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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 Chapel That Became a Storage Room

When Chaplain David Rivera arrived at Memorial Hospital in San Antonio, he found the chapel wedged between a supply closet and the billing office. Someone...

John 2:13-22Universal

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Sermon Illustration

The Man Who Ran Out of Metaphors

In the Judean foothills southwest of Bethlehem, you can still find the caves where David hid from Saul — deep limestone shelves carved by centuries...

2 Samuel 22:2-3Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Composer Who Found His Voice Again

In April 1737, George Frideric Handel collapsed in his London home. A stroke paralyzed his right side and, by some accounts, temporarily clouded his mind....

Luke 1:57-66, 80Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Last House on Recovery Street

In 2019, a nonprofit called SBP — founded after Hurricane Katrina — finished rebuilding its ten thousandth home for disaster survivors across the United States....

Revelation 21:1-6Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Milkmaid's Hands and the End of Variolation

For centuries, smallpox terrorized the world. In eighteenth-century England, doctors practiced variolation — deliberately infecting patients with a mild strain of the disease, hoping to...

Hebrews 10:4-10Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Man Who Proved No Two Hands Are Alike

In 1858, British magistrate Sir William Herschel was working in Jungipoor, India, when he pressed a local contractor's hand into ink and onto the back...

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18Universal

Sermon Illustration

Wren's Cathedral in the Ashes

In September 1666, the Great Fire of London consumed thirteen thousand houses, eighty-seven churches, and the medieval St. Paul's Cathedral. The city smoldered for days....

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Rip Current

Every summer, lifeguards along Florida's Gulf Coast pull hundreds of swimmers from rip currents — narrow channels of water rushing away from shore at speeds...

Exodus 14:13-14Universal

Sermon Illustration

Ignaz Semmelweis and the Offense of Simple Obedience

In 1847, a young Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that should have revolutionized medicine overnight. At Vienna General Hospital, mothers were dying...

2 Kings 5:1-14Universal

Sermon Illustration

Margaret's Kitchen Door

Margaret Chen knocked on her neighbor Ruth's kitchen door every Tuesday morning for three years. The first time, she came asking to borrow a cup...

Matthew 7:7-8Universal

Sermon Illustration

Seeds Stored for a Harvest They Would Never See

In 1941, as German forces encircled Leningrad, the scientists at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry faced an unthinkable test. Inside their walls sat one...

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Longest Three Minutes

Marcus Chen had been sober for fourteen months when the craving hit him in the parking lot of a Houston grocery store. It was a...

James 4:7Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Washerwoman Who Gave Away a Fortune

In 1995, Oseola McCarty of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, walked into the University of Southern Mississippi and donated one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for scholarships. She...

Psalm 112:1-10Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Cure Inside the Venom

At the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, technicians carefully milk venom from pit vipers and coral snakes — drop by deadly drop. That venom,...

John 3:13-17Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Mother Who Built a Dynasty of Faith

In 1689, nineteen-year-old Susanna Annesley made a decision that stunned her family. The daughter of one of London's most prominent Dissenting ministers, she left her...

Psalm 45:10-12, 16Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Bridge They Almost Tore Down

In 1998, the city council of Greenville, South Carolina voted to demolish the Reedy River Falls bridge downtown. The area was an eyesore — abandoned...

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Water Pump at Ivy Green

For nearly seven years, Helen Keller lived in a world of fragments. After losing her sight and hearing at nineteen months old, she grasped at...

Hebrews 1:1-4Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Slave Infant God Never Lost Sight Of

In January 1865, night riders swept onto Moses Carver's farm in Diamond, Missouri, and stole a sickly infant named George along with his mother, Mary....

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Hymn Writer Who Never Stopped Singing

Fanny Crosby lost her sight at six weeks old due to a doctor's error. She never regained it. Yet by the time she reached her...

Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15Universal

Sermon Illustration

Thirst in the Wilderness

In the autumn of 1743, David Brainerd rode his horse through the forests of eastern Pennsylvania, feverish with tuberculosis, utterly alone. The twenty-five-year-old missionary had...

Psalm 63:1-8Universal

Sermon Illustration

Monica's Thirty-Year Vigil

In the fourth century, a North African mother named Monica watched her brilliant son Augustine abandon everything she had taught him. He took a concubine...

Hosea 11:1, 3-4, 8c-9Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Refugee Who Planted a Garden

When Hawa Abdi arrived in Clarkston, Georgia, in 2016, she wanted to go home. The Somali Bantu refugee missed the red soil of her village,...

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7Universal

Sermon Illustration

The Bakery That Started in a Blackout

When Hurricane Maria stripped Puerto Rico of power in September 2017, Raquel Soto lost everything in her small San Juan restaurant. No electricity, no refrigeration,...

Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16aUniversal

Sermon Illustration

Susanna Wesley's Apron

Susanna Wesley raised nineteen children in a cramped Epworth rectory in early eighteenth-century England. The woman never lacked for Martha's kind of work. There were...

Luke 10:38-42Universal