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Home›Browse by Type›Stories & Illustrations

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Stories & Illustrations

7,545 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use

Browse Stories & Illustrations by Book

Psalm (82)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)Deuteronomy (8)2 Corinthians (8)Proverbs (8)

Sermon Illustration

What the Judge Declared

Every November, courtrooms across America host National Adoption Day. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, families line up in their Sunday best while children clutch stuffed animals...

Mark 1:9-15Universal

218 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Apprentice Who Learned to Hear the Beats

In 1987, a sixteen-year-old named Marcus Chen began apprenticing under piano tuner Walter Kraus in Portland, Oregon. Walter would strike two notes simultaneously and ask,...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Garden in Milan Where a Restless Man Finally Listened

In the summer of 386 AD, a thirty-one-year-old rhetoric professor sat weeping beneath a fig tree in a Milan garden. Augustine of Hippo had spent...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Priest Who Became "We

In 1873, a young Belgian priest named Father Damien arrived on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, home to a leper colony where the government had...

John 13:34-35Universal

251 words

Sermon Illustration

Written Over the Wreckage

In November 1873, Horatio Spafford stood on a ship crossing the Atlantic, knowing that somewhere beneath those cold waters, his four daughters had drowned weeks...

Universalperseverance

226 words

Sermon Illustration

When the Heavens Split Over Wales

In the autumn of 1904, a twenty-six-year-old Welsh coal miner named Evan Roberts could barely sleep. For thirteen years he had prayed the same desperate...

Isaiah 64:1-9Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

The Threshold of Everything

In the 1950s, British scientists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley inserted tiny electrodes into squid nerve fibers to study how electrical signals travel through the...

Universalcourage

245 words

Sermon Illustration

The Sinking Skyscraper

In 2016, residents of San Francisco's Millennium Tower noticed something unsettling — their doors wouldn't close properly. Engineers discovered the 58-story luxury high-rise had sunk...

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

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Fortress That Fell From Behind

In February 1942, British commanders in Singapore believed their position was unassailable. They called it "the Gibraltar of the East." Over 80,000 troops were garrisoned...

1 Corinthians 10:1-13Universal

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Doctor Who Defeated Death's Oldest Weapon

In 1796, a country physician named Edward Jenner in Gloucestershire, England, did something no one had ever done — he deliberately challenged humanity's most relentless...

1 Corinthians 15:20-27Universal

224 words

Sermon Illustration

The Marine Biologist Who Couldn't Stop Counting

In 2016, marine biologist Diva Amon descended nearly four miles to the floor of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the central Pacific Ocean. She expected barren...

Psalm 104:24-34, 35bUniversal

242 words

Sermon Illustration

The Glue That Holds Everything Together

In 2012, physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson — the subatomic particle that had eluded...

Colossians 1:15-17Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Flavor That Changed a Neighborhood

In 2019, a retired schoolteacher named Dorothy Henderson started leaving homemade soup on the porches of her neighbors in a struggling block of East Nashville....

Matthew 5:13-20Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Parchment Sewn Into the Coat

On the night of November 23, 1654, Blaise Pascal — the brilliant French mathematician who had calculated the weight of air and invented the mechanical...

Luke 9:28-36Universal

249 words

Sermon Illustration

The Journalist Who Was There

In 2018, volcanologist Jeff Johnson stood on the rim of Volcán de Fuego in Guatemala just weeks before its catastrophic eruption. When the disaster struck...

2 Peter 1:16-19Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

The Call Hidden in the Canopy

In the summer of 2019, graduate student Maria Chen spent three weeks in Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest, recording hours of ambient sound for her...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

229 words

Sermon Illustration

The Plea That Launched a Thousand Missionaries

In 1731, a young German nobleman named Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf attended the coronation of King Christian VI in Copenhagen. There he met Anthony, an...

Acts 16:9-15Universal

223 words

Sermon Illustration

The Quaker Who Read to Prisoners

In 1813, Elizabeth Fry stepped through the iron gates of London's Newgate Prison and found three hundred women and children crammed into two wards. The...

Isaiah 42:1-9Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

William Wilberforce and the Salt That Would Not Lose Its Savor

In 1787, a young British parliamentarian named William Wilberforce sat at his desk in Old Palace Yard, London, and scratched five words into his journal:...

Matthew 5:13-20Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Young Man Who Couldn't Explain It

In 1887, at a D.L. Moody evangelistic meeting in Brockton, Massachusetts, the song leader Daniel Towner invited people to share what God was doing in...

Universalobedience

233 words

Sermon Illustration

William Colgate's First Dime

When sixteen-year-old William Colgate left his family's farm in Maryland and set out for New York City in 1801, he had almost nothing. Along the...

Malachi 3:10Universal

250 words

Sermon Illustration

The Murderer Who Met Grace on Death Row

In 1918, Tokichi Ishii sat in a Tokyo prison cell awaiting execution. He had killed multiple people without remorse, and guards called him the most...

Luke 22:14-23:56Universal

258 words

Sermon Illustration

The Surgeon Who Became a Patient

In 2015, orthopedic surgeon Dr. David Fajgenbaum was diagnosed with Castleman disease, a rare and life-threatening immune disorder. He nearly died five times. But rather...

Hebrews 2:14-18Universal

249 words

Sermon Illustration

The Runner Who Became a Lamp in Weihsien

Eric Liddell could have stayed famous. After winning gold in the 400 meters at the 1924 Paris Olympics — a story later immortalized in *Chariots...

Matthew 5:13-20Universal

225 words