Community Group Conversation Starters
Conversation Starters help us dig deeper, connecting Sunday’s sermons with our Monday lives. Please know that these questions are meant to be a resource. 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. Read Romans 8:5-11.

2. What stood out to you from the passage?

3. What stood out to you from the sermon?

4. What sorts of things do those living in the flesh have their minds set upon? What about those living in the Spirit? What are some ways you’ve experienced a mindset of the flesh leading to death and/or a mindset of the Spirit leading to peace and life? What can you do to continuously pursue a mindset of the Spirit in your everyday life?

5. How will you apply this to your life? What are you going to do, be or think differently because of this truth?

Take time to share prayer requests and pray together.

Title: Alive Inside
Reference Romans 8:5-11
Speaker: Ben Beasley, BenB@cckc.church

"But the kinds of experience that were once the most important of all, meditations on God and the divine…lives wholly devoted to God and the divine mystery, this resolve to seek meaning, this fervor, with all its spectra of intuitions, moods, and emotions, is no longer sought or, if it is, then only on the peripheries of society, outside our field of vision, perhaps occasionally evoked in respect to some odd and obsolete phenomenon in TV entertainment: So, you’re a monk? What’s it like not having sex? When we closed the door on religion, we closed the door on something inside ourselves as well. Not only did the holy vanish from our lives, all the powerful emotions associated with it vanished too. The idea of the sublime is a faint echo of our experience of the holy, without the mystery. The yearning and the melancholy expressed in romantic art is a yearning back to this, a mourning of loss."
- Karl Ove Knausgaard

> You don’t have to live life dead.

> You are living life dead…you just don’t know it.

“Our base, primal, animalistic drives for self-gratification, especially as pertains to sensuality and survival…The sinful appetite in all of us that feels natural to our bodies and yet is wrong.” - John Mark Comer, Live No Lies

“Manifesting, or the practice of thinking aspirational thoughts with the purpose of making them real, has never been more popular: from late March to mid-July [of 2020], Google searches for the term have skyrocketed 669 percent; “shut up, I’m manifesting” is among the defining memes of 2020.” - Vox

“The more positively people dream about the future, the better they feel at the moment,” she told me. “People relax and their blood pressure goes down. But you need the energy to implement your wishes, and over time, they actually get more depressed, partly because they’re putting in less effort and have less success.” - Vox

> You’re living life alive in Christ…

> You’re living life alive in Christ…so stop choosing death.

> How do you choose to live life with Christ in a world of death?
1. Resolve in your heart to pursue God (Pursuing God).
2. Focus your attention on Him (Pointing yourself toward God).

"Narcissism accounts for our heartaches, pragmatism for our headaches, and restlessness for our insomnia. And the constancy of all three together account for the fact that we are so habitually self-absorbed by heartaches, headaches, and greed for experience that we rarely find the time and space to be in touch with the deeper movements inside of and around us… Neil Postman suggests that, as a culture, we are amusing ourselves to death, that is, distracting ourselves into a bland, witless superficiality…we, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens."
- Ronald Rohleiser, Holy Longing

> How do you choose to live life with Christ in a world of death?
1. Resolve in your heart to pursue God (Pursuing God).
2. Focus your attention on Him (Pointing yourself toward God).
3. Train yourself for this focused attention (Practicing with God).

“Come, follow me.” Contrary to what many assume, Jesus did not invite people to convert to Christianity. He didn’t even call people to become Christians (keep reading…); he invited people to apprentice under him into a whole new way of living. To be transformed. My thesis is simple: Transformation is possible if we are willing to arrange our lives around the practices, rhythms, and truths that Jesus himself did, which will open our lives to God’s power to change. Said another way, we can be transformed if we are willing to apprentice ourselves to Jesus.” - John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way