If your dad just wrote a $40,000 check to the mortgage company, that is one payment of $40,000 to one of you from him, so it triggers the gift tax. Tax rules are tax rules, as silly as they may be. To make it abundantly clear in case you got audited later, I would have him write different checks (still don't know if you are married or if he is married, so don't know if there would be 4 checks to write or multiple years to work with). It would just take the same trip to the bank to deposit them, so it isn't that much more of a hassle, and you would then have a paper record of the amount of the checks and to who they were written out to and from who they were from.
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