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 11:9-12:8 we read about the futility and fleeting nature of youth. Youthfulness comes with certain blessings, but our passage highlights the liabilities of youth. Using powerful imagery, we are given a picture of a person growing older while they witness the breakdown of their body. But in the midst of this, the book of Ecclesiastes points us back to God.

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

2. If you could go back in time, what advice would you tell your younger self?

3. Why do we drive ourselves into the ground trying to preserve our youth when we know that we cannot get it back?

4. In the end, the Teacher says youth is meaningless. How does this reorientation give us freedom from cultural expectation?

5. READ 2 CORINTHIANS 4:16-18 How does this change and redeem the ways that we see aging?

PRAYER PROMPT
Thank God for His sustaining grace. Ask God to forgive you for the ways you have idolized youth or loathed aging. Ask God to give you wisdom so that you may faithfully walk with Christ for a lifetime.

Title: Remember Your Creator
Scripture: Ecclesiastes 11:9-12:8
Speaker: Ben Beasley, BenB@cckc.church

"Immortality might seem like the stuff of science fiction, yet it’s increasingly becoming the focus of real science. In 2013, Google launched Calico, a biotech firm whose objective is to “solve” death. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, meanwhile, has pledged to “fight” death. And last year, it was reported Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos had invested in Altos Labs, a company that plans to “rejuvenate” cells in order to “reverse disease.”
- The Washington Post

"Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul." - Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle

> It’s never too early to remember your Creator.

> Our bodies will end up letting us down.

> Life will only get harder.

> Renewal only gets closer.