HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, May 21, 2025 – Our greatest joy as born-again believers is being able to spend all day every day with God. Jesus is with us, too, as he promised he would be, but as much as we love Jesus (and that we certainly do), God is our Daddy. He’s the one we love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Even if the Commandment to love God didn’t exist, we’d still love him that way. It comes with being born-again. We don’t have to try to love God or work at loving God: We just do.

Our relationship with God is entirely different from our relationship with Jesus. And like for Jesus during his time on Earth, God is our main focus. It’s God we turn to for help and guidance, it’s God we run to for comfort if things aren’t going so well, and it’s God’s Commandments and directives we do our best to follow. God is our everything, and if we’re genuinely born-again, we don’t want to live even one second without him.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never loved anyone or anything the way I love God. It’s a totality of emotional investment that I didn’t think was possible. There’s no “I’ll give God this part of me, but I’m setting aside this part for someone or something else.” No. That’s not how it is with God. You give him everything not because he’s asking you to or expecting you to, but because you want to give him everything. You can’t imagine not giving God everything. That’s how it is for us born-again believers. That’s been my experience, anyway.

And so, we spend all day every day with God. No matter what we’re doing, God is always right there with us, offering a word of advice or encouragement, cautioning us if we wander off-course, or just making us laugh when he knows we could use a giggle. Not enough is said about God’s sense of humor, which, like everything else about him, is perfect. The context is always perfect, the timing is always perfect, and the delivery is consummate. No-one on Earth or in Heaven is funnier than God. Jesus comes a distant second (he has a very dry sense of humor that bounces well off God’s), but God still wins that contest, hands down. No-one beats God at anything, not even Jesus.

I’m not always aware of God’s presence, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t always here with me. I know he’s always here because he tells me he is and because Jesus during his ministry years said that he was never alone, that God was always with him. If God was always with Jesus, then God is always with us. That’s part of the deal of being born-again followers of Jesus. The relationship Jesus had with God during his time on Earth is the same relationship we have with him.

Ultimately, I love spending all day every day with God because he’s so much fun to be with. But he’s also loving and protective in a fatherly way. His presence is the sanctuary that David wrote about, the absolute and unconditional safe zone that no-one and nothing can violate. This is Zion, the prophesied Kingdom of God on Earth. It’s not a physical place: It’s a spiritual realm, a state of being that is entirely separate from our spiritual enemies. It’s bounded on all sides and above and below by God’s love for us and by our love for God. It’s a realm of pure unfeigned love, and no-one who doesn’t love God that way can enter in.

This is Zion. This is God’s presence with us through his Holy Spirit, and it’s the closest we’ll get to Heaven until we get Home.