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 2:1-11, we read the account of someone who had everything he ever desired. Can you imagine?! Nothing was too extravagant and no pleasure was too costly to keep it from his reach. And yet, at the end of his unlimited pleasure-seeking, he concluded that it was ultimately empty, like smoke.

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

2. What are ways our culture sends the message that the meaning of life is enjoying oneself?

3. READ ECCLESIASTES 2:1-8. The author sought to find pleasure in three things: consumption, accomplishment, and possessions. Share about a time you pursued one of these pleasures and it let you down.

4. How can you honor God in your pursuit of pleasure?

PRAYER PROMPT
Thank God for the good things in life that He gives us for pleasure and enjoyment. Confess to Him that you have at times been guilty of pursuing pleasure in ways that are wrong. Ask God to give you His wisdom and help to pursue pleasure in ways that honor Him.

Title: Pleasure Up in Smoke
Scripture: Ecclesiastes 2:1-11
Speaker: Caleb Jenkins, CalebJ@cckc.church

> Pleasure Promises

> Pleasure Produces Pain

“Do you see here a pride which makes false pretensions? Such words as these rise up against God. As prophecy has told us, all things serve (God) whose power is over them. As for the person who appropriates to himself what belongs to God and attributes to himself power over the human race as if he were its lord... How can you who are equal in all things have superiority so that as a man, you consider yourself as a man’s ruler and say “I have servants and maidens” as if they were goats or cattle?”
- Gregory of Nyssa

> Pleasure Points Over the Sun

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased…. (These things) are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

> Enjoy Pleasure as God’s Gift