 Is there a better, more gratifying thing that you can think of than being a father? Without question, one of the greatest honors and privileges that God shares with men is the opportunity to see and to feel and understand what it's like to be a father. We are in no way like him to the degree that he is a father, but he at least shares with us. Just the honor to know what it is to have children and to be entrusted with guiding them and loving them and protecting them. Have you ever noticed how many times in the Bible that there are scriptures that call God our Father? We get to call him Abba, right? Father. In Psalms 103, 13 it says, as a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him. In Deuteronomy 1 verses 30, he says, speaking to the children of Israel, the Lord your God who goes before you, he will fight for you according to all he did for you in Egypt before your eyes. And in the wilderness where you saw how the Lord your God carried you as a man, carries his son, and some verses would say as a father in all the way that you went until you came to this place. So God relates to us as a father. And unfortunately, we have this issue today where we don't see men stepping up to the degree that they used to as a father. It doesn't seem to be as important. Now, me, I'm blessed. I've got four daughters and a son-in-law. So I've got five children who I love dearly. The oldest being Brittany, who is 30. I sometimes forget their ages. The second oldest is Morgan. She's what, 25, 26, 20 something. I don't know. And her husband, Anthony, I adore them. The only problem with Anthony is two things. One, he could use a haircut. And then two, he's a cowboy fan, but still love him to death. My third child, Hannah, with whom I'm wearing this shirt because she just graduated college is 23. And then my baby is Bailey, who is 14, about to turn 15. And they all are special. And I'm proud of them in their own in their own way. Many of you heard my story about being in prison for for such a long time. And one of the most hurtful things about it isn't so much about being locked away as it is about being away from your family, being away from your children. You talk about what keeps a grown man up at night crying. And the fact that I missed my youngest daughter's most of her formative years, the bulk of her years, as a matter of fact. And so now we are in the process of kind of putting that back together, becoming more familiar with with each other every day. But there's nothing that I wouldn't do for my children. Similarly to God. The problem today is that we've got so many men, so many absent fathers be they black, white or Hispanic, but particularly in the in the black community. But anywhere fathers are important. We do some things sometimes that we may not know what we're doing, but we're going to do the best that we can. Why? Because we love our children. We would literally lay down our life for our children. The Bible says Jesus says that greater love has no man that he would lay down his life for a friend. Well, what would a father do for his children? Some of you are familiar with some of you are not familiar with with some of the stats associated with a father not being at home with his children. So let me just share some of these with you. Children who don't have a father at home represent 72% of all teenage murderers, 60% of all rapists, 70% of kids who are incarcerated, they're twice as likely to quit school 11 times more likely to be violent, three out of 14 suicides, 80% of all adolescents in psychiatric hospitals and 90% of runaways. There's a clip from Prager U where Larry Elder is going over some of these stats as well. We all know the statistics that children who grow up without a father or five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. The Journal of Research on adolescence confirms that even after controlling for varying levels of household income, kids and father apps and homes are more likely to end up in jail and kids who never had a father in the house are the most likely to wind up behind bars. In 1960, 5% of America's children entered the world without a mother and father married to each other. By 1980, it was 18%. By 2000, it had risen to 33% and 15 years later, the number reached 41%. For blacks, even during slavery, when marriage for slaves was illegal, black children were more likely than today to be raised by both their mother and father. Economist Walter Williams has written that according to census data from 1890 to 1940, a black child was more likely to grow up with married parents than a white child. For blacks, out of wedlock births have gone from 25% in 1965 to 73% in 2015. For whites, from less than 5% to over 25% and for Hispanics out of wedlock births have risen to 53%. What happened to fathers? And so I'm probably going to get a little emotional on this because this is bothersome to me and it's personal to me because I know what it's like being locked away and kept away from your family. And when people act as though it's no big deal for a man not to be present in the home with his children, first of all, it's insulting to men who are at home. You do a disservice to all fathers who are doing their job. And I know things happen and sometimes divorce happens and maybe the child is not the product of someone's marriage. But that's not the child's fault. And you need to understand how important this is to not have the father there. When I was in prison, one of the things that I had to grapple with and had to come to understanding was that me not being there was not their fault. It was my fault. In other words, I willfully chose to abandon them. And now that sounds harsh because I didn't just say, you know what? I'm leaving my children. No, but my actions, my selfish actions led me away. Similarly, there are some men whose selfish actions lead them away from their children. Maybe you're just tired of her and you want to get away. Maybe you decided to have unprotected sex and get a woman pregnant who's not your wife. And now you've got another child growing up or being born out of wedlock growing up without her father at home. In particularly in the black community, you've got this huge epidemic of black fathers not being at home. And that is the leading contributor to all the things that ailed the black community. I'm saying it definitively because that's a fact. The one thing that keeps showing up over and over again with these things that hurt and ailed the black community, the one thing that keeps popping up when you look at men who go to prison, when you look at young boys who are violent, who are committing crimes, when you look at kids who are struggling with their sexuality, who are likely to become homosexual, when you look at families that are at the poverty rate or below the poverty rate, the one thing that's always seems to be common is that the father was not home. Think about this for a second. When a father's at home, everything tends to even out if a black father's at home, that black family tends to be on par with a white family. If you look at the poverty rate among blacks, it was a 22% and among whites was 11%. But among black married couples, it was 7.5%. So it's not so they not only do better than blacks as a whole, they do better than whites as a whole. And black married couples have had a poverty rate in single digits every year since 1994. Now, when I'm talking about whether the father's a good father or not, we're talking about a father being at home because his presence means something. And if you're a father at home and you don't think so, then you need to tell me you think that love yourself to where if you're not there, it doesn't matter. But there's always somebody that wants to be an apologist for somebody's bad behavior. The concept of the absent black father is a myth. It's not real. When compared to wider Hispanic fathers, black fathers were actually more likely to be involved in their children's lives in almost every way. They were even more likely to have bathed, diapered or dress their kids, eaten a meal with them, played with them, helped them with homework and taken them to and from activities. And a lot of that held true even when black fathers didn't live with their children. This idea that black fathers aren't present in their kids lives is actually false. Some of these people are just too dismissive of these issues. Maybe guilt. I don't know what it is. But stop being stupid. I'm using harsh language here because that's what you are. You are being stupid if you think that a father not being home doesn't matter. And so to come back and say that if he's not married to the mother, then that doesn't mean that he can't be involved. Well, sure, he can be involved. But to what degree? Most of you can count. So let's count. Let's use simple math. There are 24 hours in a day. So let's say this man be black or white is not married. He still has the same 24 hours in a day that a married couple has, right? And so what does he do in his 24 hours? Eight hours of work. If he's working, hopefully he's working. He's got to sleep. So let's just take away 16 hours right there for for for going to work for going to sleep. He has to wake up. He has to eat somewhere sometimes got to bathe. He's got to take care of the place that he's staying in being an apartment or a house. Now he's got eight hours in the day to see his children. Unless his children are next door to him, he's got to spend some time to travel to go see them. He's got to spend and and let's just say it's only one child. If there's two children, now you got four hours in the day to be with those children. Now, are these fathers who are not at home with the children? Are they seeing their children every day? Not likely. I don't know of any father who's not in the home who got to go to see his child every day. And let's say he is spending some time with his child. He's taking them out to a ball game or to the park or what have you. How often is he doing that? Come on, let's just be honest. You only got so many hours in the day and to say that the amount of time that he spends with that child is equivalent to the father being at home. Just his presence. Just the fact that my daughter knows that I'm in the next room or outside in the backyard. She knows that there's only so much she can do or get away with similar to your children. Daddy's at home, right? And so when daddy's at home, something happens, the household changes. And so it's just foolishness and then you want to rely on this survey. That's all it was as a survey. When black men have said that they spend this amount of time with their children. Well, it's a survey. There's no way to actually identify, but what we can figure out, what we can identify is this one fact. Children born out of a wedlock suffer greater than children who are born to a married couple. That's just a fact. And if you love your child that much, as you say you do, you will do everything that you can. Don't let the world give you some excuse to not be there. If you are not there with your child, if for some reason it's over with the uh with the mother, well then obviously you have to do the best that you can. But going forward, you need to know how important it is to be there, that you make these sacrifices like God did, like our own father did for us. See, God is not someone who's going to send somebody to go see about his children. He'll go and see about them himself. That's the way that we ought to be. I think it's an awesome privilege to be the father of these children that God has given me. I think it's an awesome privilege to have these grandchildren that I have. So let's do away with this foolishness, this nonsense of saying that black fatherlessness is a myth or black father's being involved, not being involved, is a myth. By and large we're not, you don't have to rely on the study from the CDC or the Census Bureau or any father's initiative or anything like that. You don't have to worry about any group giving you the numbers. Just go to any low-income community. Go visit someone in prison. Go to the hospitals and see what's happening there. Go to these schools and see what's happening. Go ask a teacher who's dealing with these children who are acting up, who are not graduating, who are not doing their homework. Ask them, do they know if that child has a father? I am grateful for what God has given me, for the honor of having these children that I have who just maybe inspired me, maybe because of me, maybe in spite of me they've turned out the way they have. I'm so glad that God, the father, my father, has kept his hand over my family. I'm glad that he's watched over my children even in my absence. I'm glad that he has overcome my stupidity and our learning curve that my wife and I had just trying to figure out how to do this. So what I'm saying this is to, though you can't be perfect as a father, though you can't always do the right thing and for some people though you can't be present as much as you would like, do the best you can. Maximum effort and if maximum effort still precludes you from being physically in the home, will be as present as you possibly can. Thankfully they've got they've got technology to where now you can zoom or FaceTime or whatever you call it. You can call, you can play video games with them in one destination so you can do things to be involved in your child's life. You can see about them but you can give them something to look forward to. You can teach them what it's like to be a godly man whether it's a girl or a boy that you have as a child. You can teach them what it's like to to see what a godly man, how a godly man behaves if she's a girl, how a godly man would treat her, if he's a boy, how a godly man would act, how to be responsible, respectful. We're not going to make up any excuses as to why we didn't do what we did in the first place, why we weren't there, why we didn't do this, why we didn't do that, not going to the game, not being present, why we why we divorced mommy, why we didn't, why we never married mommy, why we've gotten multiple siblings with different women. We can't, we can't go back and fix it, but we can do do better going forward. And so take the awesome privilege, honor and responsibility of being a father serious.