One day recently my morning reading in the Bible took me to Psalm 63. It was a familiar psalm to me. The first four verses resound with the writer’s love for God and desire for God. You can hear it in some of the phrases: “earnestly I seek you” (v. 1), I am “beholding your power and glory” (v.2), “your steadfast love is better than life” (v.3), “I will bless you as long as I live” (v.4).

But to be honest, I couldn’t get past the first verse. “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” When I had read this verse in the past, I took it to mean something like this. “I long for you, O God, the way a body would if it were in a dry and weary land.” And I pictured a time when the writer of this psalm (maybe David, but we don’t know) was going through a difficult time in his life. His life felt dry and weary and because of that, he longed for God.

And maybe it does mean that. But the more I meditated on it, another thought came to mind. Maybe it means something like this. “O God, my soul thirsts for you; my body longs for you, because I am in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Maybe this psalm has less to do with occasional times of suffering and difficulty and more to do with normal, everyday life. I think, if we’re honest, we have to admit that we live in a dry and weary land.

You see, this world is dry. There is no refreshment here, no nourishment, no life. Things that are dry provide no satisfaction. I can’t imagine trying to eat sawdust or chalk or sand. And though deserts have their unique beauty, hardly anything grows there. There is a big difference between a lush, tropical island and a desert. A tropical island is green and full of life, and it is green and full of life because it has an abundance of water.

And this world is weary. When I had read this psalm before, I simply thought that it meant “I am weary because I am in a dry land,” and I pictured a man crawling across the dunes of the Sahara looking quite weary. But that’s not what it says. The verse says that the land is dry and the land is weary—the land is weary. This world is weary. It is weary place. It is failing, it drains us of life, it is wearying. This world itself is weary. It is tired and worn out and spent and exhausted. It has nothing to give.

And that is the point. We have to accept the fact that, spiritually speaking, this world is dry and weary. It provides nothing that nourishes, nothing that refreshes, nothing that sustains life. It is worn out and wearying, and has nothing to give. And it is only when we truly acknowledge that that we will begin to long for God and seek him earnestly.

There is no water in this world. (My kids keep telling me that I need to drink more water. But, I don’t like water. Water only tastes good if you flavor it with tea bags and sugar.) This world is a tired, worn out, desert-of-a-place—dry and weary. It has nothing to satisfy our souls. But the Bible promises water. God is called the fountain of living water (Jer. 2:13), Jesus promises to give living water (John 4: 13-14), the Holy Spirit is called a river of living water. And in heaven there will be the river of life flowing from throne of God, and those who are thirsty will drink forever and ever, never to be thirsty again (Rev. 21:6 and 22:1).

Maybe the point is this. To long for God we have to accept how dry and weary this world is. If this world satisfies, then we have no use for heaven. And if you believe that this world satisfies, then you’re just eating sawdust.