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10,045 illustrations — Lessons from history, biography, and world events
God Himself ordains the family as His constitutive institution, granting parents rank immediately beneath His own throne.
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions.
It is a corruption of self-love, a form of self-flattery.
The pedigree of true believers consists of two movements: first, they were once *in* the world, characterized by practical atheism (living without God in spirit and conduct), imperial materialism (recognizing no spiritual universe), and dominant selfishness (each governed by selfish...
At Pentecost, the disciples heard 'a sound as of wind'—yet Maclaren draws a crucial distinction that arrests the imagination: Luke's language carefully distinguishes between the *phonē* (sound) and actual wind. No air rushed through the chamber. No hair on any...
The particle "therefore" (*dio*) anchors judgment in three ascending causes: first, their impiety itself; second, their refusal to repent despite God's discipline ("they turned not to Him that smote them"); and third, their continued obstinacy in refusing to seek the...
Christians possess incomparable privileges that necessitate corresponding obligations.
It was no frivolous boon which Christ, in the days of His sojourn on earth, thought proper to confer when, in the external sense, He opened blind eyes.
Exell's Victorian instruction distinguishes three journals worthy of consideration.
Solomon observes from wide experience that extremes in appearance and reality create spiritual peril—we must strive to *be* what we *seem*.
Isaiah quotes an ancient prediction (also preserved in Micah iv.
"Ye know not what ye ask," Christ replied—not to rebuke their boldness, but to illuminate their blindness.
What man could expect by prayer to make Elohim alter His decree?
These appear contradictory, yet they are essential antagonistic forces—like hydrogen and oxygen combining to form water, or attraction and repulsion functioning as complementary principles in nature.
First, the Lord would return—not in spatial movement, for He fills heaven and earth, but in manifestation of favor.
Yahweh, the Lord in His everlasting redemptive purpose, invites Israel to *ask*—not as suppliants begging scraps, but as covenant partners speaking into the Divine intention.
Yet these men possessed extraordinary learning in the law of Moses—literal mastery of Scripture's letter.
Stephen presents the portrait of a dying saint: he was filled with the Holy Ghost, lifted above earthly consciousness of his enemies' gnashing teeth, granted a full vision of heavenly glory and his glorified Redeemer, and embodied the spirit of...
Though believers, Paul could not address them as spiritual persons, for they moved in the lower, earthly region of human nature, where strife and division held sway.
First, David's afflictions reveal that even the righteous face enemies and dangers.
The preciousness of Christ's sympathy with our infirmities lies in His actual and personal union with our nature.
We are debtors—not to the flesh, but to Adonai and to one another across the ages. This threefold obligation structures the Christian conscience. First, we owe debts to *all times*. To the past, we are indebted to those who preserved...
Matthew 24:27 compares our Lord's return to lightning flashing across the sky. Joseph S. Exell's Victorian exposition unpacks two essential truths. First, Christ's advent shall be sudden. The masses will be unprepared, as unsuspecting as a city when lightning leaps...
Just as Isaac's birth defied natural law—Sarah was barren, Abraham aged—so Christian conversion transcends fleshly effort.
It represents a change from ignorance to knowledge, from bondage to self-control, from temporal relationship to eternal covenant.