O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
(Psalm 63:1 NIV)
There’s a big difference between casually looking for something and desperately searching for it. If you misplace the TV remote, you check the couch cushions. But if you lose your wedding ring, you turn the house upside down.
David opens Psalm 63 with that kind of urgency: “earnestly I seek you.” The Hebrew word behind “earnestly seek” is shachar (שָׁחַר), pronounced shah-KHAR. It shares a root with the Hebrew word for “dawn”, which means it carries the idea of seeking early, rising before the sun because whatever you’re after matters more than sleep.
David isn’t talking about squeezing God into his schedule if there’s time. He’s talking about pursuing God first, intentionally and eagerly. Like someone who sets their alarm early not out of obligation, but because they can’t wait for morning to arrive.
Shachar isn’t just about intensity; it’s about priority. First-thing-in-the-morning kind of pursuit. Before the noise kicks in. Before the to-do list. Before you’ve scrolled through your phone. It doesn’t mean you have to wake up at 4:30 a.m. every day. It just means that God is first in your heart and in your hunger.
David adds another image: “My soul thirsts for you.” In a desert climate, thirst isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s survival. You don’t debate whether you feel like drinking water. You drink because you have to.
That’s the posture shachar is calling us toward. Not a once-a-week spiritual check-in, but a constant deep awareness that without God, we can’t survive.
The truth is, we’re all seeking something early and earnestly. All of us. We wake up thinking about something. For some, it’s finances, reputation, relationships, or what the future holds. We get up thinking about it. We plan our day around it. We worry about it before our feet hit the floor.
The question Psalm 63 gently asks is: What if we sought God like that? What if our first instinct in times of stress was prayer instead of panic? What if our first response in times of uncertainty was trust instead of control? What if we turned our hunger toward the one can actually satisfy it?
David wrote this psalm in the wilderness. Not from a comfortable chair with coffee in hand, but in a dry place, probably in danger, and far from home. And yet he discovered something there that he couldn’t have found any other way: that God was better than life itself (Psalm 63:3).
The desert didn’t immediately disappear. The danger didn’t vanish. But the dryness didn’t get the final word. God did. And he still does for those who seek him early, eagerly, and earnestly.
Prayer: Lord, You are my God. Teach me to seek You first, not as an afterthought, but as my deepest hunger. Meet me in the dry and weary places of my life and remind me that You are worth getting up early for. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Alan Smith
Reprinted with permission from Alan Smith’s Thought For the Day