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The Father's Business Podcast
The Father's Business Podcast
He is-The Character of God: He is Presence
What if God’s presence isn’t something you chase—but Someone you meet face to face?
This episode unpacks Scripture’s language of presence—literally “His face”—and how shifting from concept to communion transforms how you pray, rest, and decide. Drawing from Exodus 33:14, Numbers, Joshua, and John 15, we explore how God’s steady withness anchors anxious hearts and restores joy.
We also confront the modern tug-of-war with attention: constant noise, endless scroll, and hurry. Discover why solitude isn’t isolation but sacred stillness—the space where you can behold God again. What we behold shapes who we become.
You’ll hear simple ways to practice presence—five-minute pauses, breath prayers, sunset reflections, and mini-retreats inspired by Jesus’ rhythm of withdrawal. If you’ve felt distant or restless, take this as your nudge to turn toward His face and behold Him.
The Father's Business was founded by Sylvia Gunter to encourage people to a deeper relationship with God. I'm Elizabeth Gunter Powell. And I am Kimberly Roddy.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to the Father's Business Podcast. We are so glad that you've joined us. Well, hi there, and welcome back to our podcast. We're glad that you're joining us today. We are continuing our series on the characteristics of God. And today we're going to talk about how He is presence. And there's a lot that's encompassed in this conversation. So we hope you really enjoy this conversation today. And we really hope that you'll open up your ears and your heart and your mind, your spirit, your soul, and your body to receive all that God has to say to you today. And we want to start this conversation with the verse in Exodus 33, 14, where the Lord said, My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest. This verse is around the other verse, Exodus 34, which we have talked about a lot, where God is passing in front of Moses and He's declaring, I'm compassionate and a gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness and all the wonderful things that he declared that he was. This is around that same time. It's in Exodus 33, and he's saying, My presence will go with you. Let's just take that right there. Like he is revealing that he will be with us, his children. And I think that's a pretty powerful concept to think about because how often do we say, I feel so alone?
SPEAKER_00:And Kimberly, I think sometimes that word when I hear God's presence, that can almost feel a little ooky spooky. Like there, that's that's hard to wrap my arms around. Like what this is it, this aura, is it this sensation? But if you really look into the the scripture there in the Hebrew, that word presence literally means face. It's about relational nearness. I mean, think about it. Most of our relationship is over the phone or you know, talking to each other on a Marco Polo or something along those lines. But when we get to be physically present with each other like we were when we were in Charlotte, when we're face to face with each other, there's just this deep richness that happens in our relationship. And so I it's so beautiful to think about. It's not just this sense of God will go with you, but his face. He is right there. He is so near to us. That also brings to my mind the other very familiar verse that we often quote here out of Numbers where it says, The Lord bless you and keep you. Let his face shine upon you and give you rest. There's so much about God that wants to be intentionally, relationally close to us.
SPEAKER_01:We see that same idea in uh if we move on in scripture in Joshua, he said, Have I not commanded you, be strong and courageous, do not be afraid, do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. And we even see it in the New Testament in Matthew 28, 20, Jesus said, And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. I mean, we could give you more verses, uh, John 15, remain in me as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself, it must remain to the vine. Over and over we see this idea in the Old Testament and the New Testament from Genesis to Revelation that that God will be with us. We also see the idea of him being near or his nearness. It's different to be near one another, like like Elizabeth, when you were talking about, like when we are together in person versus when we are far apart and we're connecting on the phone or online or something. It's just different, like when we can see each other's face and to think that that's what God was saying in Exodus, that his presence was his face. I I find that a difficult concept to really grasp today because I don't feel like I see his face.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And that I I was having the same feeling as we're reading through all these these scriptures. It's like, yes, this is truth, and this is what's promised to us, and it's promised to us in abundance because every characteristic that we're going to talk about at God about God will be in abundance. But why don't we feel on a more regular basis, the face of God is with me?
SPEAKER_01:Well, as I think about it, I believe that the reason that we don't sense his presence, experience his presence, see his face is simply because we do not make space and time for solitude. When we talk about solitude, what we're really talking about is we're not talking about loneliness. We're talking about uh making space for a sacred stillness before God.
SPEAKER_00:And that's that's why this conversation to me is so interesting, Kimberly, because we're talking about we need to experience the presence of God's face, but the way we're talking about getting to that place is solitude, which does feel like being alone. I mean, we in our culture, we use solitude as a form of punishment, whether that be in prison where you put someone in solitary confinement, or even think about your own kids, when they've done something wrong, they've got to go to timeout. They've got to go be put off by themselves to settle down, be punished, regulate whatever the purpose of that timeout is for. And so it it kind of messes with the mind to think about we want to know more of God's face, but how we do that is through solitude. And I think that is part of the conversation that you and I want to have today. It's not about God leaving us alone. Um, and there's uh lots of scriptures and and times that we can think about in the Bible where God purposely took his people into the wilderness or took them into desert places. And the scripture says he took them into the wilderness not to punish them, but to speak tenderly to them. But I know for I mean, a lot of our listeners, the more extroverted among us, the idea of solitude is just absolutely awful. Now, I'm not one of those people. If you want to give me a day of solitude, I am all in. I enjoy being alone. But for people who struggle with being alone, or I know we know some people that almost even get into a panic if they are they don't have people around them because that's just the way they're wired. This idea of solitude and stillness doesn't sound like enjoying God to me.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm I'm a little bit more wired that way than you are, as far as getting antsy when I have too much alone time. Um, when when I know that I'm gonna be alone, truly alone without humans for several days. It takes me a day or two to get accustomed to that. And so I don't tend to seek out truly being alone or being isolated. But again, I think the key here is that we're we're not trying to isolate ourselves. We're trying to get alone or be quiet or be still for the purpose of connecting. Right. And so we we have to, I think we are so accustomed to not being alone, especially today in our age of technology, we are not accustomed to not having something in front of us. I even was uh listening to a report that was discussing closed captioning when you're watching TV. And it was saying that things have shifted a little bit in that a lot more of the younger generation, like under 35 or 40, are actually putting captions on their shows more so than the older generation. And we tend to think of like growing up for me, closed caption was for the hearing impaired, right?
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:But now closed captioning is really so you can multitask in a lot of ways. Um, and a lot of younger people are talking about that. They're saying one, they want to be able to understand things a little bit better because dialogue can be fast. But two, some one lady actually said, I want to, if I read the cla captions, sometimes that comes faster than the actors saying it so I can stay ahead. And others were talking about wanting to read the captions while doing something else. So I think how distracted are we, you know? Um, how much do we have a buzz or a ding that goes off in our pocket or on our wrist or in our bag, you know, in our purse or whatever that notifies us to look at something else rather than whatever we were doing. And so I think that to talk about truly experiencing solitude is is just a challenging thought for today. I mean, even for me, when I was in seminary in the early 2000s, I did a three-day silent retreat. And it was so incredibly difficult to just get settled in, which took I felt like 48 hours, which was two of the days, you know? Right. Yeah. Um, and so I I do readily understand that many of our listeners are truly like, what do you mean? Like, how do I ever think about carving out space and time for solitude? And yet, if we don't carve out time for solitude, I think we miss out on so much. I think we begin to lose the art of reflecting. I think we're losing the ability to just let our minds wander and to let our minds come up with thoughts and think of things and allow the Holy Spirit to guide us, because that's a foreign concept. Um, and and I think the truth is we've even seen on our retreats, our conferences, our workshops, our things we do that that we have to ask people, turn off your phone, be present. We in our on our retreats and conferences, we even give people the opportunity to go and sit and be quiet and listen. And it's in those moments that people almost a hundred percent of the time, I'm not gonna say it's almost a hundred percent of the time, people are coming back and are saying, Here's what, here's what I sensed, here's what I sent the Lord sensed the Lord saying to me, here's what I heard, here's what I saw, here's what here's what I felt, you know, here's what I experienced. And in all of that, it's not God who showed up different.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It's us who paused to see him.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Yeah. And I think that's that is that is the convicting, encouraging, depressing part of all of this to me is God is always present. His face is always with me. So I have this ability to tap into this abundance of him, and yet, how much have I missed? Because I am so easily distracted, because I am not taking the time to slow down. And it's hard. Like I was sitting on my swing just yesterday after I'd taken a walk and I'd listened to a couple of worship songs, and I just want to sit down on my swing and just enjoy God's presence and kind of start my day off right. And I'm sitting there trying to focus in and just really tell Father, Son, and Holy Spirit how much I appreciate them and how much I love them. And the whole time I'm trying to focus on that, I've got eight other things running through my head because it's it's you know, it's a morning, it's a new week. I got to get going, and here's all the things that are waiting for me to do. And I've I felt I even just said, Jesus, I am so sad that even when I'm trying to sit here and focus in on you, my brain wants to go 8,000 different directions. And I just want to think about you for a few minutes because we have trained our brains. I going back to what you're talking about with the subtitles on on the shows that we watch, uh, or you listen to a podcast while you're cleaning the house, we have trained ourselves to do multiple things at once. I think more so in the last couple of decades than we used to do. I mean, I think back to, you know, my parents' first car didn't even have a radio in it. So, what did you do when you drove from point A to point B? Well, either you were by yourself and you were just with your thoughts, or you had someone else in the car and the two of you had a conversation. And I'm guilty of this. As soon as I'm in my car and I'm driving anywhere, I'm like, well, what podcast do I need to listen to right now? Or what music do I need to turn on? And so we have so trained ourselves that we've got to have multiple things going on at the same time that it does make it harder when we give ourselves a chance to be still, to really allow our brains to be at rest so that we can ponder and be amazed at who God is for us.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And that's that other part of Exodus 33, 14, where the Lord said, My presence will go with you and I will give you rest. And what the word rest there means is to settle, yeah, to settle down, to dwell securely. Yeah. I I'm not settled when I'm listening to a podcast and feverishly cleaning, cleaning my room. I mean, that's a productive good thing to do.
SPEAKER_00:Sure.
SPEAKER_01:Certainly not bashing that, but I'm not practicing listening to God. I'm not settling down, I'm not dwelling securely with him. I'm not seeking to be at peace with him and all and all of those things. And so, yeah, I think it's until we I mean the first thing is like just recognizing we need less noise, but this is a deeper part of that too. This is, I need less noise and I need to be okay with that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Kimberly, Isaiah 30, 15 says, and repentance and rest is your salvation and quietness and trust is your strength, picking up on that verse that you just read where in his presence he will give us rest. Well, that rest is what leads to us being renewed in him, being found in him. God's strength doesn't flow from our doing more, it flows from our being with him. And so if we're not slowing down enough to be still, to be renewed and let his presence settle over us, let his presence give us rest, let it quiet us and give us the ability to trust in him, then how do we ever get to that deeper place? So it's not just about being still for the sake of being still, which honestly in this culture would be great. You know, give give your brain, give your body, give your emotions a break. Um, but it's about allowing that solitude, that place of stillness, that place of intentionally saying, I'm gonna focus on your presence to bring us rest and renewal and to steadiness, that settledness that we talked about. That word rest meaning that we settle into it. And all of this is connected to the idea that we talk about a lot on this podcast, which is this whole idea of alignment. It's about bringing all of who I am into the presence of all of who he is and letting him settle and restore and renew in those places of quiet.
SPEAKER_01:Along with that, right there, Elizabeth, if we can keep in mind, we truly are not ever disconnected from God as his children. So we don't have to fear the other side of that. Right. You know, uh, I read John 15 earlier, it says, Remain in me as I also remain in you. That passage, that whole chapter in 15, John 15, is about abide in me and I in you. A branch cannot bear fruit by itself, and so unless it abides in the vine. And the imagery there is that he's the vine and we're the branch. He holds us steady and we're we're always connected to him. We're always abiding with him. And that same is true, like to remember that he is an intimate God. He is the one who wants to pull us closer. He wants us to abide with him and be present with him. And solitude is not about me pulling away, it's me pulling away from the stuff that I'm honestly running to, the stuff I'm connected to. Um, but it's really about God pulling me closer to him. Uh, an interesting thought here is to think about the idea of solitude and beholding or wonder. And so the idea of wondering cannot happen until we pause long enough and shut things off enough, the phone, the noise, the scrolling, all of it, so that something happens deeper inside of us. That's when we begin to wonder. Like, think about this as a at a very basic level. How many times have you been having a conversation around the dinner table or in the car or whatever, and you're thinking back to what was the name of that thing? What was the name of that person? What you're trying to remember something and you start questioning it, remember, and someone goes, I'll look it up, I'll Google it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You stop wondering because you find the answer. You go and you create, you, you have it, you have the answers at your own hands all the time. We don't have to wait till we get home to look it up in an encyclopedia or ask someone older than us who might remember or whatever, you know? Yeah. We we have lost the ability to wonder because we don't sit in that silence long enough to let our minds think and process. And so the wondering that starts to happen inside of us spiritually when we shut other things off, when we turn off the idols that we run to, it's that wondering that leads us to behold. Uh when our hearts grow quiet enough and we can see again, really see who God is, then we can behold Him. We spend so much time rushing around in life that we actually miss the sacred moments that are right in front of us. In the 1600s, Blaise Pascal said, All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. We were created to wonder and to behold his face. That's his presence. But if I don't stop beholding something else, I can't behold him.
SPEAKER_00:And I think that's a very key point, Kimberly, because this the idea of behold, some people would think that's a weird word. What does that mean? It it basically means to stop, to look, to pay attention, to gaze upon, to ponder, to focus your attention on. So we are all beholding something all the time. And this may loop back around to the concept of broken cisterns out of Jeremiah 2, which is where am I looking for living water? Am I looking to God to be my living water or am I trying to get it from another source? So we all are all beholding. You and I have joked that there are times where I just sit down for a few minutes to, you know, I'm gonna give myself five minutes just to, you know, scroll through Instagram or some other social media platform and just look at a few things on my phone. And then the next thing you look up, and it's 45 minutes later. I have totally gone down a rabbit hole of something and I'm beholding. But I, and it's so easy to lose track of time on certain things that you're beholding. But if you at the same time ask me, will you sit in silence for 45 minutes and just enjoy the presence of God? In some ways that would feel like an eternity. But and it feels like in the blink of an eye for other things that capture my attention, 45 minutes goes by and I'm like, oh my gosh, now I'm gonna be late because I've spent too much time on my phone. And I love the the analogy you did or the example you just gave Kimberly about what we used to do around the dinner table. I remember those conversations around the dinner table. And sometimes you would wonder about something and there just wouldn't be an answer. And we just all have to go kind of, huh? Well, um, I guess we just won't know the answer to that question. And I think that is also infiltrating my relationship with God that if I can Google and get the answer to almost anything I would ever want to know on the face of the planet, and yet God seems slow from my perspective to speak to me, to answer a prayer, to do whatever. It is breeding me a frustration and a lack of trust because God should be like Google. When I ask God a question, I should immediately have an answer. But with God, it's not about the answer. It's about Him, it's about beholding Him, it's about spending time in His presence. And I, you know, maybe it started with me with Sesame Street because I loved how every how fast-paced it was. But my brain has been trained through my whole life to want instant, fast gratification. And yet God is telling us, he commands us, be still and know that I am God. And I don't think that he would have to command us to do it if it was easy, but it is our lifeline. It beholding him is what it brings about transformation in our lives, right? It is.
SPEAKER_01:Let's pay attention for just a minute at a couple of places in scripture where we see the idea of to behold. Okay. So Isaiah 43, verse 19. Behold, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. In Luke 2, then the angel said to them, Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. John 1, 29, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. What we see in Scripture when we see the word behold is the fact that it's announcing something grand. If we zero down to what the gospel means, the gospel means that we have in that that something has been announced to us, the good news has been announced to us, and it can change our lives forever. Exactly what you're talking about. It will transform us. So the connection there that you're saying is exactly there that as we behold something, we see the work that the Lord has done, we see who the Lord is, and that in and of itself has the power to transform us. So that is where we see solitude become that doorway to awe, AWE, to awe and wonder and beholding. It's where God enlarges the small view of Him that we have and He restores our sense of holy wonder.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think what I hear you saying and what you're talking about, Kimberly, is it's this idea that God is saying, open your eyes, like pay attention, like behold. I this is all the things I'm doing. And I I haven't done a word search on the word behold, but it's all it's in scripture a lot. You know, and I I think that might be a fun task for someone to do is just how often does behold show up in the scripture? Because I think God is continually saying to us, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. And he was speaking this in his word to people who did not have as much distraction as we do technologically, but there's always something to distract, there's always something to pull our affection away from him. And he knows, I don't think it's an ego-driven thing. He's not like, look at me, look at me. He knows he is the source, his presence is the source of everything we need. And we will only find what we need in him. And so he's just continually wooing us, calling us to be with him. And I mean, just think about that for a minute. The God of the universe wants to spend time with us, and yet he has to constantly, you would think that would be an open invitation that I would jump at, but how many times does he have to get my attention? Hey, Elizabeth, over here, over here, I'm right here, I'm right here, because I'm so easily distracted by the things of this world.
SPEAKER_01:If I could cling to what the psalmist was saying in Psalm 16, 11, that that would be really amazing because he says, You will fill me with joy in your presence. And and I don't believe that so often. I feel like I will find joy by filling myself with something else. But but what the psalmist is reminding us there is that he, Jesus, that God, God is going to be the one who makes known to me the path of life. He's gonna be the one who fills me with joy in his presence with eternal pleasures. If I could remember that his presence is sufficient, that it's enough, that it's actually more than enough, that it's something spectacular to behold, and that it gives me rest, I think I would want to carve out times for solitude more. And so I think that's where we as the body of Christ who know this truth, we have to be reminding one another of that. We have to be encouraging one another to, I mean, asking our friends, have you have you have a moment to behold God lately? You know, I mean, it can be as simple as that, but but how can we encourage one another? I I'd encourage you and encourage myself to encourage one another to really seek out those moments, to take those times where we ask ourselves, what's what's the noise in my life right now that's keeping me from hearing God's tender voice? What might he want to be saying to me if I slowed down? I mean, just wonder that enough to go, yeah, I need to slow down and and hear him.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and there I think there's a couple of practical ways that we could do it. It I mean, it may be set an alarm for 30 minutes earlier if you're a morning person. I've gone through seasons where I have set an alarm either on my watch before we had phones or on my phone, where it just goes off a couple of different times in the day as just a reminder to like stop, take a breath, take a moment, you know, give give God an offering of your time for the next five minutes, regardless of what's going on around you. There's other seasons where I chose to watch the sunset with him. And so I would arrange my life to where I would, you know, 15 minutes or 30 minutes, however much time I could I could have right around sunset. I I kind of see that as the end of day, even though it's not because I go to bed much later than that. But I would end my day with him and spend that time just kind of reflecting and rehearsing, where did I see God today? God, what do you want to say to me now? Just sometimes just listening to worship music that's about him and just celebrating who God is. But I think, Kimberly, if we don't get intentional about choosing moments of solitude throughout our day, or maybe it's a rhythm where you take a couple of hours a week where you're gonna intensely just enjoy him and be with him, whatever your rhythm is, if we don't make that a discipline, it's not gonna happen because there's always four other needs that are screaming loud. And if if we allow them, they will fill up our entire life and leave no room. And I think one thing we haven't really mentioned yet on this podcast is the model of Jesus doing this. How many times did he slip away from the crowds? I mean, talk about a man who had a lot to do. There was always one more person who needed healing or one more person who needed to know the truth of who he was or emotional needs, all I mean, people pulling at him all the time. And yet it was a known practice that he would slip away and spend time with his father. But I would think if he is fully God and fully man and he is in that wonderful communion with father all the time, if anyone didn't need solitude and time to ponder, it would be him, right? Because like he's got it all the time, and yet even then he chose to slip away and spend time with them to the point that at one point in scripture they're trying to find him and they're like, oh, we'll know where we'll find him. He's he's gone off by himself. So it was known enough that they knew how to find him when they wanted to interrupt his solitude. So if Jesus needed that, how much more so than us? And I even think before he started his ministry, right? He went into the desert, the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights. There's there's this intensity of things that God does with us and for us and in us when we get pulled away from the daily routine and make solitude, make basking in his presence, make enjoying his nearness a part of our daily rhythm.
SPEAKER_01:Elizabeth, you're right. If Jesus had to do it, how much more so do we have to do it? And so that is that is our encouragement today for all of us. I mean, here's the truth when when the noise fades, there's there's not when there's no distraction, when there's no applause. For you, when there's no affirmation, when there's no comfort, when there's no friend, when there's you know, no, when there's nothing, what remains? He does. He he does. He he is present with you. He is rest for you. He is enough. And and I know that that's hard to sit with. It's hard to sit with in easy times of life. It's hard to sit with in dark times of life. But let's just cling to what we read in the beginning from Exodus that my he says, My presence will go with you and I will give you rest. So we hope that you'll start to sense that tug towards some stillness and some solitude. And we encourage you to not resist it because he is the God of solitude. He will call out to you. He will ask you to come and be with him. He desires to be near to you. He is Emmanuel, God with us. In just a minute here, you're gonna hear the end of our podcast where Sylvia says, Thank you for listening. We wrap it up with our music. We would really encourage you to end the podcast, look at the clock, and take five minutes. It's it's gotta start somewhere. So can you take five minutes to just be still, to be quiet, and just listen and behold who he is. I want to thank you for listening to the Father's Business Podcast.
SPEAKER_00:This podcast is made possible through donations by people like you. To donate, go to www.thefathersbusiness.com. Be sure to follow us at the Father's Biz on Instagram and Facebook.
