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Overview
Did you know that God wants you to have amazing sex? Join pastor Levi Lusko for a unique and compelling understanding of the power and the pleasure attached to God’s plans for relationships.
There is nothing more powerful on earth than the forces of love, sex, and romance. In fact, relationships are a matter of life-and-death importance. But as apps like Tinder foster no-strings-attached sexual encounters, sex is being stripped of any emotional or spiritual significance.
So how can you train today for the relationship you want tomorrow? In Swipe Right, Levi Lusko shares with raw honesty from his own life experiences and God’s Word how to:
- Resist settling for instant pleasure by discovering what your heart really longs for
- Learn how to avoid and treat sexual scars by careful living today
- Regret-proof your marriage bed and your deathbed
- Transform a stagnant marriage by trading predictable nearness for mind-blowing intimacy
With equal parts prevention and cure, the book is not just a list of rules to live by but something to live for: God’s powerful plan for our lives. To get there we must learn how to swipe right—to live up in a left, right world—because what we do with sex and romance is one of the most important choices we’ll make.
God’s dreams for your life are not intended to kill your joy but to enhance it. Whether you’re fed up with dating and hooking up as usual, tired of being single, numb because of porn and casual sex, or curious about how to improve your marriage, this book is for you.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780718035839 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nelson, Thomas, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2017 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 251,325 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Levi Lusko is the founder and lead pastor of Fresh Life Church located in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Utah. He is the bestselling author of Through the Eyes of a Lion, Swipe Right, I Declare War, The Last Supper on the Moon, and Roar Like a Lion, the 2022 ECPA Christian Book Award winner for young people's literature. Levi also travels the world speaking about Jesus. He and his wife, Jennie, have one son, Lennox, and four daughters: Alivia, Daisy, Clover, and Lenya, who is in heaven.
Read an Excerpt
Swipe Right
The Life-and-Death Power of Sex and Romance
By Levi Lusko
Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2017 Levi LuskoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7180-3583-9
CHAPTER 1
You Don't Want What the Devil's Got in His Crock-Pot
In the Lusko household, the sound of the garage door opening is the starting gun for a flurry of activity. Tabasco, our miniature poodle and the only male in the house besides me, begins barking from his perch on the couch. At least one or two of my daughters hide somewhere in the house, and sometimes Clover, the youngest, barges out to greet me and carries my backpack inside. It's key that I finish my work before opening the garage door. I once made the mistake of initiating the routine before wrapping it up and ended up disappointing some little hearts. They had done their hiding, but I didn't do any seeking.
This tradition started when it was just Jennie and me living as newlyweds in an apartment in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We got a discount on the normal rate because it had a scenic view of the community Dumpster. "Look on the bright side," I told Jennie. "We won't have far to walk when we take out the trash!"
We gladly accepted the reduced price because it fit our budget. I was a youth pastor, and she worked as a waitress at Romano's Macaroni Grill, where she perfected both writing her name upside down with a crayon and singing "Happy Birthday" in Italian. Because she had mainly lunch shifts, I would usually arrive home from work after her. For some reason she began hiding from me, and I would have to find her. There weren't many places to look: the pantry, the linen closet, the spare room that doubled as an office. Her hiding place would change, but what happened when I found her did not. We were newlyweds, after all, and we couldn't keep our hands off each other. (Still can't.) It is somewhat ironic that once we had kids, our daughters adopted this game of hide-and-seek, as more likely than not, at least one of them was conceived as a result of it.
My other favorite thing about coming home is the smell that meets me when I walk in the door. Jennie does an absolutely wonderful job of creating an atmosphere, and she usually has candles lit, music playing, and something delicious cooking. In the winter, often something hot and bubbling has been cooking slowly in the Crock-Pot for hours: a delicious chili, a spicy Thai curry, or some hearty and filling shepherd's pie with ground turkey (instead of beef) and sweet potatoes.
I'm making you hungry, aren't I? As I write this I'm sitting in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It's 9:00 a.m., but I'm craving soup!
There is nothing quite like walking into a warm, cozy house, with a fire roaring, a puppy yipping, little girls screaming and running, candles dripping wax on the table, and something rich and savory simmering in the kitchen. Life is good.
When I was a teenager I always wanted to go out and do something. Staying at home was the worst. I pretty much feel the opposite these days. I've been out and done stuff. I'd much rather stay in. Plus I wear sweats as a uniform in my home, and no one is there to judge me. (Although it might have gotten a bit excessive: the other day I put a pair of jeans on, and my five-year-old daughter, Daisy, looked at me and said, "Are you preaching today? You only wear real pants on preaching days.")
That's what I want to talk to you about in this chapter, and to be honest, it's the reason I wrote this book. Not sweatpants — something cooking slowly in a Crock-Pot. It isn't a delicious home-cooked meal either. This Crock-Pot belongs to the devil, and trust me when I tell you that you don't want what he's got inside his electric cauldron. It smells delicious, and just the scent of it will drive you, like Edmund in the Chronicles of Narnia being offered Turkish delight, into a frenzy. But you need to know that Satan is slow cooking the death of your calling.
WAY BACK WHEN
There was a steamy stew brewing for Esau. To understand what was at stake, we have to go all the way back to Esau's grandpa Abraham, one of the most famous dudes in the whole Bible. His nickname is the Father of Faith or just Father Abraham. Ironically, for someone who went down in history as a dad, old Abram (as his name was at the beginning of the story) and his wife, Sarai, had a really difficult time having kids. To make matters worse, the name Abram meant "exalted father." Imagine his embarrassment when introducing himself, as people constantly asked how many kids he had, only to learn he had none — in a culture that equated a barren womb with the judgment of God! That would be like having the unfortunate name Anthony Weiner and then being caught up in a sexting scandal.
Abram and Sarai grew old and eventually gave up on the idea of having a family. He accepted that his servant Eliezer was going to be the beneficiary of his considerable estate. Then God showed up with an amazing, ridiculous promise: "Abram, you and Sarai are going to have so many descendants that they will be more in number than the stars in the night sky. Out of your family will come great nations. Through those nations, kings will be born who will bless the whole world" (Genesis 15:2–5, 17:4–6, author's paraphrase). Eventually a messiah would come from Abraham's descendants, crush the head of the devil, and destroy death.
As insanely, improbably bizarre as it was to hear such a thing, Abram believed God on the spot, and God "accounted it to him for righteousness" (Genesis 15:6). In other words, God opened an umbrella called grace over Abram's life, and from that moment forward, not one drop of wrath would ever splash onto his skin. That's faith, by the way: triggering grace by taking God at his word. Latching onto the words that come from his mouth — no ifs, ands, or buts. In this ancient story, Abraham modeled for us what God has asked of us from the beginning: faith.
We mistakenly think that going to heaven is based on doing something, but it's based on believing something: God's promises. Author and pastor Jentezen Franklin put it this way: "You don't get good to get God, you get God to get good."1 So it's not about what you can do; it's about you believing what God did and will do. Ephesians 2:8–9 tells us that "salvation is by grace through faith" (author's paraphrase). Abram's experience became the prototype for how we are saved today — by putting our faith and trust in Jesus.
I like to imagine that Abram went home, put on a little Drake in the tent, chilled a bottle of champagne, and surprised Sarai with some roses. As you do.
But they didn't have a baby.
Years went by. It seemed as if God had completely forgotten about them and failed to keep his word, but God again reminded Abram of his promise. God even went so far as to change Abram's name to Abraham, which means "father of many nations," and Sarai's name to Sarah.
At this point, Abraham was ninety-nine years old, and Sarah was about ninety. Speaking about it afterward, the book of Hebrews says God waited until Abraham's body was "as good as dead" (11:12). In case you are wondering, that's not a compliment. I don't imagine many Tinder profiles have that as a description:
My name is Tim. I am in banking. I like cooking and playing soccer, and my body is as good as dead. Swipe right for a good time ...
But once the sitch was several levels beyond impossible, God intervened. Sidenote: it ain't over till it's over, but even when it is over, God can add time to the clock.
HAIRY AND HEEL-CATCHER
The stork finally showed up. It wasn't clean and tidy by any means; there was a lapse of faith when Abraham and Sarah had a baby with a surrogate, thinking God needed help. But he didn't. In God's perfect, impossible time, Abraham and Sarah conceived and named their baby boy Isaac, which is fitting because it means "laughter." I'm sure this geriatric couple got plenty of laughs as they pushed the stroller around when they weren't far from needing wheelchairs themselves.
Isaac grew up and married Rebekah, a wonderful girl with a nose ring. After Rebekah struggled with infertility for twenty years herself, she and Isaac finally got pregnant — only it was a buy-one-get-one-free deal, because she had twins. This is where it gets tricky and murky. There was a forked branch in the family tree. God's promise to Abraham was that through his seed all the people of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:3). After God made it clear his blessing was to go to Isaac and not Ishmael, it was easy to identify his chosen people. But now that Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger were candidates for God's blessing, there was some question as to who would inherit it.
From an ancient historical perspective, the mantle should have gone to the firstborn. Whichever twin came out first would take the lion's share of Grandfather Abraham's promise into the future.
The due date finally arrived. First out was a hairy baby whom they named Esau (a creative name that, in the original Hebrew, means "hairy"). The second baby was born holding onto Chewbacca's foot, so they called him Heel-Catcher. We know him today as Jacob.
The two couldn't possibly have been more different: "Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field; but Jacob was a mild man, dwelling in tents" (Genesis 25:27). They were like Bass Pro Shop and Williams-Sonoma. Esau liked to cover himself in elk urine and go bow hunting. Jacob sat around customizing his Blue Apron orders and drinking espresso with his mom. They didn't have a whole lot in common — except that they were vying for their father's attention.
You won't believe what happened next.
Genesis 25:29–30 says, "Now Jacob cooked a stew; and Esau came in from the field, and he was weary. And Esau said to Jacob, 'Please feed me with that same red stew, for I am weary.'" The men had spent the afternoon each doing what each liked best — Esau had tried to kill wild animals, and Jacob had loafed around the house, tweeting and trying out a new recipe for bean soup that he had found on Pinterest. When Esau arrived in the tent exhausted and starving, the whole place smelled amazing because of this big, bubbling pot of stew his homebody brother was cooking. The scene was like one from Looney Tunes: the aroma from the stove reached out to grab Esau by the nostrils, and he floated across the room absolutely intoxicated by the smell.
I can just imagine Jacob pulling a tray of steaming biscuits out of the oven in front of a drooling Esau and saying matter-of-factly, "Sell me your birthright as of this day" (Genesis 25:31).
I should pause right here and acknowledge that "birthright" doesn't exactly ring a bell in our day, but four thousand years ago, it was a huge deal. As the name suggests, the birthright belonged to the firstborn male, and it gave him three things:
1. A double portion of the inheritance. It caused the firstborn to be seen in the will as though he were two people. So if there were two sons, the firstborn would get two-thirds of the estate and the sibling would get one-third.
2. A leadership role. The firstborn became the chief executive officer of the family business. In the event of a disagreement in how things should be run or done, he had the deciding vote, and his brothers and sisters had to defer to him.
3. Last, and most significantly, a spiritual blessing. He acted as the priest of the home. In Abraham's family, this would also mean receiving the promise from God and propagating his chosen people and ultimately the Messiah.
In other words, having the birthright was a really, really big deal. And because he was born first, it was Esau's. No one could pry it from his fingers.
Keep that in mind as you picture Jacob saying, "If you give me your birthright, I'll totally let you have some of my stew." I'm sure his proposition seems as ridiculous to you as it seems to me. It's obviously not a good deal. (By the way, it's always easy to know how other people should respond to their temptations because we aren't the ones standing there light-headed and with low blood sugar, smelling the stew on the fire.)
Esau should have been outraged by this offer. He ought to have swiped left so fast it would have made Jacob's head spin. He should have thrown his hands up in the air and said, "Are you kidding me? You want me to trade all that God wants to do in my life, and all that he has promised to do through me generations from now, for a bowl of stew?"
I heard pastor Andy Stanley preach on this text once. He said that if he could have called a time-out, he would have sat Esau down and explained to him that from that moment forward, God would introduce himself to ultra-significant people, such as Moses, as "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Esau" — but if Esau made this deal with his brother, the saying would become "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." God always gives us a way of escape when we are tempted. The key is to slow down. You can't see the escape route as well when you are hauling.
But Esau took no time to think about introductions or chosen people or double portions. All he could think about was how delicious that stew would taste as it passed briefly through his mouth: "And Esau said, 'Look, I am about to die; so what is this birthright to me?'" (Genesis 25:32). Translation: "I'm starving now and will probably die if I don't eat this food, so what good is a promise of what I might get someday?"
Let's be clear about something: Esau wasn't starving to death. Maybe he was really, really hungry, but he had walked in there, hadn't he? He'd said "please." Esau's response is hyperbole at its finest. But in that moment, nothing mattered to him more than having a full stomach.
THE POINT OF NO RETURN
Red pill, blue pill. Swipe left, swipe right. Two options were on the table: Would you like this meal right now, or would you like to see God do great things through your life down the road? Genesis 25:33–34 says,
Then Jacob said, "Swear to me as of this day."
So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob.
And Jacob gave Esau bread and stew of lentils; then he ate and drank, arose, and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.
Just like that.
Esau chose the stew. He traded his calling for a can of Campbell's. He gave up his inheritance for something that made him feel good for an evening. He could have been a part of a chain of events that led to Christ coming to the world, but he wrote himself out of the story.
It seems that Esau was a man of intense physical desires. He did whatever he felt like doing, no matter what, and it kept him from reaching his potential. Like Paul warned the church at Philippi, Esau's god was his belly, and it led You Don't Want What the Devil's Got in His Crock-Pot to destruction (Philippians 3:19). His highest good was to feel good.
But the next morning, he was hungry again. Within twenty-four hours he had digested and eliminated the meal he just had to have. In the end, he lost everything.
Because hindsight is twenty-twenty, and the fog has cleared and the dust has settled, you and I can sit here shaking our heads at Esau for being so shortsighted. A better use of our time would be for me to tell you that somewhere, in some kitchen, there is a big, simmering pot of stew that the devil will serve up to you at just the right time — and it will be just as tempting to you as Esau's was to him. When that day comes, whatever is being asked of you in return for a taste will seem so far off and uncertain that all you'll be able to think of is how delicious and happy the stew will make you in that moment. If you're not careful, and if you don't keep a cool head, you'll be tempted to take a bite.
WATCH OUT FOR THE ESAU SYNDROME
Trust me when I say this: you don't want what the devil's got in his Crock-Pot, where he's slow-cooking the death of God's highest and best plans for your life. Satan knows what you desperately need to understand: desires can keep you from your destiny. That's why Scripture warns us, "Watch out for the Esau syndrome: trading away God's lifelong gift in order to satisfy a short-term appetite. You well know how Esau later regretted that impulsive act and wanted God's blessing — but by then it was too late, tears or no tears" (Hebrews 12:14–17 the message).
You and I are joking if we think we are immune to this temptation. In fact, instant gratification is the norm in the world today. People are lovers of pleasure, and they want it now.
We have all sorts of desires — the desire to eat, the desire to have sex, the desire to be liked, the desire to win, the desire to prosper and be rich, the desire to be known. In and of themselves, none of these desires are bad; in fact they're all God-given. However, since Adam and Eve bit into the banned fruit, sin has influenced our desires. Like them, we can satisfy good desires in the wrong way.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Swipe Right by Levi Lusko. Copyright © 2017 Levi Lusko. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Chapter Zero, xv,Chapter 1: You Don't Want What the Devil's Got in His Crock-Pot, 1,
Chapter 2: The Problem with Pineapples, 19,
Chapter 3: Scars Mean Sex, 31,
Chapter 4: Flying Blind, 43,
Chapter 5: Strength and Honor, 59,
Chapter 6: The Things We Carry, 75,
Chapter 7: Red Bull at Bedtime, 91,
Chapter 8: Samson's Hair Began to Grow, 107,
Chapter 9: Vice President Biden in My Bed, 127,
Chapter 10: Date Your Mate — or the Devil Will Find Someone Who Will, 149,
Chapter 11: Breaking the Fourth Wall, 161,
Conclusion: Winter Is Coming, 181,
Commitment Card, 196,
Things I Really, Really Want You to Remember, 197,
A Gift for You, 203,
Acknowledgments, 205,
Notes, 209,
About the Author, 219,
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