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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

The Hammer That Never Stopped Swinging

In June 2023, Jimmy Carter entered hospice care at ninety-eight years old. The former president had spent nearly four decades after leaving the White House...

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18Universal

237 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Artesian Wells of the Great Basin

In 1882, settlers in South Dakota's James River Valley were desperate for water. The surface creeks ran dry each summer, and shallow wells produced only...

Matthew 7:7-8Universal

252 words

Sermon Illustration

What Astronauts See

When astronauts aboard the International Space Station orbit Earth, they witness something that reshapes how they understand light and darkness. From the ground, we watch...

James 1:17Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

Twenty-Six Days in New York

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stepped off a ship in New York Harbor, leaving behind a Germany descending into madness. Friends had arranged everything —...

Luke 4:1-13Universal

245 words

Sermon Illustration

The Casserole Brigade of Elm Street

When Dave Hernandez collapsed in the produce aisle of the Kroger on Fifth and Elm, he had no church, no family in town, and a...

John 13:34-35Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

Eric Liddell's Contentment at Weihsien

In February 1945, Eric Liddell was dying of a brain tumor inside a Japanese internment camp in Weihsien, China. The Olympic gold medalist who had...

Psalm 16Universal

225 words

Sermon Illustration

The Cellist of Sarajevo

During the siege of Sarajevo in 1993, mortar shells had reduced the city's beloved National Library to a smoldering skeleton. Bread lines became killing fields....

Habakkuk 3:17-19Universal

248 words

Sermon Illustration

What the MRI Reveals

Dr. Sarah Chen, a radiologist at Johns Hopkins, once described her work this way: "Patients walk into my office looking perfectly fine on the outside....

Hebrews 4:12Universal

256 words

Sermon Illustration

The Night the Sand Began to Whisper

In 2019, twenty-two-year-old Maria Chen joined a sea turtle conservation team on the beaches of Padre Island, Texas. Her job during the night shift was...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

244 words

Sermon Illustration

George Müller and the School of Grace

In 1825, a young German theology student named George Müller spent his evenings gambling, drinking, and stealing from friends. He once forged his father's signature...

Titus 2:11-12Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Night the Beach Began to Move

In the summer of 2019, a twenty-year-old marine biology intern named Adriana arrived at Ostional Beach in Costa Rica to help monitor olive ridley sea...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

271 words

Sermon Illustration

The Tree on Riverside Drive

Every morning for thirty-seven years, Margaret Chen walked the same half-mile stretch along Riverside Drive in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She knew every tree on that path....

Psalm 1Universal

252 words

Sermon Illustration

The Surgeon Who Handed Over the Scalpel

In 2019, Dr. Rana Awdish, a critical care physician at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, collapsed in the hallway of her own ICU. A ruptured...

Luke 5:1-11Universal

224 words

Sermon Illustration

The Map That Was Already There

In 2003, after thirteen years of painstaking work, Francis Collins and an international team of scientists completed the Human Genome Project — mapping the entire...

Psalm 139:1-3, 13-15Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Intersection Where They Removed the Stop Signs

In 2009, the town of Drachten in the Netherlands tried something radical. Traffic engineers removed nearly all the stop signs, traffic lights, and lane markings...

Judges 21:25Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Lamp That Refused to Be Hidden

In 1787, William Wilberforce sat in his garden at Holwood House in Kent, wrestling with a decision that would define his life. Just two years...

Matthew 5:13-20Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration

Eighty-Six Years and Not One Regret

When Roman soldiers came for Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, in AD 155, the elderly pastor was eighty-six years old. He had spent a lifetime shepherding...

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18Universal

221 words

Sermon Illustration

The Doorway She Could Not Un-Enter

In 1943, Corrie ten Boom stood in the hallway of her family's narrow house on the Barteljorisstraat in Haarlem, Netherlands. Her father Casper had just...

Esther 4:16Universal

227 words

Sermon Illustration

When a Village Heard Its Own Language for the First Time

In 2022, Bible translators with Wycliffe completed the New Testament in Kakchiquel, a Mayan language spoken by nearly half a million people in the highlands...

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bible Burner of Punjab

In 1903, a fourteen-year-old Sikh boy named Sundar Singh tore a Bible apart page by page and burned it in his courtyard in Rampur, India....

Acts 9:1-6Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

From the Raft to the Runway

In the summer of 1943, Louis Zamperini drifted on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean, sunburned and starving, sharks circling beneath him. The former...

Psalm 30Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

The First Shift After the Badge

When Marcus Powell graduated from the Denver Fire Academy in March 2019, his mother pinned the badge to his chest while his whole family cheered...

Mark 1:9-15Universal

269 words

Sermon Illustration

The Light in Mammoth Cave

In 2023, a park ranger at Mammoth Cave in central Kentucky led a group of tourists deep into the longest known cave system on earth...

2 Peter 1:16-21Universal

246 words

Sermon Illustration

The Well That Kept Running Dry

In 2018, Maria Santos walked into a community center in Tucson, Arizona, carrying two gallons of water she'd hauled from a distribution point six blocks...

John 4:5-42Universal

232 words