mentor podcast. My name is Steven. I'm here with my friend, close friend, best friend, Zachary Garza. How the heck are you, sir?
Speaker 3:Best friend?
Speaker 2:Hey, man.
Speaker 3:Oh, Steven. Let's go get some pizza after this. Please.
Speaker 2:Today, we are starting a new series, Zach, called the father factor. We're gonna talk about fathers. We're gonna talk about the power of a father, power of an absence of a father, the power that only a father has in a child's life.
Speaker 3:Before we get started, I just want to acknowledge the elephant in the room. Right? I don't know if there's a more sensitive subject than fathers. Whenever we start to talk about fathers, more than likely, one of 2 things is gonna start to kind of pop up in your heart. 1 is you're gonna start thinking about really good times that you had with your father.
Speaker 3:Your father was there, your father was present, your father was awesome, your father was the best dad ever. Right? Or the second thing is, you're gonna perhaps be taken back to focus on what your father wasn't. Your father wasn't the perfect dad. Your father failed in some ways.
Speaker 3:Perhaps he wasn't even there. Today, we're we're gonna talk about not only children growing up without a father figure present, but just we're kinda talking to everyone because all of our fathers, as good as they are, as good as they were, they're all sinful. There's no such thing as a perfect father. And when when you start to understand about who God the father is, right, God the father is so much better than the best of our earthly fathers. Because of that, we all have some sort of hurt or father wound if comparing our dad to God the father, the perfect heavenly father.
Speaker 3:And so I just wanna say that whether you have no relationship with your father, whether you've never met your father, or whether your father is your best friend, I do believe that the Lord wants to focus in on the area of fathers, and he has something that is going to be used to help heal your heart or to help turn your heart more like his. Fathers, they will impact you. Some impact you a great deal, some the absence of them impact you a great deal. Fathers
Speaker 2:play such a significant role in God's design for relationships, family, even just societies in general. Men are leaders of the home, fathers lead their families, and they lead in the workplace. I think it's so interesting that one of the greatest breakdowns in our society and culture all stems back into this role of a father in our life. When you look at the scripture, God describes himself as our heavenly father. Jesus comes.
Speaker 2:He does only what the father is doing. The spirit is revealing this revelation of the father in the life of Jesus. And so on one side you have our society's greatest issue is related to the role of a father, and the greatest revelation of God is father. Yeah. I just think that's incredible and so representative of our need is God as father.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And as we start the series, I just wanna say a couple things just right off the bat. We here at You Can Mentor, we believe that God has set up family in a very intentional and specific way, and we believe that his way is the best way. We believe that the best thing for a child is to have 2 loving parents, male and female. We believe that both mom and dad have vital roles in parenting.
Speaker 3:Please don't hear us say that the father is more important than mom. God has set it up to where a child needs both. Mom has her part to play and dad has his part to play, and they are equal in regards to importance. Why we're focusing on this is just because from our experiences, we don't know too many kids who their mom has left them. However, we we have come into relationship with a lot of kids who have experienced growing up without a father figure present.
Speaker 3:We also believe that Satan wants to divide the family. A way that he does that, one of the most common ways is that he wants to remove or distract the father. Yes. A single mom can have success raising a child, but that's not how it's supposed to be. I was raised by a single mom.
Speaker 3:She did a great job, but the one thing that my mom couldn't do for me was show me how to become a man. We truly do believe that the negative influence or the impact or the absence of a father in the homes of our children is the single biggest problem our country is facing. And that's why we're talking about it today. Now for every person, it's different. For every mentor, it's different.
Speaker 3:You have to think about your relationship with your father, and you have to think about the kid who you're mentoring, his relationship with his father. And then kind of one thing that we say is chew up the meat and spit out the bones. So for some of you guys, there's gonna be a lot of meat that we cover today. For some people, there's gonna be some bones. So take only what applies to you.
Speaker 3:Chew up the meat and spit out the bones. Alright. So let's talk about where the word father comes from. I don't speak Hebrew, but here we are, and we're gonna talk about the Hebrew. This might be a huge mistake, but I I thought it was super interesting.
Speaker 3:So the word father comes from the word Aleph, which is the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and it's a literal picture of an ox. Interesting. Yeah. So the ox is a symbol of both strength and leadership, as in the ox leads cows and calves and its herd to safe packs safe pastures. It protects them from enemies, from people who are trying to kill them.
Speaker 3:The first part of the word father is aleph which is an ox. The second part is bayeth, and that's the second letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and that is a picture of a literal house or tent. You put these two words together, strength and leadership and house or tent, and you have a strong leader and a protector of the house or a protector of the household. And that's where we get powerful. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's where we get the word father. I think that that's really interesting because I know for me, sometimes whenever I think about fathering, I think that a father is this man's man. Right? Like, they have to cut wood and wear, like, black and red checkered flannel shirts and, like, eat steak. Flannel.
Speaker 3:They have to wear flannel shirts and dip and, like, work out. But I think what's so interesting here is the Lord says that all fathers are strong leaders and protectors of their household. Wow. And so if you're a father biologically or if you're representing a father figure as a mentor, I just want you to know that from the very root of this word, the Lord believes that you have what it takes, and that you are a strong leader and that you are a protector of who's in your household. And when you mentor, you invite someone into your household, and you say, I am going to be your covering.
Speaker 3:I am gonna be your shepherd.
Speaker 2:That's just an awesome mental picture of being an ox, an ox tent. I've I've heard that, oh gosh. Who is it? John Piper. He says that biblical manhood is the benevolent responsibility to protect, serve, and provide for women in deferring roles.
Speaker 2:And this picture of a father really is like you're a man's man when you're a strong leader who's providing protection in a a place of safety and security. Like, that's that's what fatherhood is all about.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I'm gonna kinda share what my experience was like, the impact that my father had on my life. And when doing this, right, like, you you have to tow this line of being as honoring as possible to your parents while also just being open and honest about how you felt. And so I just want you guys to know that I honor my father and, yes, he wasn't perfect because there's no such thing as a perfect father. But he did the best that he could, and his dad did the best job that he could whenever he was trying to raise him.
Speaker 3:My father wasn't able to be there for us starting in junior high school. What that kind of produced in me was just these emotions that I I didn't have a grid for. I can remember whenever other kids would talk about fathers. It wasn't like they were making fun of me or anything like that. They they were just talking about their dads.
Speaker 3:I would get so angry, because I wasn't emotionally mature enough to process what was going on in my heart. But I can just remember that anytime someone talked about their father, I would, make fun of them or I would meet it with sarcasm or I would just get straight up mad. If I saw one of my friend's dad show up to his game or if I saw a father put his arm around his son at church service, It just drove me absolutely nuts. And there were a few times whenever I would, like, invite over one of my buddies, hey, why don't you come over to my house and let's go play basketball? And they'd say no.
Speaker 3:And I'd ask why? And they'd say, well, because I'm I'm about to go hang out with my dad. And that just man, that did something to my heart. And I didn't know what was happening, but I just knew that it wasn't making me feel good. I started to kinda grow this this hatred, this anger towards men.
Speaker 3:I didn't get a I didn't get along well with authorities. I had issues with almost every teacher and every coach that came into my life. I wouldn't do what they said. I was I was disrespectful to them. I spoke poorly about them.
Speaker 3:I absolutely hated authority. And although I didn't know it at the time, the root of it was I had some major trust issues. As I look back, it wasn't that I hated fathers or authority, it was that I couldn't handle the fact that I didn't have my father in my life. I didn't know how to deal with the fact that things weren't how they were supposed to be. I had jealousy and envy, and that led me to feel a certain way deep down inside.
Speaker 3:Deep down, I wanted a father. Deep down, I needed a father, and I was so angry that I wasn't receiving that. Perhaps on the outside, everything screamed that I didn't want anyone looking after me. But on the inside, my heart was in dire need of someone who would look after me. I just didn't know how to express it.
Speaker 3:I wanted a man who would listen to me when I screwed up. I wanted a man to attend my games and cheer for me. I wanted someone to guide me, some someone to walk with me through life. I wanted a man how to show me how to handle my emotions. I wanted a man to give me a hug and to say that he loved me, to say that he was proud of me.
Speaker 3:I didn't want new clothes or a new car. I didn't want money or a vacation or anything like that. I wanted the covering that only a father could provide. I wanted security. I wanted even though I would have never said this, I wanted someone to submit to.
Speaker 3:I wanted someone to care about me and to show me the way, someone that would be in my corner no matter what. I wanted someone to follow, someone to be with me. I wanted a father, a strong leader of a household. And I believe that that's exactly what all of our kids are looking for, is that they don't want your stuff, instead they want your heart. They want your covering.
Speaker 3:And, yes, I didn't have a really close relationship with my father, but I believe that the things that I just shared whether your father was in the home or not, perhaps you can identify with. Perhaps the kid that you're mentoring can identify with. And there are so many kids out there growing up without a father figure around. Over 25,000,000. And even if they did have a father figure in the house, there are so many people that walk around, and they don't even know their father.
Speaker 3:Sure, dad might provide financially and set them up for success in school and things like that, but they don't know what it's like to be a strong leader of a household. I see way too many grown men, adults heads drop when we start talking about dads. And I think that that's a miss. Right? Especially in today's world, we need fathers more than ever.
Speaker 3:We need leadership. We need that guide. And whether you're a father in the natural, a father in the spiritual, or both, us fathers have a job to do. And as a mentor, I celebrate you today because you have chosen to take this kid underneath your wing and say, yes. This kid, I'm gonna be a father to him.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna lead him. Yeah. He's or she's not my biological child, but I'm choosing to play this role for them. And that's my experience with the father. All of us have a story about your father.
Speaker 3:Perhaps some of us have a story about a man who stepped into the gap and was that father figure for you, whether it's a mentor, or a coach, or a teacher, or stepdad, or a pastor. But whatever your story is, we're all here in some part, in some way because a man stepped up and said, I'm going to play a role in your life. And if you didn't have that, more times than not, that's going to leave a hurt that until dealt with is going to prohibit you from becoming all that the Lord has for you to become.
Speaker 2:So, Zach, what do you what would you say are the the main things a father provides for his kids? What what is a father's role in the life
Speaker 3:of his kids? A father obviously does a lot. Right? But 3 of the main things that he gives is leadership, identity, and security. Whenever I say leadership, I'm saying someone who has chosen to accept the role of the person in charge.
Speaker 3:They have taken ownership of the family. They have taken ownership of the role. It's the head of a body. This person sets the family or the child on a course and leads them in the way everlasting. He provides someone to look up to.
Speaker 3:Just like a shepherd, he's over the flock. He protects the flock. He provides for the flock. If one of his sheep goes off the path, he does whatever he must do to get them back on the path. It's someone to look to in the good times and the hard times.
Speaker 3:It's someone to come to whenever you don't know what to do. I think about my children, and my children love being around me because I'm their father. Yes. But more so because whenever I'm around, I really do believe that they feel almost invincible. It is that my dad can beat up your dad or my dad's a superhero, right, or my dad's the strongest guy out there.
Speaker 3:My kids love falling in order, behind my leadership. And you can see this from a very young age. Even though some of our teens, right, they might it might look on the outside that they hate submitting, they hate authority. Kids kids don't know that they need a leader, but deep down they do, and they actually love it, because it does provide this next thing. Right?
Speaker 2:Well, I think we all love leadership. Yeah. Everyone loves to be led. We might reject it in the moment, but we know that leadership is for our good. Like, the story of the Bible is that we reject leadership, but it's what's good for us.
Speaker 2:Like, the Lord says, like, ask of me for the ancient paths so that you can walk and it will go well with you. But the people of god say, we will not do it. I can
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so we reject leadership, but leadership is actually the main thing that we need. Because I love I love how this is the first thing you say a father provides. A father provides leadership. It's not about how much money he has or even how many skills or how much wisdom he has but he's willing to lead. He's willing to go forward, take responsibility, and give from what he has.
Speaker 2:That's huge. It's like the that verse in Joshua, it's like, as for me and my house, fill in the blank. Yeah. Like, a father is the one that says that. As for me and my house, this is where we're going.
Speaker 2:We'll serve the Lord. And I just think that's that's huge that that's the first
Speaker 3:primary thing a father provides. I do believe that the Lord put fathers here on earth to be an example of him. From the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, the Lord was our father. Right? He was in charge, and he has that same call to us as fathers.
Speaker 3:Me and my boys, we've got this this creek that's at the end of our street. And, the past couple weeks, we've been taking adventures. Right? We've been exploring the creek. And this creek is disgusting.
Speaker 3:I mean, there's trash everywhere. It's but but the boys love it. And there's vines and, I mean, the grass is up to my knees and I'm a tall guy and it's a little bit scary. Right? And one thing that I've noticed is my boys won't go forward unless I go first.
Speaker 3:I chart out the path. I move away the vines. I cut down the tall grass. I pave a way so that my my boys can follow me. They won't go down the path unless I do that.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I'm preparing a way. And I think that that's just such a good example of what a leader does is that they go forward, they face the hard stuff, they cut down the vines, they cut down the tall grass, and they say, hey, guys. It's safe for you. Come on. And so that's what a leader does.
Speaker 3:It's good. And being a leader, that provides security. And I believe that it provides security in 3 ways. The first one is safety, then protection, and those two things lead to independence. So think about a baby.
Speaker 3:Right? A baby needs to feel safe. They need to feel safe through having food provided for them, through warmth, affection, attention. A baby can only grow and become who the Lord intends them to be in a safe environment. Perhaps you've heard the stories of orphans who don't receive these things.
Speaker 3:Well, their their physical growth is stunted. Their intellectual growth is stunted because before they can grow, they first need to feel safe. They need to know that everything that they need is there and that they don't have to worry about anything, but that they are safe and secure in the arms of a father. And that kind of leads to this next stage, this becoming a child, starting to venture out into their own journey. And it's here that a father provides protection.
Speaker 3:Right? They provide provision. Anything that you need, the father is there to provide, whether it's wisdom or guidance or or protection or just a shoulder to cry on. A father provides food. He provides educational opportunities.
Speaker 3:Just the father is gonna do whatever he has to do to make sure that you grow up and you become all that you could be. They protect through a covering, just knowing that everything's gonna be okay because my dad's got me. The kids kinda start to figure out that this world isn't isn't the safest place. They they might experience their first hurt, whether it's, through my best friend made fun of me, or my my friend down the street moved away, or perhaps someone passes away. Right?
Speaker 3:It is here that a child experiences the hurts and heals from those only when there's a father there to make sure that first there's safety, and they kinda lead out in that way. It kinda is that my dad can beat up your dad. My dad is a superhero. My dad is the strongest guy out there, right, which is basically just a kid's way of saying my dad's got me and he's going to protect me. And if you've got, safety and if you've got protection, then that kinda paves the way for in your teenage years or early adulthood years to be independent.
Speaker 3:And it's here that a father kinda gives courage and gives confidence. It's here that the father kinda encourages the child to take risks. It is here that a father disciplines. Hey. You're doing this thing that's not right, and I'm gonna I'm gonna give you this little discomfort to make sure that whenever you get older, you don't do these things and experience big discomfort.
Speaker 3:Right? They prepare the child for the world. They don't prepare the world for the child. And so a father truly kinda does does things to create this tension, to create this discomfort, to make sure that the child has everything that they need to become an independent person, to go off on their own and to succeed and to get back up when they fall down and to not be scared. A child can can look back whenever he experiences a hardship in adulthood and say, I can do this because of what my dad taught me as a teenager or because my dad prepared me for this moment here.
Speaker 3:And so you can start feeling secure in being independent. You can start feeling confident in whether it's your job or your role as a husband or your role as a father because your father has prepared you for this. At first, it was safety, and then he protected you, but then he intentionally taught you. He intentionally gave you the tools and skills that you needed to become independent. If we bring this back to to the definition of father, right, that strong leader, protector of a household, that strong.
Speaker 3:Right? His strength provides safety. His strength provides protection, and then he leads them into independence. Right? He he gives them a vision of what they can become, and then he prepares them for that.
Speaker 3:I just think that that leadership provides security. And then once you have those two things, that that leads you into your identity. Right? And so what what is identity? It's the qualities that make you different.
Speaker 3:It's almost your heart, your soul. It's what separates you from everyone else. It's the Lord has made you unique, and he has given you something in a heart, in a vision, in dreams that he has given no one else. There's only one of you. And identity, it's you on the inside.
Speaker 3:It's your beliefs. It's your values. It's it's at the core of your humanity. It's who you are. It's not about what you do, but it's instead about who you are, and it's about whose you are.
Speaker 3:It's about who you belong to, your tribe, your family. It's your talents, what God has given you. It's your heart, what motivates you, and it's your values. It's what you care about. A father leads and he provides this secure foundation so that you can enter into your identity.
Speaker 3:When a child doesn't receive this in some way, some form, some fashion, whether it's because your father wasn't there or maybe it's you've never even met your father, your father's incarcerated, or your father passed away, or perhaps your father was around, they just weren't intentional, or they didn't know how to give you these things. When for some reason you don't receive this, you develop what we like to call the father wound. So that's why a father is so important because a father gives three things, leadership, security, and identity. All of us have to be honest. No matter how good our father was, no matter how present he was, or if we didn't even know our father, if we didn't have a father figure around.
Speaker 3:All of us to some degree have been impacted by our fathers. For some of our kids, they have a huge father wound. Mine was absolutely enormous, and I had to deal with that. But thank God that he provided mentors, that he provided fathers to give me leadership and security and identity. And there's no way that I would be here today if it wasn't for different men stepping up in different seasons of my life and helping me understand the impact that my father had on me to identify the symptoms of how my relationship with my dad has impacted me, and then to help me heal from that, and to help me begin to rebuild what the enemy, what sin had once destroyed.
Speaker 3:I can honestly say the Lord has restored my relationship with my father. And he put me on this process of identifying and dealing with and healing from from the impact that my relationship with my father had on me. And while he took me through that process, not only did I receive freedom, not only did I receive identity, not only did I receive skills and tools to become who I am today, but it brought me so much closer to god the father. Because I believe that God made us humans, us fathers imperfect for a reason. And one of those reasons is because he wants us to say, I wish I had someone who could meet my everything.
Speaker 3:I wish I had a relationship that could fulfill all of my needs. And then that's where he steps in. And that's where there's an opportunity for him to say, son, I can be that for you. I have given you this father, but I want you to know that I am the only true perfect father. Come to me and receive all that you need.
Speaker 3:Come to me and receive my covering. Receive security. Son, I wanna give you my leadership, and I want you to submit to my leadership not for my good but for your good. And I wanna give you an identity and a path. Will you follow me?
Speaker 3:Will you be my son?
Speaker 2:I I think these three roles provide a very a very clear job description for a father. Obviously, being a father is more than just these three things. Yep. There's a lot of other details that go like, maybe you should be merciful. But I I just think, man, these these three roles relate to so many needs that we all have.
Speaker 2:We all need leadership. No one gets through life without being led. Like, you will not be a healthy person if you do not submit to leadership. You're not gonna make it unless people provide for you. Kids cannot provide for themselves.
Speaker 2:We do not live in a society where children are hunter gatherers running around providing for themselves. And if they do end up providing for themselves, they usually end up in unhealthy situations where they're getting their needs met in all the wrong places. We need someone to train us in independence so that we can provide for ourselves and grow and be stretched and be challenged and disciplined. And no one has an identity that's not shaped and formed by the people that invest in you. Like, I don't define who I am.
Speaker 2:I am defined by something external from me, which I think ultimately in our relationship with god, we realize what he has spoken over our lives, and then we realize an identity that we've received from the world or from broken relationships. And that interchange, I think, really is transformative when we've had relationships that have spoken true identity over us. The role of a father connects to every deep need that we have as we develop as children, as adults, and that's huge.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and why we're talking about this on our podcast is because from our experiences, most of the kids from the hard places that we have built relationships with, there is a deficit in their relationship with their father. You can go to our web page, check out our show notes, but I'm just gonna toss out some facts about kids growing up without a father figure present. 71% of high school dropouts are fatherless. Fatherless children have more trouble academically, scoring poorly on tests of reading, mathematics, and thinking skills.
Speaker 3:Children in father absent homes are almost 4 times more likely to be poor. 85% of youth in prison have an absent father. There are significantly more drug use among children who do not live with their mother and father. Father absent children are more likely to smoke, drink alcohol, and abuse drugs in childhood and adulthood. Being raised by a single mother increases the risk of teen pregnancy.
Speaker 3:Children consistently report feeling abandoned when their fathers are not involved in their life, struggling with their emotions and bouts of self loathing that affects their self-concept and their self esteem. There are so many facts and so much data on just the impact of a father or the impact of a lack of a father, in a child's life. We wanna help you if you're mentoring a kid who has experienced one of these things. We wanna help you guide them and support them and identify the wounds and help them heal from it and ultimately give them someone to look up to and be that father that perhaps they didn't ever have. And we hope that when they start to see you as a father, that that gives you a chance to point them to the perfect father and say, hey, everything that you truly need is is found in Christ Jesus.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to this episode. Please check back with us next week as we continue the father factor series over the next few weeks. We're gonna talk about how fathers impact our lives and the role of mentors in that space. So please subscribe. Sub but that would make it a lot easier for you to follow this series, wouldn't it?
Speaker 2:Just click that button that says subscribe. I don't know what the Hebrew in of subscribe means. I think it means something like you like us. Do that, and we'd love for you to follow us on social media at you can mentor, facebook.com/youcanmentor. Like us.
Speaker 2:We share videos and other encouraging stories of mentor relationships, just encouraging you in this one thing that we want you to pick up after you listen to every episode, and that's this, you can mentor.