Pain can bring us together like nothing else.

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Overview

What creates community? Is it common goals and shared history? Relationships based on a shared gene pool or a shared faith? Or is it, as Philip Yancey suggests, hardship that best brings us together? In this study, we’ll meet the man whose painful experience as a prisoner of war became the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. And we’ll see how suffering provides the ultimate test of faith—and of community.

Table of Contents

SCRIPTURE: Luke 9:23–24; Luke 10:25–29; John 13:35; John 15:12–14; Acts 2:42–47; Romans 16:4,7

LEADER'S GUIDE

    • Identify the Current Issue

    • Discover the Eternal Principles

—Teaching point one: Christian community is possible because of sacrifice.

—Teaching point two: Christian community grows deeper in difficult times.

—Teaching point three: True community extends beyond our faith community and changes how we see strangers, even enemies.

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