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.

1. In a few words, describe both the rich ruler and the blind beggar.

2. These two men approached Jesus quite differently - discuss the differences between how they addressed Jesus (consider their tact, volume, their emotion). How did their different approaches affect Jesus’ initial response to them?

3. Name an issue or a person in your life who you can pray for with more boldness and desperate humility, like the beggar did about his blindness.

4. How do these stories impact your view of eternal reward? (Read Matthew 16:24-26 to explore this further)

Title: Everything or Nothing
Scripture: Luke 18:18-43
Speaker: Tim Spanburg, TimS@ChristCommunityKC.org

"Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day...I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter."
- New York Times article, “The ‘Busy’ Trap”

“When Jesus does not have our attention he will often disturb the thing that does.” - Charles Bond of Mt Pleasant Church

"Many who were once on your side...have turned from the ways of violence and tyranny, overcome by observing the consistent lives of their [Christian] neighbors, or noting the strange patience of injured acquaintances, or experiencing the way they did business with them." - Justin Martyr

>> What Will Give Us Eyes to See Jesus?
- Confront your condition
- Cry out all the more
- The mercy of the Son of David