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HomeIllustrations

10,079 Illustrations

Browse Sermon Illustrations

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Top Rated Newest Oldest|All Sources Biblical Illustrator Spurgeon Maclaren

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Sermon Illustration

Abraham Lincoln's Tears for a Broken Nation

In the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln visited the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, just days after its fall. Witnesses described a man who looked...

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1Universal

238 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Hiding Place Behind the Hiding Place

During the Nazi occupation of Holland, Corrie ten Boom and her family built a secret room behind a false wall in their Haarlem home —...

Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16Universal

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Mines That Sang

In the winter of 1904, something extraordinary swept through the coal valleys of South Wales. The Welsh Revival, sparked through the prayers of a young...

Psalm 98Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

Margaret's Head Count

Margaret Dawson drove Bus 14 for the Calhoun County school district for thirty-one years. Every afternoon, she counted heads before pulling away from Ridgeview Elementary....

Luke 15:3-7Universal

246 words

Sermon Illustration

The Freed Woman Who Built Los Angeles

Biddy Mason walked into a Los Angeles courtroom in 1856 as property. She walked out free. But what she did with that freedom reads like...

Psalm 112:1-10Universal

239 words

Sermon Illustration

Light in the Cottian Alps

In 1655, the Duke of Savoy ordered the extermination of the Waldensians, a small community of believers who had clung to the gospel in the...

Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10abUniversal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

What the Robin Knows

Each spring, the European robin migrates hundreds of miles across Europe guided by something it cannot explain. Scientists long assumed birds navigated by landmarks or...

Universaltrust

274 words

Sermon Illustration

The Source Behind Every Green Thing

Every leaf on earth is a tiny solar panel. The oak outside your kitchen window, the grass beneath your feet, the basil on your windowsill...

Colossians 1:15-17Universal

224 words

Sermon Illustration

Kagawa and the Shinkawa Slums

On Christmas Day, 1909, a twenty-one-year-old Japanese seminary student named Toyohiko Kagawa moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack in the Shinkawa slums of Kobe. The neighborhood...

Isaiah 58:1-12Universal

227 words

Sermon Illustration

Science Illustration: Chemistry and Transformation

Picture a chemist in a lab, eyes gleaming with wonder as they mix two ordinary substances. In that moment, the room fills with anticipation—something remarkable is about to unfold. As the elements combine, a transformation occurs. What once existed as...

Revelation 21:1-5Universal

254 words

Sermon Illustration

The Hat Tip That Tore Open the Sky

In 1940s South Africa, a nine-year-old boy walked beside his mother down a dusty Johannesburg street. Under apartheid, Black South Africans were treated as invisible...

Mark 1:4-11Universal

267 words

Sermon Illustration

The Sound That Circled the Earth

On August 27, 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa erupted with what remains the loudest sound in recorded human history. The blast was heard on...

Psalm 29Universal

204 words

Sermon Illustration

The Laundromat on Franklin Avenue

Every Tuesday night, Maria Santos unlocks the doors of Spin Cycle Laundromat on Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis and puts up a hand-lettered sign: "Free Wash...

Isaiah 58:1-12Universal

230 words

Sermon Illustration

Millard Fuller's Million-Dollar Repentance

In 1965, Millard Fuller was a thirty-year-old millionaire in Montgomery, Alabama, with a law practice, a Lincoln Continental, and a marriage falling apart. His wife...

Isaiah 58:1-12Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Quiet Persistence of William Wilberforce

For twenty years, William Wilberforce rose in the British Parliament and introduced the same bill to abolish the slave trade. Twenty years. He was mocked,...

Isaiah 42:1-9Universal

231 words

Sermon Illustration

Already Called Home

When Sergeant Maria Reyes received her reassignment orders at Forward Operating Base Salerno in Afghanistan, everything looked the same — the dust, the heat, the...

Colossians 3:1-4Universal

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Repairmen Within

Every day, the DNA inside each of your cells suffers tens of thousands of breaks, nicks, and chemical wounds — from sunlight, from breathing oxygen,...

Universalperseverance

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Cartographer Who Mapped What He Could Not See

In 1507, Martin Waldseemuller produced the first map to label the newly discovered continent "America." Working from his small workshop in Saint-Die-des-Vosges, France, he painstakingly...

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Closed Bible and the Open Door

Every Sunday morning for thirty years, Margaret Chen arrived early at her church in Knoxville, Tennessee, polishing the communion table and arranging the hymnals with...

Isaiah 58:1-12Universal

265 words

Sermon Illustration

George Washington Carver's Little Workshop

Every morning before dawn, George Washington Carver walked the fields near Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, collecting plant specimens and praying. He called these walks his...

Proverbs 16:3Universal

239 words

Sermon Illustration

The President Who Kept Pardoning His Own Assassin

In 1865, a Confederate sympathizer named Michael O'Laughlen was convicted of conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. But years earlier, Lincoln had already demonstrated the very...

Psalm 78:1-2, 34-38Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Midwife Who Walked to Freedom and Built a Legacy

Biddy Mason walked nearly 1,700 miles behind a wagon train from Mississippi to California in 1851 — still enslaved, herding cattle the entire way. When...

Psalm 112:1-10Universal

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Farmer Who Watched the Floodwaters Rise

In March 2019, the Missouri River swallowed whole towns across Nebraska and Iowa. Farmer Nick Galanakis stood on a bluff outside Hamburg, Iowa, and watched...

Psalm 97:1-2, 5-6, 9Universal

215 words

Sermon Illustration

The Marine Biologist Who Knew Each Whale by Song

In a cramped research station on Maui's western shore, marine biologist Dr. Salvatore Cerchio lowers a hydrophone into the Pacific and listens. Within moments, he...

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18Universal

240 words