Grow Guide | August 23, 2026
Text Study for Sunday, August 23, 2026
Series Theme: Live in Community
Reading: 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:10
CONNECTING QUESTIONS
When did you realize you needed glasses? If you don’t need glasses, tell about a time it was difficult to see.
PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION
Loving God,
Thank You for calling us into Your beloved community. Though we are many, You make us one body in Christ, each with unique gifts and a shared purpose. Teach us to love You and love one another in all we do. Help us to value connection, conversation, and companionship. Equip us to build intentional relationships both within our church and beyond our walls. Fill us with grace to seek reconciliation, generosity to care for others, and humility to serve faithfully. May Your love overflow through our lives, forming a community that reflects Christ and proclaims peace to the world.
In Jesus’ name we pray.
Amen.
CONTEXT
Live in Community For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. – Romans 12:4-5 As part of God’s beloved community, we will love God and love others in all we do. We will value connection, conversation, and companionship. We will develop intentional relationships with all God’s people within and outside our walls. We will use 2 Corinthians as a lens because this letter reveals Paul’s understanding of Christian leadership, ministry, and community. Paul deals with these themes while addressing some very practical tasks, such as defending his ministry while seeking reconciliation, raising funds for the poor, and countering competitors who are challenging his ministry and, in his view, abusing the Corinthians and leading them astray. Throughout Paul depicts how his own life experience, with all its vicissitudes, becomes the location where Christ’s overflowing sufferings and consolation render the gospel to others in such a way that authentic community might be formed. We learn how God’s mercy and consolation actually helps us bear suffering, sin, and death, overflowing within and through our relationships with others into expanding communities that embody and proclaim God’s reconciliation of the entire world. Let’s live in community!
From Dr Lois Malcolm at EntertheBible.org:
At face value, 2 Corinthians depicts an anxious apostle hoping to restore a broken relationship with churches he has founded while also raising a collection for Jerusalem and addressing the false claims of other apostles and their deleterious effects on the Corinthians. But in the very way Paul structures and portrays what takes place in the letter, he depicts how the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah both deconstructs and re-envisions the ways we perceive and respond to God and to one another. Moreover, Paul makes clear that such transformation takes place precisely in the midst of whatever it is we are facing—within our own bodily experience of life and through the multi-sensory ways we communicate with one another and with God, through eyes, ears, mouths, and even noses.
LOOK AT THE BOOK
How is it with your spirit this week?
What was one take-away from listening to the Carry On Cast podcast that connects with this Grow Guide?
Our theme is connected to our church’s vision statement “Live in community.” Tell about something you have seen in a church that spoke to you: art, words, a color, a book, or symbol. Why do you remember it?
Jump to 2 Corinthians 4:16. How does this passage begin?
Paul is trying to build a case that being a follower of Jesus is not trying to get rid of our bodies (see also, the heresy of Gnosticism), but that Jesus shares in our humanity to demonstrate love and resurrection.
Which is why Paul returns to a key theme in verse 17. What does he describe as momentary?
Tell about an experience in your life when affliction was not momentary. How did you weather the experience?
Paul does not say that being a follower of Jesus exempts us from affliction, but that we walk through affliction with Jesus. Who has walked with you through hard seasons of life?
Chapter 5:1 is powerful! Paul brings a new image for us here, what is it? He uses this as another metaphor for the body. Again, Paul is trying to show how followers of Jesus see and move through the world differently.
Paul goes on in the verse to point out that if the “tent” is destroyed, what already stands in its place? How is it built?
Jump to verse seven. How do Christians move through the world? How do you interpret that passage?
In what ways can Easter Lutheran Church live in to a way of honoring our bodies (tents!) as part of our discipleship?
How is Jesus good news for us this week?
What would you like to talk about that we have not yet?
TAKING IT HOME
What word is repeated in verse six and verse eight? Given this gift from Jesus, what is one choice you can make that may have caused you fear before?
Sending Prayer
O God, you made us in your image and send us into the world you so love by your Spirit’s power. As you have called all people to you, make us one in your name. Through your grace, let us live in community to the glory of your Son, for we pray in Christ’s holy name. Amen.