Session 2: Father Types

Father Types and the Father’s Heart

This session is all about father types and the Father’s heart for us. Keep your hearts open. Be ready to receive. Let go of things and just be open. There will be some interaction in this session, a little bit of ministry, and some testimonies as we work through the father types.

A Father’s Role

How many of you know that the design was for our parents to be a perfect representation of God? We are doing father types, and that does not exclude mothers. Mothers have a responsibility toward their children too, and a role to play in investing in them. But God is our Father. He is called Father constantly in the Bible, so we are going to talk a lot about fathers in this session.

So what is a father’s role in a child’s life? A father is a provider and a protector. He gives significance and safety. He mentors, gives value to his children, and feeds them. A father is also the first male encounter you have. When you are born, he is your first encounter with a man, with an authority figure. That makes it a very important role.

The First Man We Knew

I am going to read a quote from fatherdevelopment.net. “The relationship we had with our fathers was the beginning of all relationships with men. He was the first man we knew. He set the tone for all men who would come into our lives. And he delivered a deep message about who we were to him, and consequently, who we were to the world. Our dads were a major force in determining our self-esteem, and for good reason. The father-child relationship starts with the child’s earliest, most primitive feelings from dad and expands from there to sophisticated thoughts, feelings, interactions and behaviors. Though these often continue on into childhood and even parenthood, many of us as adults no longer recognize our feelings and behaviors as connected to our fathers. But the truth is, whether we recognize it or not, our fathers have had a strong voice in how we view ourselves, in everything from relationships to job performance. A father who treats his child like royalty, loving and honoring and making a special place in the world, is teaching that child to do the same for themselves. A father who treats a child like dirt is teaching the child to expect the same from the world. These lessons of self-worth go deep within us, and most of us continue to believe and follow our father’s message long after we leave our father’s houses.”

Freedom Is About Us

This is by no means meant to put down our fathers or talk badly about them, as if to say, “See, I was right.” This is all about us, because we are the ones who carry these things in our lives. We are the ones who need to forgive. Some of us have had terrible things done to us. I have been in Father Heart conferences where I have heard some horrific stories, and it is really sad. But there is freedom from everything. We need freedom from this. If a person did something horrible to you, whether a dad, a pastor, or any kind of spiritual father, forgiveness is so that you can be free and do not have to carry it. Sometimes it has to be a gift you give them that they do not deserve. Some of us have dads who are gone, and we cannot work this out with them.

The thing is, God is our perfect Father. We have said it a bunch of times today. He is the perfect representation of the father we need in our life to father us. Whatever we went through in our childhood, whether we had a good father, an abusive father, a passive father, all of that stuff, we need him to father us now.

I have been to these things probably thirty times, and this one session is one of the biggest for me. I had a way of acting and living my life that I did not know came from my childhood and my dad. Once God started to show me, “This is the filter you see me through because of what happened to you as a child,” he began to release me from those things, and I began to give them to him. My relationship with him grew so much bigger, so much deeper and so much more intimate. We have worldly sayings like “like father, like son.” I used to brag about that with my anger: “Like father, like son. It’s not my fault, I was brought up that way.” And yes, I was brought up that way. But it is not who God created me to be. It was not my identity. Identity is a huge thing that people struggle with nowadays. Nobody knows where they are going, what they are doing or who they are until they meet the Father, and then they begin to realize who they are.

The Six Father Types

There are six father types. For each one I am going to read how it can affect your view of God, and for some of them we will have a testimony. Then you will have the opportunity to stand and pray a quick prayer to release your earthly dad, so that you can view God through a different lens.

Here are the six: the absent father, the passive father, the performance-oriented father, the authoritarian father, the abusive father, and the good father. For the longest time, every time I came to the good father, I wondered who actually had a good father. Now I have two daughters and I think I have this down. Then I realize I am not the perfect father either, so I point them toward God.

The Absent Father

An absent father can be due to death, divorce, long work hours, a high travel schedule, abandonment and so on. It can make you feel insignificant, because the father we get our significance from is not there to give it. This can result in feelings of neglect, rejection and abandonment.

You might be a single mom, or you might have had a single mom, and think, “I got my significance from my mom.” But your father, whether he was there or not, was designed to have a role in that. Even when we get our significance from our mother, it is not complete, because we were designed to have a father and a mother both pouring into us.

If you had an absent father, here is how your view of God may be projected. If your dad was not around, or even when he was there he was not really around, you may feel God is distant and uninvolved. You may feel that if you love him, he will leave you. You might only feel the love of God intermittently, and feel that God will not come through for you. There may be a sense of deep guilt and striving for love and approval, and a fear of being rejected. There may be a fear of getting close to God because he may abandon you, so you are frightened to risk relationship with him. These things can make us very intense and serious, because we did not really have a childhood, and God wants to restore those years. You might have a sense of “I’m very strong, I can take care of myself, I don’t need anybody, I have to make my own way in this world, because if I don’t do it, nobody will.” These are all worldly mindsets. He is our Father and he wants to do this with us. He wants to walk us through life. Or you could be a very angry person who internalizes it and blames everything on the fact that your dad was not there. We are not saying “get over it.” This stuff affects you. But there is healing for it. He wants you to be whole and complete. A lot of times you may feel like something is missing in your life.

Psalm 68:5 says he is a father to the fatherless. John 14:18 says he will not leave you as orphans. Hebrews 13:5 says he will never leave us. What is crazy is realizing that God was with you that whole time. For a long time I would ask, “Why didn’t you do anything? Why didn’t you protect me?” Now that I am healed, I look back and see that he was protecting me. It might not have looked the way I thought it would, but he was there, and I am here now because of it.

If you had an absent father, stand if you feel comfortable doing it, and close your eyes. Your earthly father could have had something in every one of these six types, so just picture God standing in front of you and repeat this prayer after me.

Father God, thank you for my earthly father. I forgive him for any way he misrepresented you to me. I thank you that I am not alone and never will be. I thank you that you long to be a father to me as much as I long to have a father. I am not an orphan any longer. I welcome you into my life as a father to me, as your son or daughter.

The Passive Father

The next father type is the passive father. A testimony was shared on this father type.

When we have these views of God because of our childhood, and those things begin to leave, and you start to read the Bible and it is no longer a rule book but a love story from the Father who created us, it is a whole different Christianity. Sometimes you have blockages and cannot get to a certain point. That is why prayer ministry is such a big part of who we are here. These quick prayers are important, but they are just a beginning. You might have blockages that take longer than a two-line prayer to get through. So write down what comes up, and talk to one of the leaders if you want to go deeper. We have prayer ministry people who do that.

A passive father is not responsive, involved or active. He is not home even when he is home. Some of these types cross over with the absent father. He is unable to express his emotions, and it is difficult to get his attention. He is often hidden behind a book or a newspaper or engrossed in the TV. That was written before phones were around, so add phones, the computer and video games. Basically, your dad is there, but he is not. I had a friend growing up whose dad was passive. We would do whatever we wanted in the house, and I would say, “Your dad doesn’t care,” and he would say, “No, he just doesn’t even know what’s going on.” He was in his own world.

A passive father rarely gives affection, initiates or pursues you. He is unemotional or withdrawn, and rarely able to share joy or grief. He has difficulty saying “I love you” and is uncomfortable with physical affection. This does not mean he felt nothing for you or considered you unimportant. It may just be that he found it hard to express. But the result is that it is hard to feel close to him. Undemonstrated love wounds. The absence of something good can be as devastating as the presence of something bad. During World War II, an experiment was done with about fifty newborn babies. The only thing the caregivers were allowed to do was meet their basic needs: feed them, cover them if they were cold. They were not allowed to show them any affection at all, no touch, nothing, from the time they were born. All of them died within six months. That is how important it is for us to have affection.

Here is the view of God this can project. You know God loves you, but you think it is from a distance. You walk by faith that God loves you, and it is only faith, with no experience, no encounter and no relationship with God. You just believe. That is a hard Christianity, just white-knuckling it through. I could not do Christianity if I did not have encounters and experience with God. I tried, and it did not work out. By nature I am rebellious, and so are we all. With God I could not do it without having an encounter with him, a relationship with him daily, all the time, even in something little.

You may think you cannot experience the Father’s love. I hear it all the time: “How do you experience the Father’s love? I haven’t.” You may think God is not interested in your life, that he is up there with more important things to do. Look at what is going on in the world, and you wonder what he could have time for. Guys, do not put God in a little box and say he does not have time for you. The mysteries of God are unfathomable, but we know him because we can encounter him. We may become people who can cope and get by, but who have a hard time expressing our love and knowing how to accept it. We have a hard time expressing love to our kids, our wives and our husbands.

He is intimately acquainted with all your ways (Psalm 139). Luke 12:7 says he has counted the hairs on your head. He knows you. He knit you together in your mother’s womb. Think about how many billions of people are in the world. That is how big God is. He is not passive in his love for us, and he is interested in every detail.

If you had a passive father, you can stand or sit, and close your eyes. You can say this out loud or in your heart.

Father, thank you for your love, and I stand here today to receive that love. I want to forgive my father for his passivity. Forgive me for my responses to his passivity. I am sorry for my responses to the wounding. I invite you to be active in my life, and to show me that you are interested in my life. Amen.

When you pray this, have faith and believe it. He is interested in your life, and he is going to show you. There are not many things I can guarantee in life, but a lot of this I can guarantee.

The Performance-Oriented Father

The next father type is the performance-oriented father. A testimony was shared on this father type.

A performance-oriented father has high standards untempered by enough love, nurture or affection. He values strict obedience. He points to faults and failures as a way to motivate you to succeed. How many of us know that does not work? There is disapproval for not meeting expectations, and your strengths and successes are rarely affirmed. For example, an exam mark of B may be mentioned without any comment on the four A’s. Love and affirmation are expressed only when you perform well, in things like school, appearance, sports or religion. I think a lot of Christians had a performance-oriented father.

This can lead to a fear of failure and a feeling that you have to earn the Father’s love. You feel you can never live up to God’s standards, and you may never feel good enough in God’s eyes. It leads to an ever-increasing obsession with working harder and with success in some area of life. There is nothing wrong with success in life. It is about what is driving you, what your motivation is. There is little sense of rest. There is often an air of super-spirituality, and you may wear a mask to hide what is really going on internally. Burnout, discouragement and depression may come. It has been said that most people who suffer depression had at least one performance-oriented parent. We are not excluding the moms here.

Your projected view of God is that he is only interested in your performance or attendance. You get your value from coming to church and think, “Okay, I’m right with God.” New Testament discipline can quickly become New Testament law. You have all the boxes checked. We are always trying to earn our way, thinking God only loves me when I’m doing the right things, so I do lots of them. If we rest, God will judge us. Some people struggle with this: “I’ve got to be busy, busy, busy.” We become people who strive to succeed, strive for affection and notice, and confuse value with what we do. We get great at hiding our weaknesses and lying. Or we give up, shut down, or do not even bother to try. Those things can cause depression.

Look at what Scripture says. Ephesians 1:4-5 says he chose us to be his sons. This is not by mistake. John 17:23 says he loves us just as he loves Jesus, exactly the same. Imagine that. Jesus was perfect and we are not, but he still loves us exactly the same. In Matthew 3:16-17, at the baptism of Jesus, Jesus had not even done anything yet. He had not done all the miracles and had not gone to the cross. And the Father said, “This is my Son, whom I love.” He was speaking his identity out over him. You have that same thing. You are his son or daughter whom he loves.

It can’t be that easy, can it? It is that easy. He will still change us and he will heal us. The more time we spend with him, and the more we do with him, the more we become like him. We want his character. If you do not want his character, you are in the wrong place. We do not come together to check a box, to say, “I did my fifty-two Sundays this year, I’m going to heaven.” We want to be more like him, and we want more of him.

If that was your father, you can stand or sit. Close your eyes, and we will go through the prayer.

Father, thank you that you do not require perfection in order to be loved by you. Thank you that you love the way you created me, and that you desire to spend time with me. Thank you that I cannot earn what I have already been given. Help me to walk in the experience of being so greatly loved by you. Thank you for my parents, who did the best they knew how. But where they taught me to strive and perform for acceptance, I want to forgive them. I want to give them unconditional forgiveness and release them from any judgments I have. Lord, unhook the lie that I need to perform in order to be loved. Father, I receive your unconditional love. Father, I receive your unconditional love. Right now, start the process in me. I give you permission to take down the walls that have kept you distant.

Just remember, God never reveals something in your life to make you feel bad. He reveals it because he wants to work on it and heal it. When you realize, “That’s me, my dad was like that,” and you actually see God in this, it is not to beat you up. It is because he wants a relationship with us where we know our perfect Father.

The Authoritarian Father

The next father type is the authoritarian father. A testimony was shared on this father type.

An authoritarian father is strict, a legalist who lives by the rules but has little ability to give intimacy and express love. Obedience is valued above relationship, and truth above love. He is more comfortable with obedience and truth than with love and intimacy, and he majors on truth and the letter of the law. Approval comes by obeying the written and unwritten rules. This translates into a belief that love and obedience are intertwined. It can result in a deep anger that quenches the spirit of a person, leading to a crushed or heavy heart. It can also lead to a loss of motivation in life and a lack of identity, so that a person is easily trapped in negative groups where he takes on their identities and becomes somebody else.

You see God as the big cop in the sky, watching to make sure you obey the Christian rules, be nice, be in church and so on. So it is hard to develop a relationship with God. Since we unconsciously see God as harsh and angry, it is difficult to develop intimacy with him. We are afraid. This type of father can shape our idea of God as one who seems only interested in the rules.

Remember, this is not about bashing our fathers. The testimonies are from people who have gone through this stuff and been healed in their hearts. They are telling you how they saw God partly because of this, and how God healed it.

Your projected view onto God may be that God is harsh and impatient. You may believe God is only interested in the public areas of my life, in being outwardly righteous or holy. Do you have tattoos? Those guys with tattoos are trouble. We become people who are constantly looking for someone else to blame for our failures or problems. We do not want God’s hammer to fall on us. We become intolerant of anyone who does not act or think the way we do, because we are the only ones who have it right.

If that was your father, we are going to go through a little prayer. You can stand or sit, and close your eyes.

Lord, heal the areas of my heart that were quenched or silenced. I release the constant fear of making a mistake. Where my boundaries were crossed by control, I ask you to establish your protective peace. I choose to forgive my father for choosing rules over relationship. I forgive him for not honoring my individuality, my feelings or my voice, and I release him to you.

The Abusive Father

The abusive father is the next type, and this is a serious one. It is the most severe wound inflicted on a child. There is deep emotional pain, but it can be healed. This father inflicts physical, emotional, verbal or sexual abuse on family members. That creates great inner pain, fear and insecurity in your relationship with your father. Is he in a good mood? Is he angry? You may believe it is your fault. It is hard to relax. You are always aware of the emotional atmosphere when dad is around. You may feel guilt, shame and a sense of worthlessness. You may shut down. You may turn to counterfeit affections for love and to dull the pain and fear that are constant factors in your life.

In terms of God, you feel unsure of your relationship with him, or you feel that getting near to him means being punished. Deep down, you feel afraid of God and that he is angry with you. You likely feel you have done something wrong, especially if you do not feel his love. Alternatively, you may feel angry at God for not protecting you from your father’s abuse. It is often hard to relate to spiritual authority in the church. That was my thing. I was angry at God for such a long time, because I felt like, “You didn’t do anything. I’ll never serve you.” Thank God I am healed. This kind of father can be outwardly peaceful and loving, but explode.

So your projected view of God is that he is the big cop in the sky, the God of wrath, to be feared and not trusted. God will hurt you if you let him close to you. He is quick to punish and is not a loving father. We can become angry at God for not protecting us, and feel he does not care. We feel inherently bad, as though we deserve to be punished: “I must have done something.” We battle guilt, unworthiness and shame: “There’s something wrong with me.” We find it hard to draw close to God and to trust others. “If others really knew how bad I was, they wouldn’t love me.” Or, “Why would God love me if my own father can’t?”

Jeremiah 29:11 says he has plans to prosper you, to give you a future and a hope. God’s intention is always for good. A bruised reed, one that bends over and falls, God is not going to snap off or break. The very areas where you were broken, he will strengthen and redeem. That is true, and he has redeemed so much in my life.

If you had an abusive father, you can stand or sit, and close your eyes. We will pray this prayer.

Father, thank you for your tenderness. You are so wonderful and tenderhearted. You love to wipe every tear. Come and cover us with your love. Give us a double portion of honor where we were dishonored. Give us a garment of praise where we have walked in heaviness. Restore all that the locust have eaten.

The Good Father

Remember, these are just two-line prayers, and there is more if you need it. We will have a prayer team up front at the end, right before lunch, and if some of us have been deeply wounded, you can get more prayer ministry.

Now the good father. Good fathers instill love and security. They call their kids to life. This type of father unconditionally pours out affirmation, love and encouragement in concrete ways. Even in the midst of discipline, he is proud of you and initiates relationship. Like our heavenly Father, affirmation is spoken and given through hugs and kisses, touch, gifts, reassurances and encouragement. Even in discipline there is love. The good father speaks openly about how much he loves you, about your value, your identity and your purpose. Even if this was not your father, these are things we can shoot for, adding God in there. A good father promotes you and is openly proud of you. He initiates and comes to the rescue when you need him. He sees you and loves you for who you are, not for what you are not. This is the Father’s treatment of Jesus at his baptism, which we talked about earlier.

Having a good father means you have more confidence and a greater ability to risk and to rebound after disappointment or rejection. You more easily connect with God and with the love of God. There are many good fathers, but only one perfect Father. Good fathers pave the way for you to live a healthier, more balanced and wholesome life in God. But we are not perfect, and I am talking about me too.

If there is anything you may struggle with in this regard, it is that sometimes it is difficult to see the need for a closer attachment to your heavenly Father than to your earthly father. It is not about not needing him. It is more like, “I can call my dad up and just talk with him,” so you never really go to God and spend time with him. You know he is there, he loves you and he is good. Here are some things to look for. One little fault can seem like a blaring issue. I see that in my own daughter after reading this. When you have had a dad who usually met your every need, things seem bigger than they are. It can seem dishonoring to have been hurt by something he did. You may not know how to receive love from Father God because there is no felt need. You feel others might need it, but you are okay. “Yeah, that person over there needs love, but I’m good.” But really, we all need it. You may have a wonderful view of Father God but not let him have a place in your life.

This also shows up in Christians who relate mostly to Jesus and the Holy Spirit. There are a lot of Christians who have no relationship with the Father, only with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And the truth is that all three are there, and we need the whole. Sometimes people say, “How many times can you talk about the Father heart?” And I say, the whole Bible, everything we have, is the Father heart of God. Do not limit it. Everything Jesus did was the heart of God. Everything the Holy Spirit does is the heart of God.

If you had a good father, you can stand, close your eyes, or stay seated, but everybody can pray this one, because it is about wanting to be closer to you, Father.

Father, thank you for your love, and I thank you for my earthly parents. I bless them that they gave me life. I choose to honor them for giving me such a wonderful upbringing. And if they did not, I choose to forgive them. Today I want to release them, Father, and bless myself to learn and be closer to you. I give you permission to be my Father.

Closing Prayer and Ministry

Those are the six father types. Hopefully you got something out of that. If it is your first time, it is the beginning of a journey that is life-changing. If it is not your first time, you are still on that journey. We are always going to be on it, as we become more and more like him and our character becomes more like his character. We want to reflect him.

The lead team came forward, and an invitation went out to anyone who wanted prayer. If something in this session touched you and you want to take care of it, or you do not know how to handle it, you are welcome to come up. If you would rather go straight to lunch, you are welcome to do that too.

Father, we thank you for this time today. We thank you for your presence. We thank you for how much you desperately love each and every one of your children. Thank you, Father, for the healing that you are doing here today. We bless the food and the lunch, and we thank you for providing all the provisions that we need, because Father always provides. We pray that you touch every heart here and continue this ministry and work throughout the day. Amen.