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.

In Ecclesiastes 1:1-18, verses 1-11 make the point that secular life apart from God is pointless for humans. He begins the book of Ecclesiastes by declaring that everything is pointless or vain under the sun in our physical world. Then, in verses 12-18, the Teacher makes the point that life is meaningless under the sun apart from God.

1. What stood out to you from Sunday’s sermon?

2. READ ECCLESIASTES 1:2-4 Why does this passage claim that everything is vain or meaningless in life?

3. Was there a time in your life when you struggled to find meaning and purpose? And how did you navigate that season?

4. What are the areas of your life now where you seek to find meaning apart from Jesus? How can you integrate the Lord Jesus into this area of your life?

PRAYER PROMPT
Pray that Jesus would show you that your life apart from His is meaningless, and that He would lead you to depend on Him in every area of your life. Also, pray that as you grow in your awareness about the brokenness of our world that you would be reminded of the hope we have in Jesus through the gospel in the midst of your sorrow.

Title: Life Up in Smoke
Scripture: Ecclesiastes 1:1-18
Speaker: Reid Kapple, ReidK@cckc.church

> When you live under the sun all you get is smoke

“Most of the material in Ecclesiastes fits into the category of ‘journaling’ better than it conforms to our modern notions of a treatise or a reasoned argument on a single subject…Qoheleth seems to allow the audience to ‘overhear’ his reflective meditations.” -Kathleen Farmer

> If this material world is all there is, then life is indeed meaningless.

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
-CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

> Fall into despair
> Fake a smile
> Face the smoke