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HomeIllustrations

9,055 Illustrations

Browse Sermon Illustrations

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Top Rated Newest Oldest|All Sources Biblical Illustrator Spurgeon Maclaren

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Sermon Illustration

Thirty-Six Hours in the Deep End

Dr. Amara Osei still had confetti in her hair from the Emory University School of Medicine graduation ceremony when her phone buzzed at 4:47 a.m....

Mark 1:9-15Universal

243 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Midnight Shift at Jodrell Bank

In 1957, a young radio astronomer named Bernard Lovell stood beneath the massive dish of Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England, waiting. For years, skeptics...

Luke 21:25-36Universal

245 words

Sermon Illustration

The Unfinished Symphony

When Antonin Dvorak left the National Conservatory of Music in New York in 1895, he did not simply pack his bags and vanish. For three...

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

Calm Singing on a Sinking Ship

On January 25, 1736, a violent storm tore across the Atlantic and slammed into the small ship carrying John Wesley toward the colony of Georgia....

Psalm 46:2-3, 5-6, 8-9Universal

222 words

Sermon Illustration

The Commission Includes Baptizing - Lutheran (Matthew 28:18-20)

A Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany secretly baptized Jewish children to save them from the Holocaust, giving them Christian identities that protected them. Was it right? The questions are complex, but notice: he saw baptism as powerful, real, consequential.

Matthew 28:18-20Universal

Short82 words

Sermon Illustration

The Coach Who Called Her by Name Before Tryouts

Maria Vasquez showed up to the University of Portland soccer tryouts in 2019 convinced she was invisible — a walk-on from a tiny high school...

John 1:43-51Universal

244 words

Sermon Illustration

TheEli Lilly Free Clinic in Appalachia

Every Sunday morning, Dr. Raj Patel sat in the third row at Grace Community Church in Harlan County, Kentucky. He sang the hymns, bowed his...

Isaiah 58:1-12Universal

247 words

Sermon Illustration

Two Minutes of Totality

On April 8, 2024, Sarah Gonzalez drove eleven hours from Atlanta to a small field outside Dallas, Texas, just to stand in the path of...

Matthew 17:1-9Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

George Müller's Empty Cupboard on Ashley Down

In 1838, George Müller sat at a breakfast table in Bristol, England, with three hundred orphans and not a crumb of food in the kitchen....

Psalm 25:1-10Universal

224 words

Sermon Illustration

The Shelter You Have to Enter

On May 20, 2013, an EF5 tornado carved a seventeen-mile path through Moore, Oklahoma, with winds exceeding two hundred miles per hour. Entire neighborhoods were...

Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

Looking Up

In 2018, Dr. Rachel Grubb, an emergency physician in rural Kentucky, treated a teenager named Cole who had been bitten by a copperhead while hiking...

Numbers 21:4b-9Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

Signatures in Blood at Greyfriars

On February 28, 1638, hundreds of Scottish men and women crowded into the churchyard of Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh. They came to sign the National...

Exodus 24:3-8Universal

247 words

Sermon Illustration

The Kitchen Light on Crawford Street

Margaret Holloway kept her porch light on during every storm. Her grandchildren knew this. When thunder cracked over their neighborhood in Joplin, Missouri, and the...

Nahum 1:7Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Mathematician Who Found the Infinite

In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, mathematics' highest honor. Her work explored hyperbolic surfaces — shapes so complex...

Ephesians 3:8-12, 14-19Universal

229 words

Sermon Illustration

The Face That Preached Before He Spoke

In 1836, twenty-three-year-old Robert Murray M'Cheyne arrived at St. Peter's Church in Dundee, Scotland, as its new pastor. What happened over the next seven years...

Exodus 34:29-35Universal

235 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 Refugee Doctor Nobody Expected to Find in Rural Kentucky

When Dr. Amara Osei arrived in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 2019, the whispers started immediately. A physician from Ghana, practicing in a coal town of...

John 1:43-51Universal

242 words

Sermon Illustration

The Cartographer Who Charted Every Vein

In 1958, a young anatomist named Frank Netter sat in his studio at the CIBA pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, painting what no camera could...

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18Universal

249 words

Sermon Illustration

The Clockmaker of Strasbourg

In 1842, Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué completed his life's masterwork: the astronomical clock inside Strasbourg Cathedral. He had spent thirty years studying the original medieval mechanism, dismantling...

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Telescope Nobody Wanted to Look Through

In 1847, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that should have changed medicine overnight. Working in a Vienna maternity ward where one...

Habakkuk 1:5Universal

244 words

Sermon Illustration

The Intersection With No Traffic Light

In 2003, the city of Drachten in the Netherlands tried something radical. Traffic engineer Hans Monderman convinced officials to remove nearly all traffic signs, signals,...

Judges 21:25Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

Forty Feet Beneath the East River

When engineer Washington Roebling began constructing the Brooklyn Bridge in 1870, the most critical work happened where no one could see it. Workers descended into...

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

236 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 Surgeon Who Waited

In 2010, a young mother named Clara Benitez sat in a hospital waiting room in Houston, clutching her phone, watching the minutes crawl by. Her...

John 11:1-45Universal

243 words