Christ Community Leawood
The Mustard Seed - 9:00 & ON-DEMAND
CONVERSATION STARTERS
Conversation Starters help us dig deeper, connecting Sunday’s sermons with our Monday lives. These prompts have been designed to help Community Groups grow in their relationship with God, with one another, and with their neighbors. Please know that these questions are meant to be a resource to you. You do not have to follow them verbatim or get through them all. We trust you to know your group and to ask the questions based on your group needs.
1) What stood out to you from the sermon?
2) Most all of us have never seen a mustard tree, and we think of a mustard seed as something we find in the bottom of a jar of pickles. What object can you think of in our modern world that better illustrates the minuscule growing into the immense?
3) In Voltaire’s poem La Bégueule, he proposes, “…The best is the enemy of the good”. Give an instance in your life where you considered doing something for the Kingdom of God, but hesitated because you felt unqualified or under resourced.
4) The New Testament writers saw Jesus through the Old Testament storyline of a Messiah that came as a suffering servant, whose atoning sacrifice would make a way for sinful humanity to be forgiven, reconciled with God, and part of a new, everlasting kingdom. Using that same storyline, how does that help you frame our current circumstance of a pandemic and social unrest?
5) The Prosperity Gospel movement teaches that every time somebody has a problem in their life it is because they don’t have enough faith. In what ways does the mustard seed analogy teach quite the opposite?
Luke 13:18-19 ESV
Title: The Mustard Seed
Scripture: Luke 13:18-19
Speaker: Tom Nelson, TomN@ChristCommunityKC.org
“The damage done to our practical faith in Christ and in his government-at-hand (his kingdom reign) by confusing heaven with a place in distant or outer space, or even beyond space, is incalculable. Of course God is there too. But instead of heaven and God also being always present with us as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away and, most likely at a much later time--not here and not now.” - Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy
“What is at stake with this similitude is a restructuring of Jewish expectation. The kingdom which has already begun with Jesus, does not come with a glorious bang and the defeat of Rome; rather, it comes unexpectedly, almost unnoticed.” - Klyne Snodgrass, Stories with Intent
>> Three Kingdom Truths A Mustard Seed Tells Us:
- Small Beginnings Can Have Big Endings.
- Small Faith Can Make A Big Difference!
- Ordinary People Can Live Extraordinary Lives!