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HomeIllustrations

7,545 Illustrations

Browse Sermon Illustrations

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Top Rated Newest Oldest|All Sources Biblical Illustrator Spurgeon Maclaren

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Sermon Illustration

When Everything Was Gone, He Still Sang

On November 22, 1873, Horatio Spafford stood at a telegraph office in New York and read a message from his wife that began with two...

Habakkuk 3:17-19Universal

255 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Voice That Cut Through Static in Guayama

When Hurricane Maria obliterated Puerto Rico's power grid in September 2017, the island went silent. No cell towers, no internet, no landlines. Three and a...

Isaiah 52:7-10Universal

248 words

Sermon Illustration

The Surgeon Who Stepped Off the Balcony

For years, Dr. Paul Farmer watched from hospital balconies in Boston as medical students discussed tropical diseases in the abstract — malaria, tuberculosis, cholera —...

Hebrews 10:4-10Universal

239 words

Sermon Illustration

The Outlaw of Wartburg Castle

In April 1521, Martin Luther stood before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms and declared, "Here I stand. I can do no other....

Mark 1:9-15Universal

245 words

Sermon Illustration

The First Victory That Promised the Last

In May 1796, Edward Jenner made a daring wager against humanity's deadliest scourge. In a cottage garden in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, he took fluid from a...

1 Corinthians 15:20-27Universal

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Night Blaise Pascal Stopped Thinking and Started Knowing

On November 23, 1654, the brilliant French mathematician Blaise Pascal — a man who had already revolutionized geometry, invented the mechanical calculator, and dazzled the...

1 Corinthians 2:1-16Universal

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Penthouse That Couldn't Save Him

In 2008, executives at Lehman Brothers worked from the thirty-first floor of their Midtown Manhattan headquarters, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass that made the city look...

Obadiah 1:3-4Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

The Song She Couldn't Simply Sing

In 1874, English hymn writer Frances Ridley Havergal penned the words that would become one of Christianity's most beloved consecration hymns: *Take My Life and...

Universalsacrifice

250 words

Sermon Illustration

The Open Window on Maple Street

Margaret Chen had kept the windows of her small bakery shut tight for three winters. Business was slow, flour prices climbed, and she calculated every...

Malachi 3:10Universal

260 words

Sermon Illustration

The Birdsong That Was Always There

In 2019, a retired schoolteacher named Margaret Chen joined a birding group in Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. On her first morning walk, she heard...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

The Woman Who Walked Into the Ghetto

In 1942, Irena Sendler was a social worker in Warsaw with a permit to enter the Jewish Ghetto to inspect for typhus. She could have...

Esther 4:16Universal

221 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bishop in the Desert

In 356 AD, imperial soldiers stormed a church in Alexandria, Egypt, with orders to arrest Bishop Athanasius. The Arian heresy — which denied the full...

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

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Fireproof Box After the Wildfire

When the 2018 Camp Fire swept through Paradise, California, Dave and Kathy Locatelli lost everything. Their home of twenty-three years was reduced to a concrete...

1 Peter 1:3-9Universal

245 words

Sermon Illustration

The Genome and the God Who Already Knew

In 2003, scientists completed the Human Genome Project — thirteen years of painstaking work by thousands of researchers across six countries to map the three...

Psalm 139:1-3, 13-15Universal

245 words

Sermon Illustration

Buying the House on Detroit's Hardest Block

In 2009, a Detroit schoolteacher named John George did something his neighbors called foolish. While families fled the city by the thousands, while foreclosure signs...

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

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Potter of Burslem

Josiah Wedgwood opened his first pottery works in Burslem, Staffordshire, in 1759. He became the most celebrated potter in English history — but what made...

Jeremiah 18:1-11Universal

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Injection That Unlocked a Death Sentence

In January 1922, fourteen-year-old Leonard Thompson lay dying in Toronto General Hospital. He weighed barely sixty-five pounds. Type 1 diabetes was consuming him — his...

Universalfreedom

235 words

Sermon Illustration

Corrie ten Boom's Hidden Room of Mercy

In February 1944, the Gestapo raided the Beje, the narrow Dutch watchmaker's house where Corrie ten Boom and her family had been hiding Jewish refugees....

Psalm 25:1-10Universal

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Airport Gate That Became a Church

In December 2022, a massive winter storm stranded over four thousand travelers at Denver International Airport for three days. Strangers who would never have spoken...

2 Corinthians 13:11-13Universal

247 words

Sermon Illustration

The Garden That Refused to Stay Dead

In March 2012, landscape architect Emily Sullivan walked through the grounds of a Joplin, Missouri, church that had been leveled by an EF5 tornado ten...

Romans 8:6-11Universal

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Boy Who Was Overheard at the Chapel Organ

In 1692, a physician named Georg Handel had no intention of letting his eight-year-old son pursue music. The boy was destined for law — a...

John 1:43-51Universal

247 words

Sermon Illustration

The Penthouse Above the Flood

In 1985, a luxury hotel perched high on the cliffs above Armero, Colombia, advertised itself as the safest address in the valley. Its brochure boasted...

Obadiah 1:3-4Universal

242 words

Sermon Illustration

The Last Miles of Dick Hoyt

On a spring morning in 2023, eighty-two-year-old Dick Hoyt laced up his running shoes for the last time at the Boston Marathon starting line. For...

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

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Composer Who Refused to Be Finished

In the summer of 1741, George Frideric Handel was a ruined man. His operas had flopped. Creditors circled. A stroke four years earlier had paralyzed...

Universalperseverance

230 words