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    Jun 15, 2025

    Why Father's Day Matters

    Preacher: Ron Hauenstein

    Category: Family

    Keywords: fathers, impact, belonging, fatherhood, orphan spirit

    Summary:

    This fatherhood message comes from Spokane's premier leader of fathering and Executive Director of Spokane Fatherhood Initiative. It looks at the critical and irreplicable role of fathers in the home and why the church must strengthen fathers.

    Detail:

    FATHER’S DAY MESSAGE June 15, 2025

    By Ron Hauenstein, Founder and Executive Director, Spokane Fatherhood Initiative

    It’s Father’s Day so it’s fair to ask, What is a father? A father is a man who can change diapers with one hand and fix a leaky faucet with the other. He can build a fort out of couch cushions and sheets. Dads fix broken toys with glue guns and we turn mundane trips to the grocery store into adventures for the kids. We cluck our tongues over owies and have a first aid triage system that says throw some dirt on it. We can fix most anything except perhaps our sense of fashion.

    We sometimes struggle with simple instructions like put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and something to do with the toilet seat.

    I think most of you know, Father’s Day was born in Spokane. On June 19, 1910, a Father's Day celebration was held at the YMCA in Spokane by a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd. Sonora’s mother died when Sonora was 16 and she helped her father raise her five siblings.

    Sonora Dodd was a member of Old Centenary Presbyterian Church (now Knox Presbyterian Church), where she first proposed the idea. She had heard a sermon about Mother's Day in 1909 at Central Methodist Episcopal Church, she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday to honor them.  Several local pastors accepted the idea, and on June 19, 1910, the first Father's Day, "sermons honoring fathers were presented throughout the city." But it didn’t become an official national holiday until Richard Nixon was president in 1972. BTW, Sonora was still alive during Expo ’74, Spokane’s World’s Fair. She was honored as the founder of Father’s Day and could well have met President Nixon who was in Spokane for the opening ceremony.

    Celebrating the 115th anniversary. Riverfront Park today, 1-3, Gabriel’s Challenge, announce Fathers of the Year.

    Since Father’s Day was born in churches it is in our spiritual soil, it is part of the Christian heritage of Spokane. And while I want to celebrate fathers today, I also want to acknowledge that not everyone may feel like celebrating fathers. We all have a father story. Some are great and some are not so good. My desire today is to provide something that helps everyone here, regardless of their relationship with their father.

    The central theme I want to share with you today is the question of identity. How do we develop a proper sense of self-worth that gives us confidence as we move about the world? As Christians we are to take our identity from Christ, so what happens to non-believers? Where does their identity come from? That’s the issue I want to explore throughout this message today, because the health of our relationships depends on how we see ourselves.

    The question of identity is deeply entwined in the question, “Why do we need a fatherhood initiative?” In 2016 and 2017 we informally surveyed the community and found virtually no programs targeted specifically at fathers, yet we also knew there was a huge need for such programs.

    During that season and since, we learned that children who feel a closeness to and warmth from their father are:

    • twice as likely to enter college
    • 75 percent less likely to have a child in their teen years
    • 80 percent less likely to be incarcerated and
    • half as likely to show signs of depression.

    Conversely, when fathers are absent in a child’s life, the outcomes are reversed. Children raised in a father-absent home are

    • four times as likely to live in poverty
    • more likely to have behavioral problems
    • two times more likely to drop out of high school, and
    • more likely to commit crimes.

    Can you sense the power of identity in these statistics? A child who grows up fatherless or with an emotionally absent father develops a sense that they do not belong, they don’t fit in. They can easily conclude that something is wrong with them because they’ve been rejected and abandoned. But when kids feel accepted, supported, encouraged and loved by their fathers, they thrive in many areas of live, not just as children but also adults.

    The best social science research demonstrates that fathers play an important, perhaps vital role in healthy child development. 

    Several other people and I incorporated the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative in July of 2017 on the principle that fatherlessness is the root cause of nearly all of society’s problems. Our mission is to restore the value of fatherhood.

    We see a direct link between healthy, committed fathers and healthy communities. As more children experience a present, loving and nurturing father, the stronger and healthier our communities will be.

    In fact, here’s what I’ve come to believe:

    • The strength of a community depends on the strength of its churches.
    • The strength of the Church depends on the strength of its families.
    • And the strength of families depends on the strength of fathers. we[repeat]
    • The strength of a community depends on the strength of its churches.
    • The strength of the Church depends on the strength of its families.
    • And the strength of families depends on the strength of fathers.

    But we need to do more than just teach fathers. If we want families and communities to heal and thrive, we must teach relationship skills to moms and dads and even to teenagers. I believe the most important thing we can do for the kids of Spokane is teach their fathers and mothers how to get along and stay together.

    In September of 2018 we began offering fatherhood classes from NFI. Friday night we celebrated a new class of graduates, 28 men who had completed a minimum of 24 hours of classroom training. We have now issued 753 Certificates of Completion with an amazing graduation rate of 93%.

    We have added several electives and we now have six classes running simultaneously with over 60 dads involved. Thank you!

    But we’re not satisfied with what we’ve achieved to date. We recently launched SpoFI 2.0 – a campaign to double what we’re doing over next three years. And in the process we want to make Spokane known as a city that reflects the father’s heart, the heart of God and His love for His people.

    Our next round of classes starts Tuesday June 24. Flyers on the table in the lobby. Get all the details on our website, spofi.org. You will also see there a series of blog posts with some fascinating details about the history of Father’s Day.

    I have found that there is a certain risk when making statements about the importance of fatherhood because many people can choose to interpret that message as an attack on mothers or women. I have the deepest respect for single moms especially and I hope everyone who hears this message will accept my position that advocating for fathers is not advocating against women. Mothers and fathers are different and children need both.

    And BTW any man who thinks that women are the weaker sex should try pulling the blankets to his side of the bed tonight and see what happens…

    Many of the men who enroll in our programs come to us defeated and discouraged. Many have struggled with addiction and poverty. The overwhelming majority are non-custodial dads, men who in some cases have gone years without seeing their children.

    What happens to a father when he loses access to his children? He often loses his purpose in life. We help dads regain their sense of purpose and help them experience hope once again. And in the process they regain their identity as fathers, protectors and providers.

    I drill into my students the number one purpose of our fatherhood classes. Our goal is to help dads develop a positive, enduring relationship with their children. So no matter that parenting circumstances you face – 14 year old daughter gets pregnant or you catch your 10 year old son smoking marijuana – there must be consequences, of course, but the relationship is preserved.

    One of our dads was in divorce court and he shared his SpoFI diploma…

    Another testimony: at the graduation ceremony Friday night, I required all of my students to complete a sentence for me as I handed them their diplomas. The sentence begins…I am a better dad today because…

    Here’s how one dad fulfilled that assignment:

    “I’m a better dad today because thanks to the 24/7 Dad courses my gratitude for life and being a father has outweighed the anger I face from tragic events. Now, each time I remember something that I reacted to [in anger], I respond gently, allowing myself the time to collect my thoughts so that I may communicate with my children with love, patience and gratitude. I am now even more committed to being emotionally reliable for my children which will guide them to become the best versions of themselves, as they also navigate the course of their own lives and support them with all that I am as a father forever and ever. Thank you Spokane Fatherhood Initiative - SPOFI from the bottom of my heart.”

    So we Malachi 4:6 played out before our eyes-- 6 He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.”

    Dr. Ken Canfield is the founder and president of the National Center for Fathering. He’s also a member of our advisory board and has become a good friend and mentor. Ken says children without a father in the home are affected socially, psychologically, educationally, economically and culturally. He writes:

    A father has enormous power. About this, he has no choice. [repeat] For good or for bad, by his presence or absence, action or inaction, whether abusive or nurturing, the fact remains: A father is one of the most powerful beings on the face of the earth.

    One of the most powerful principles I teach our dads is to learn the importance of separating identity from behavior. God of course is the expert at this. We sin, and sin again, and yet His love for us is unchanging. Time and time again we misbehave but He remains our Heavenly Father. Our behavior does not cause us to lose our identity as children of God because through repentance and forgiveness our relationship with Him is preserved.

    And so it is with our children. Many times they behave in such a way that they test our love. Unfortunately, we often confuse identity and behavior and our children can easily feel judged if dads get angry and yell at them.

    I illustrate this principle of separating identity from behavior by sharing testimony from a book by Danny Silk, a pastor in California. Here’s the story.

    It is so easy as parents to turn kids hearts away from their fathers. Dads yell. Dads don’t apologize. Dads punish rather than discipline their children. Sometimes they try to motivate through shame or emotional stonewalling.

    And when parents – not just dads do this – the results can cause long-lasting damage. This is our Malachi test – to parent with love, not fear, so that the hearts of children do not turn away from the hearts of their fathers.

    I believe all of us are born with a yearning in our hearts for approval from our fathers. In their book The Resolution for Men the Kendrick brothers who produced the movie Courageous wrote this:

    “Regardless of age, everyone wants a good answer to the question, ‘What does my dad really think about me?’ Our hearts intrinsically long for his approval. And when we don’t get it, we tend to spend the rest of our lives working tirelessly to win the approval of others in an attempt to fill the void he has left.”

    This is the power of fatherhood that Ken Canfield is talking about. Men who become fathers have no choice. The drive for affirmation from our fathers is in all of us the day we are born.

    So what is it about fathers – the father-child relationship that makes it such a powerful force in our lives? The relationship between a father and child is different than that of a mother and child, and it’s not easy to define.

    If I were to ask you, ‘What is the one feature that distinguishes the New Testament from the Old Testament?’ how would you respond? What is it, as you step from Malachi into Matthew, as you cross over that 400-year gap in history, what is the distinctive feature that makes the new covenant, new? Now that is a question worthy of a seminary student to answer for sure, but it is a question that every Christian, in some way, needs to answer.

    One of the most influential evangelical leaders of our time was J.I. Packer, a British theologian who died in 2020 at the age of 93. His seminal work is Knowing God, where he wrote this answer to the question, ‘What separates the old covenant from the new covenant?”

    The distinctive feature of the new covenant, Packer says, is that we call God “Father.”

    Abraham would never have called God “Father.” Moses would never have called God “Father.” Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos would never have called God “Father.” It is the incredible blessing of the new covenant that we have this fellowship in the family of God. We have by the power of the Holy Spirit been brought by new birth into a new family, the family of God.

    Here’s how Packer makes his case:

    Packer writes:

    “[In the Old Testament] The constant emphasis was that human beings, because of their weakness…and their defilement as sinful creatures, must learn to humble themselves and be reverent before God….Again and again it was stressed that we must keep our place, and our distance, in the presence of a holy God. This emphasis overshadowed everything else.”

    So in the OT we have this image of God as distant, someone to be feared. Punishment for disobedience was swift and just. Perhaps some of you have or had an earthly father like that.

    As a child in Sunday School I was told that God hates sin so much that sinners will die and go to hell. Well, it’s not much of a stretch for a child to grow up believing that if God hates sin…and I sin…therefore God hates me. How can God hate sin and love me at the same time? This question of identity, of developing a right and healthy view of God and salvation, is deeply important to how you live your life.

    And that’s why we need the New Covenant, right? In the New Testament, Packer writes:

    “A new factor has come in. New Testament believers deal with God as their Father. Father is the name by which they call Him….To those who are Christ’s, the holy God is a loving Father; they belong to his family; they may approach him without fear and always be sure of his fatherly concern and care. This is the heart of the New Testament message.”

    This theme is expressed most clearly in Galatians 4:4-7

    4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. 6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

    Earlier I mentioned that the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative is founded on the belief that fatherlessness is the root cause of society’s problems. But what then is the root cause of fatherlessness? I believe our community, our culture, including the Church, is subject to an Orphan Spirit. As I said earlier, we all come into the world with a hunger, a yearning, for affirmation from our father. And if we do not get it from our earthly father, few people know how to receive it from our Heavenly Father. We can easily live and act like orphans when we believe we don’t have a place in the world.

    Joseph Mattera writes, “The orphan spirit is perhaps the greatest curse on the earth today. Orphaned men have a hard time connecting to their spouses, children, those in spiritual authority and supervisors, and have a hard time accepting and loving themselves. There are presently millions of incarcerated men who are acting out lives of violence and rebellion because their earthly fathers abandoned them!

    “The only way to break this orphan spirit is for people to be filled with a sense of the Father’s love for them in Christ, which then enables them to become mature sons who serve God out of knowledge of His undeserved grace instead of trying to earn the Father’s love through performance.”

    He continues: “I believe all of the emotional, physical and spiritual ills of society can be traced to humans feeling alienated from God and their biological fathers....”

    I saw the power of fatherhood and fatherlessness when I was preaching on Saturday mornings in Airway Heights prison. One day we had testimonies from the men. One prisoner said when he was a young boy his parents divorced and he didn’t understand the process or what that meant. All he knew was that his daddy was gone. So he walked out his front door and went to the next-door neighbor, knocked on the door and said, “Daddy’s gone. Is daddy here?” And when he was told no he went to the next house and asked the same question. “Daddy’s gone. Is daddy here?” House after house after house. Knock knock knock.  “Where’s daddy?” He kept at this until dark, when finally the police came and took him home.

    But the next day, he went out and did it again. And he did it the day after that. And of course he never found his dad, and it’s not much of a mystery to me why he is in prison.

    A few weeks after this man gave his testimony I was able to ask him, “How old were you when this happened?”  His answer astounded me. He said he was about two years old. And he said, “I kept doing that for years.” For years, he knocked on doors in his neighborhood, looking for his father.

    God is the answer to the Orphan Spirit because He came to us as a father so we would never have to feel what this man was feeling, rejected and abandoned, alone, desperately searching for affirmation that only a father can provide.

    I have been pondering and praying about this question: Why did God choose to come to us as Father? He has many titles but the one that defines our relationship with Him is Father. In the Lord’s Prayer we begin by honoring that relationship. We pray “Our Father in Heaven.” First Corinthians 8:6 says “Yet for us there is one God, the Father…” Popular pastor and author Louie Giglio says Jesus referred to God as a father in the Gospels alone 189 times, far more times than any other term, distinction or characteristic Jesus used to describe Him.

    Why did God choose to come to us as Father? He could have come to us as king, but then our relationship and identity would be as loyal subjects, far different than children of God. He could have come as a mighty military leader, as many Jews expected the Messiah to come, to overthrow the Romans. No, if God came to us as General God, our relationship would be as obedient soldiers, not sons and daughters. He could have come as a dictator, so we’d be living as slaves. God would demand our obedience and threaten us with punishment if we failed to please Him. We would then be living in fear, cowering in the face of His tyranny.

    In these instances the office, the title defines the relationship, much like the Old Testament. If he is King God or General God or Dictator God He would never call us His beloved. Our connection to God is not to see Him in His role as God but in His relationship to us as our Father. That’s the distinction between the Old and the New Testaments.

    We are all born with a yearning to hear words of affirmation and support, not from our employers, not from our spouses, and not even from our pastors. No, we hunger to hear our fathers say, “Good job. I’m proud of you. I’m so glad you are my son, my daughter. You’re going to make a difference in the world.”

    But if you didn’t get that from your father, it may be hard for you to accept God as your Heavenly Father.

    I believe God wants to be our Father because the relationship of father and child is intensely personal. There is no other relationship like that between a father and a child. We all understand the word father, even if our father was less than godly, even if we grew up without a father. Kids who grew up without a father do not need to be taught what a father is.

    One day I asked the men in prison, who is the richest man in the world. At that time it was Jeff Bezos, who is number 4 today. I then asked, what are the chances that Jeff Bezos is going to write you into his will so you can inherit his $233 billion fortune. They of course laughed and scoffed at the idea, but then I said this: One drop of the blood of Jesus is worth more than all of his billions.

    Think for a moment about the difference between being a foster parent versus adopting a child.  A foster parent provides everything that child needs – food, clothing, shelter but with the understanding it’s temporary.

    But what happens when a child is adopted? Are you aware that when someone adopts a child, that child gets a new birth certificate? Instead of the biological parents’ names, the new birth certificate will have the names of the adoptive parents. So as a believer in Christ you have a new birth certificate that says God is your Daddy!

    So when I adopt you I give you my name. I make you a part of my family. I write you into my will so you will inherit your share of what I own. It’s a powerful message that says, “You belong here. You are part of this family.”

    This is the power of the fatherhood relationship, the key to our identity questions. If God came to us as a King or a military leader or a dictator, there would be nothing for us to inherit. We would not be written into the will of a King or a General or a Dictator. We wouldn’t inherit their wealth. We wouldn’t be given a new name. This is why God came as father, because no other relationship provides the power of this intensely intimate connection.

    You are mine, His Word says. John 14:18 – I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. God says I chose you – you will always have a place in my house – and I will share with you all that I own.

    That is the identity God wants us to walk in. We are His sons and daughters. He is our Father. Amen.