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: Reid Kapple, ReidK@cckc.church

> Pleasure can destroy us if it doesn’t direct us

“We used to travel faster, build bigger, live longer; now we communicate faster, chatter more, snap more selfies. We used to go to the moon; now we make movies about space…And we hype the revolutionary character of our communications devices in order to convince ourselves that…this progress is the only progress we could reasonably expect.”
-Ross Douthat (The Decadent Society)

“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.”
-CS Lewis (The Weight of Glory)

> Point out your poison
> Practice fasting

“The desires that burn in our chests are put there by God, turning the vessels of our souls skyward. But the load of sin we carry in our souls inhibit our upward movement into the heart of God…This is why we fast. It releases our pleasure-seeking from the limitations of our puny imaginations and opens it up to the infinite wonder that is the Fount of Life.”
-Dakota Dietz

> Point out your poison
> Practice fasting
> Praise God for pleasure

“These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—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.” -CS Lewis (The Weight of Glory)