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Home›Browse by Type›Stories & Illustrations

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Stories & Illustrations

6,717 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use

Browse Stories & Illustrations by Book

Psalm (81)Luke (49)Matthew (42)John (36)1 Corinthians (31)Romans (29)Isaiah (29)Genesis (25)Acts (24)Hebrews (17)Ephesians (16)Revelation (14)Jeremiah (14)Galatians (10)Colossians (10)Mark (9)Philippians (8)2 Corinthians (8)Proverbs (7)James (7)

Sermon Illustration

The Voice She Couldn't Name

Maria Chen spent her first morning at Cornell's Sapsucker Woods completely overwhelmed. The May forest was alive with sound — trills, warbles, sharp chips —...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

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Sermon Illustration

The Sinking Tower on Mission Street

In 2016, residents of San Francisco's Millennium Tower discovered something terrifying. The fifty-eight-story luxury high-rise, home to multimillion-dollar condos with skyline views, had sunk seventeen...

1 Corinthians 3:9c-11, 16-17Universal

Sermon Illustration

Easter Eve at the Baptistery

On the night before Easter, 387 AD, a thirty-two-year-old rhetoric professor stepped into the octagonal baptistery beside Milan Cathedral. His name was Augustine, and he...

Mark 1:4-11Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Search Party on Ridgeline Trail

In March 2019, a three-year-old boy named Casey Hathaway wandered away from his grandmother's backyard in Craven County, North Carolina, and disappeared into dense woodland....

Luke 15:3-7Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Professor Who Sailed Back Into the Dark

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood on the deck of a ship bound for New York, watching the German coastline disappear. Friends had arranged a...

Matthew 4:12-23Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Casserole Nobody Asked For

Margaret Ellison hadn't spoken to her neighbor Deb in three years — not since the property line dispute, the lawyers, the cold silence that settled...

John 13:34-35Universal

Sermon Illustration

The River That Feeds Itself

The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sit barely sixty miles apart in the same Jordan River valley, fed by the same water source....

Luke 6:38Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Emperor Penguin's Call

Every winter in Antarctica, emperor penguins crowd together in colonies of forty thousand or more — a churning sea of identical black-and-white bodies huddled against...

Luke 15:3-7Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Bible She Never Hid

Rosa Gutierrez walked three blocks to the bus stop every morning with her Bible tucked under her arm — not in a bag, not covered...

Romans 1:16Universal

Sermon Illustration

The College President Who Saw the Fifteen-Year-Old Preacher

When Martin Luther King Jr. arrived at Morehouse College in 1944, he was just fifteen years old — a skinny kid from Atlanta who had...

John 1:43-51Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Son Who Trusted What His Father Refused

In 735 BC, King Ahaz stood in Jerusalem trembling. Two enemy armies were marching toward his gates. God, through the prophet Isaiah, offered him a...

Isaiah 7:10-14; 8:10Universal

Sermon Illustration

One More Vault

At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the U.S. women's gymnastics team stood on the edge of history. After a stumbling first vault, Kerri Strug limped back...

Universaltrust

Sermon Illustration

The Prescribed Burn at Francis Marion

Every spring, forestry crews in South Carolina's Francis Marion National Forest do something that looks like destruction. They walk through stands of longleaf pine with...

Malachi 3:1-4Universal

Sermon Illustration

Sojourner Truth and the Body That Belonged to God

In 1826, Isabella Baumfree walked away from the Dumont estate in Ulster County, New York, carrying her infant daughter and nothing else. She had been...

1 Corinthians 6:12-20Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Murmur in Room 4B

In her third week of clinical rotations at Johns Hopkins, medical student Priya Anand pressed her stethoscope to an elderly patient's chest and heard something...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

Sermon Illustration

Olaudah Equiano and the Price Already Paid

In 1766, a young African man named Olaudah Equiano stood on a dock in Montserrat, West Indies, clutching forty pounds sterling — every coin he...

1 Corinthians 6:12-20Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Hum Only the Beekeeper Could Name

In the apiaries outside Asheville, North Carolina, a retired schoolteacher named Margaret Whitfield spent her first summer as an apprentice beekeeper convinced she would never...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Refugees of Herrnhut

In 1722, a ragged band of Moravian refugees stumbled onto the estate of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf in Saxony. They had nothing but the clothes...

1 Corinthians 12:1-11Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Borrowed Canoe at Lake Windermere

Every summer, the outfitter at Lake Windermere in British Columbia rents cedar-strip canoes to tourists. Before anyone touches a paddle, old Tom Macready walks each...

1 Corinthians 6:12-20Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Key She Already Had

For eleven years, Maria Santos carried a secret through the doors of her church in San Antonio. She smiled during worship, volunteered in the nursery,...

John 8:32Universal

Sermon Illustration

Michael Faraday and the Invisible Force That Holds Everything Together

In 1845, Michael Faraday stood in his basement laboratory at the Royal Institution in London, passing a beam of light through a block of heavy...

Colossians 1:15-17Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Boy Whose Fingers Were Made for a Purpose He Could Not Yet See

Louis Braille was three years old when a leather awl slipped in his father's saddle-making shop in Coupvray, France, and pierced his eye. Infection spread...

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Little Church on Vine Street

In 2019, a tornado carved through Joplin, Missouri, and left First Community Church as nothing but a concrete slab and a splintered cross. When the...

Haggai 1:15b-2:9Universal

Sermon Illustration

When Every Knee Knew to Stand

On the first Monday of October, the marshal of the United States Supreme Court strikes the gavel and calls out, "Oyez, oyez, oyez." Every lawyer,...

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14Universal