to long for what you are missing: an aching desire for someone who is absent or something you genuinely need
This verb names the ache of absence. It is the word for what a person feels when someone they love is somewhere else and they want to close the distance, and it is equally the word for wanting something they truly need and do not yet have. Either way the longing reaches outward, toward a person or a promise, rather than settling into itself.
It is mostly Paul's word, and in his letters the longing runs both ways: he longs to see churches he has never visited, they long to see him, and a sick friend of his longs for the people who heard he was ill. The New Testament never uses it to shame anyone for longing. That is what sets it apart from the ordinary word for desire (ἐπιθυμέω), which just as often names wanting what is out of bounds, and from the word for reaching out to get something (ὀρέγομαι), which carries the stretch of ambition toward a goal.
The same longing can be aimed at what has not been given yet. Paul groans to be clothed with the home that comes from heaven, and Peter tells new believers to want sound teaching the way a newborn wants milk: not a mild preference but a hunger the body cannot argue with. What holds the uses together is that the object is always something the person is right to want.
One verse stands apart. In James 4:5 the longing is jealous, and readers have never agreed whether it is God yearning over the spirit he placed in us or that spirit itself yearning enviously for what belongs to someone else. The strength of the longing is not in question there. Its direction is.
Nuances
Who is doing the longing in James 4:5, and whether that longing is God's jealousy or human envy.
- majorityGod is the one who longs: he yearns jealously over the spirit he made to dwell in us, with the phrase read as an idiom for jealousy, which fits the surrounding demand for undivided loyalty.; Martin Dibelius, James, rev. Heinrich Greeven, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), on 4:5; James Hardy Ropes, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle of St. James, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1916), on 4:5; Ralph P. Martin, James, Word Biblical Commentary 48 (Waco: Word, 1988), on 4:5
- minorityThe spirit God placed in us is the one who longs, and its longing is envious, so the clause states the human bent toward envy that the letter goes on to rebuke.; James B. Adamson, The Epistle of James, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 171-73
- minorityThe clause is a question rather than a statement: does the spirit God placed in us long enviously? Scripture's answer is no, because it longs for God.; Sophie Laws, "Does Scripture Speak in Vain? A Reconsideration of James IV.5," New Testament Studies 20 (1974)