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 12:9-14, a single summary is given for all that has been shared in the book: though the world offers many attempts at wise living, one can only find it in fearing God and keeping His commandments.

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

2. Read Ecclesiastes 12:9-14 aloud and then read the same passage in The Message version. Does The Message version illuminate any part of the text in a new way to you?

3. Since there are so many excellent books, podcasts, blogs etc. around living the Christian life available, to what extent do you lean on these resources vs. the Bible (vs. 11, 12)? How do we find balance here?

4. Share about a time when life events brought disappointment or pain, but you felt God’s care in the midst of the ‘smoke’, even when you couldn’t see or understand why it was happening.

PRAYER PROMPT
Ask the Lord to help us cherish the gift of wisdom He has provided in Ecclesiastes and write it on our hearts and minds. Ask the Lord to help us through His Holy Spirit to fear Him and keep His commandments in all our activity and affections.

Title: Fear God
Scripture: Ecclesiastes12:1-8
Speaker: Reid Kapple, ReidK@cckc.church

> Fearing God frees us from all fear

“With society having lost God as the proper object of healthy fear, our culture is necessarily becoming ever more neurotic, ever more anxious about the unknown–indeed, ever more anxious about anything and everything…We are left utterly uncertain about the shifting sands of both morality and reality. In ousting God from our culture, other concerns…have assumed a divine ultimacy in our minds…And thus we feel helplessly fragile. No longer anchored, society fills with free-floating anxieties.” -Michael Reeves, Rejoice and Tremble

“By fearing the Lord we can resist fearing our situations and circumstances. His presence reforms and informs our stories and our understanding of them. Strangely when we lose our fear of the lord we also lose some perception of his comfort, love, and compassion…We seek distractions to avoid our weariness, to numb our sense of meaninglessness, or to fill the silence that haunts us. We try to derive self understanding, values, and a sense of worth and direction from the creation instead of looking to the creator who alone can show us these things.”
-Kelly Kapic, You’re Only Human