The Icebergology™ of Life with Rob Jackson

Episode 04: When Desires Go Wrong | The Icebergology of Life with Rob Jackson

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Why do we keep doing what we hate? Why does the same behavior keep returning no matter how many times we confess it, resolve against it, or try to stop?

The answer isn't weak willpower. The answer is desire — and it's operating below the waterline, out of sight, long before any behavior is chosen.

In this episode, Rob Jackson unpacks two distinct ways desire goes wrong: disordered desire, which misdirects the heart toward the wrong source, and deceitful desire, which lies about what it will deliver. Drawing from Romans 7 and Ephesians 4, Rob walks through how these desires form, why suppression never works, and what it actually looks like to renounce a desire in the name of Christ — not as an act of despair, but as an act of spiritual authority.

What We Cover in This Episode

  • Why the behavior that keeps coming back almost always has a desire underneath it
  • The difference between disordered desire and deceitful desire — and why confusing them produces shame instead of transformation
  • How legitimate needs become disordered when they don't get met through legitimate means
  • Why every desire of the flesh overpromises and underdelivers — every time
  • Romans 7:15 — Paul's honest confession of two wants operating simultaneously
  • The critical distinction between suppression, renunciation, and transformation
  • What it means to renounce a desire in the name of Christ — and why that is an act of spiritual authority, not defeat
  • Three practical steps for what to do with a desire you didn't choose

Got a question for Rob? If something from this season stirred something in you or raised a question beneath the surface, send it here: https://www.icebergology.com/podcast-questions

The Iceberg of Life Formation Spotify Playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3DE1iasq5FaJRPwDJUO9R8?si=g6BsLajDSEO63QpsTOXMQQ

Key Quotes

"Disordered desire is not always immoral — but it is always dysfunctional. It drives us to seek in the wrong places what can only be found in one place."

"Suppression pushes the desire down. Renunciation brings it into the light and hands it over."

"What you can name, you can bring to God. What stays unnamed stays in the dark — and what stays in the dark keeps running your life without your permission."

"Any desire that does not form us into the image of Christ must be renounced in the name of Christ."

Scripture References

  • Romans 7:15, 17
  • Romans 8:5
  • Ephesians 4:22
  • Galatians 5

Free Resource

Download the free Below the Waterline PDF guide — a clear, simple map of the Iceberg Model™ of Christian Spiritual Formation: icebergology.com/model

Connect with Rob

Website: icebergology.com

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SPEAKER_00

I want you to think about something you've tried to stop doing. Maybe it's a behavior, maybe it's a pattern of thought, maybe it's the way you respond when someone you love says the wrong thing at the wrong time. You've tried to stop. You've prayed about it, you may have confessed it more times than you can count, and it keeps coming back. Now here's a question I want to sit with today. Why? Not why in the sense of self criticism, not why as an indictment. Why as a genuine question, a diagnostic question, the kind a good physician asks before he prescribes anything. Because if you don't understand why a behavior keeps returning, you will keep treating the symptom and leaving the source untouched. And below the water line, the source is almost always the same thing desire. This is episode four of the icebergology of life. I'm Rob Jackson. Welcome back. We've covered a lot of ground in the first three episodes. Episode one established the foundation. You are not your behavior. What you do above the waterline? Well it's real, but it's not the whole story. Below the waterline, there's a world of thought, belief, desire, and wound that is quietly running the show. Episode two took us into the stories, the narratives we inherited, the ones we keep repeating, and how they shape what we expect from life, from God, and from the people closest to us. Episode three went to feeling, to the emotional life that most of us have learned for very good reasons to avoid, and we talked about what that avoidance costs, how what we refuse to feel doesn't disappear. It relocates below the waterline where it does its worst work in the dark. Today we go one layer deeper. We go to desire, to wanting, to the part of you that is always moving towards something and what happens when that movement gets pointed in the wrong direction or when it carries a lie about what it will find when it gets there. This is not abstract theology. This is one of the most practical things I've encountered in forty years of sitting with people in pain, because in almost every case, every case the behavior that brought them into my office had a desire underneath it, and that desire had a story, and that story had a wound. The iceberg doesn't start a behavior. It starts much lower than that. Let me give you a working definition. Desire is the movement of the heart toward what it believes will satisfy it. Notice what that definition includes. It includes belief. Desire is not blind, it's not random, it moves toward what the heart has concluded, rightly or wrongly, will fill the thing that is empty. Augustine said at first, our heart is restless until it rests in God. He was pointing at something that every honest person recognizes when they stop long enough to look. We are creatures built for a specific kind of satisfaction, and when we don't find it in the right place, we don't stop wanting, we redirect. That redirected wanting, that is where the trouble begins. Now I want to make a distinction here that I think is crucial, and I want to make it carefully, because it has significant implications for how we think about ourselves and about sin. There are two ways desire goes wrong, two distinct problems operating at different levels, both below the water line. The first is what I call disordered desire. The second is what Scripture calls deceitful desire. They are related, but they're not exactly the same thing, and confusing them leads to a lot of unnecessary shame and a lot of ineffective remedies. Disordered desire is the heart reaching for something real through a broken pathway. Let me say it again, disordered desire is not always immoral. It's always dysfunctional. It's always pointed at the wrong source, the wrong timing or the wrong means, and it always drives us to seek in the wrong places what can only be found in one place. Here's an example. The desire for intimacy is not a sinful desire. God designed it for us. We are made for closeness with God and with one another. This is a good and legitimate wanting, but when that desire gets disordered, when it gets disconnected from its proper source and pathway, it may drive a person into pornography or emotional dependency, or a string of relationships that promise closeness and deliver emptiness. The desire itself is not the problem. The desire for closeness is right and good. The disorder is still in the pathway. The heart has learned to reach for a substitute because somewhere along the way it concluded that the real thing wasn't available, or consider the desire for security. This is not a corrupt desire. God is described throughout Scripture as our refuge, our shelter, our strong tower. The desire to be safe is woven into how He made us. But when that desire gets disordered, it becomes control. It becomes the need to manage every variable, every relationship, every outcome. Because the heart has decided that safety can only be manufactured, never received. Let me be clear about something, because I think this distinction matters. Disordered desire is not the same thing as immoral desire. But make no mistake, disordered is not a mild word. When desire is disordered, it is dysfunctional. It is pointed in the wrong direction, and left unaddressed, it quietly drives behavior above the waterline that causes real damage to real people, to marriages, to friendships, to the people who love us most and can't figure out why we keep doing what we do. This is where the iceberg model becomes so important, because if you only see the behavior, the control, the pornography, the emotional unavailability, and you treat it as a simple moral failure, you miss the disorder underneath. You may produce behavior modification, you will not produce transformation. But there is a second and deeper problem, and Scripture names it directly Ephesians four twenty two. Paul instructs believers to put off the old self and note what he says about it, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires. Deceitful desires, not just disordered, deceitful. The word Paul uses here carries the meaning of deception that operates from the inside, that tells you something is true when it's not, that makes a counterfeit look like the real thing just long enough to get you to reach for it. And here's what this means practically. Every desire of the flesh, every desire that operates independently of the life of Christ carries a lie about what it will deliver. It overpromises every single time. The desire for approval says if enough people affirm you, you'll finally feel like you're enough, but it never delivers. You get the approval and need more. The desire for control says if you can just manage this situation, this relationship, this outcome, you will feel safe. It never delivers. There is always another variable, and the desire for pleasure says this will satisfy the ache, but it doesn't. It numbs it briefly, and then the ache returns louder. This is not a minor design flaw. This is the condition Paul is describing in Ephesians four. The old self operating on the basis of desires that are fundamentally deceptive, desires that promise what they cannot deliver and lead us further away from the very thing they claim to offer. And here is the sobering reality I want you to sit with. Without the life of Christ actively reordering the heart's wanting, without what Paul describes in Romans eight as the mind set on the Spirit, even our best desires carry some measure of this distortion. Not because we are uniquely corrupt, but because we are human beings living in a broken world, operating with a nature that, apart from ongoing transformation, defaults to reaching for what is available rather than what is true. Paul understood this from the inside, and he wrote about it with an honesty that still stops me after decades of reading it. I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Note what he says. He does not say I do what I want, even though I know it's wrong. That would be simple rebellion. He says something far stranger. He says I do not do what I want. I do the very thing I hate. There are two wants operating simultaneously. There is the want Paul identifies with the desire to do right, to live faithfully, to honor God, but there's another want operating at a different level that seems to keep overriding the first one. That second want is what we've been talking about today. It is the desire that formed below conscious awareness. It is a desire that carries a disorder and a deception, and it does not ask permission. It just pulls. He goes on in verse seventeen. So now it's it's no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. Paul's not excusing himself. He is describing the architecture of the problem. There is something operating below the level of conscious intervention that has its own momentum, its own logic, its own wanting. And willpower, even the willpower of a man like Paul, is not sufficient to address it at the level where it actually lives. This is why the iceberg model matters. The war Paul is describing is not primarily a behavioral war. It's a war of desire. It is fought below the waterline, and the weapons that win it are not the weapons of self discipline alone. Let me walk you through how this actually works, because this is where the model becomes concrete. Every human being is born with legitimate needs the need for love, for safety, for significance, for belonging, for the sense that we matter and have a purpose. Those are not sinful needs, those are the needs God designed us with. The needs that when met rightly, through relationship with God and genuine community with others, it produces the kind of human flourishing that Galatians five describes as a fruit of the Spirit. But in a broken world, those legitimate needs encounter a broken delivery system parents who couldn't give what they didn't have, relationships that promised safety and delivered harm, communities that offered belonging and then withdrew it when we failed to perform. And when a legitimate need doesn't get met legitimately, the heart doesn't stop wanting, it adapts. It finds a substitute. And the substitute that is where disordered desire takes root. The heart learns to reach for what is available rather than wait for what is right. Now, add the deceitful dimension. The substitute doesn't just misdirect the desire, it lies to the desire. It whispers this will be enough. This will satisfy. This time it will be different. And the heart, hungry enough, believes it. That is the mechanism disorder plus deception operating below the waterline long before any behavior is chosen. By the time behavior shows up above the surface, the desire has been in place for a very long time, and simply deciding to behave differently without addressing the desire underneath is like trimming weeds without pulling the root. It works for a season and then it comes back. This brings me to a line I want to draw carefully because it matters enormously for people of faith. There are two things you can do with disordered and deceitful desires. You can suppress them or you can allow them to be transformed. And somewhere between those is a necessary step toward transformation. You can renounce it. Let me take those in order. Suppression looks like success. The behavior stops or goes underground, which looks the same from the outside. You apply willpower, accountability, consequences, and for a season it works. But suppression does not change the desire. It doesn't address the disorder. It does not expose the lie. It just damns the river. And a damned desire under pressure will always find another outlet. Sometimes it comes back as the same behavior, stronger. Sometimes it surfaces sideways in control, in anger, in a joyless rigidity that doesn't look like sin, but has lost something essential about being alive. This was my personal experience, and I've seen this in counseling more times than I can count. The person who stopped the behavior but became a different kind of prisoner. The form changed, the desire underneath found another expression. Now pronunciation. This is not suppression. Prenunciation is an act of the will made in the authority of Christ that says, I see the desire clearly, I name it for what it is, and I refuse in the name of Christ to let it form me. Any desire that does not form us into the image of Christ must be renounced in the name of Christ. That is not a counsel of despair. Rather it is an act of spiritual authority. It is a believer exercising the freedom that Romans eight describes, the freedom of someone who is no longer condemned, no longer owned by what used to on them. And here is the crucial distinction. Suppression pushes the desire down. Pronunciation brings it into the light and hands it over. Suppression is powered by shame or willpower. Pronunciation is powered by the name and the authority of Jesus Christ. Suppression leaves the desire intact and under pressure. Prenunciation opens the door for the desire to be transformed, reordered, redirected, or simply released. This is part of formation, not a separate track from transformation, the beginning of it. You cannot have what you will not release. And release requires naming, and naming requires courage, and courage comes from knowing that in Christ you are not condemned for what you find below the waterline. Transformation is the long work that follows renunciation. The mind set on the Spirit is not a mind that has successfully suppressed its desires. It is a mind being gradually, patiently, imperfectly reoriented toward a source who can actually deliver what desire has been reaching for all along. That reorientation is slow. It involves more failure than most people are comfortable admitting. But it's the only thing that actually works because it's the only approach that goes deep enough. So what do you do when you find yourself pulled by a desire you didn't choose and don't fully understand? Three things. Our instinct when we encounter a disordered desire is to immediately recoil from it, to condemn it, to distance ourselves from it quickly as possible. But condemnation drives desire underground, where it becomes invisible and therefore more powerful. What you can name you can bring to God. What stays unnamed stays in the dark, and what stays in the dark keeps running your life without your permission and against the divine desires of God. Second, ask what is reaching for and what lie is telling. Under every disordered desire is a legitimate need. The pornography is reaching for intimacy without risk. The danger is reaching for justice or safety. The control is reaching for security in a world that keeps threatening it, and underneath the reaching there is a lie that this particular substitute will finally be enough. Name the need, expose the lie, not as an exercise in self condemnation, but as an act of honest self knowledge in the presence of God. three renounce it in the name of Christ and bring it to God before you bring it to your willpower. This is the order that matters. Not resolve to do better, then ask God to help you follow through. But see the desire clearly, name what it is and what it isn't, refuse in the name of Christ to let it form you, and then come to the one whose love is not contingent on your performance. Let that love touch the place where the need lives. Allow that touch to begin reordering what your heart reaches for. This is what it means to have the desires of His heart, not that we manufacture new wants through discipline, but that we open the ones we have to the one who can transform them from the inside out. I'd like to pray with you. Father, for the places in us where desire has gotten turned around, where the heart's reaching for the wrong thing with a hunger that was made for you, and for the lies we have believed about what would finally satisfy us. We ask for something more than willpower. We ask for transformation, for the slow, patient work of the Spirit that gets underneath the behavior and touches the wanting itself. Expose the disorder, unmask the deception, and reorder our hearts toward the only one who can actually deliver what we've been reaching for. In Christ's name. Amen. Well, if we talked about something today that's resonating with you and you want a clear, simple map of what the iceberg model actually looks like, I put together a free guide. It's available for you to download at icebergology.comslash model. That's icebergology.comslash model. It's free. Go grab it and I'll see you in episode five.