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HomeIllustrations

9,099 Illustrations

Browse Sermon Illustrations

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Top Rated Newest Oldest|All Sources Biblical Illustrator Spurgeon Maclaren

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Sermon Illustration

The Shoe Clerk from Northfield

In 1855, Edward Kimball walked into a Boston shoe store with a single purpose: to speak to a teenage stock boy about Jesus. The young...

John 1:43-51Universal

240 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Flotilla Nobody Organized

On August 12, 2016, floodwaters swallowed southern Louisiana. Before FEMA arrived, before the National Guard mobilized, something remarkable happened. Ordinary people — shrimpers from Lafitte,...

Acts 2:1-31Universal

224 words

Sermon Illustration

George Müller and the Empty Breakfast Table

On a gray morning in 1838, three hundred orphans sat at long wooden tables in Bristol, England. The plates were empty. The cups were empty....

Psalm 146:5-10Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

The Prisoners Who Couldn't Stand Up

On January 30, 1945, 121 U.S. Army Rangers crawled through the grass toward the Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines. Inside the wire, over five...

Mark 16:1-8Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

The Habitat House on Millbrook Lane

In 2019, Maria Gonzalez and her three children moved into a Habitat for Humanity home on Millbrook Lane in Charlotte, North Carolina. Over four hundred...

1 Corinthians 6:12-20Universal

230 words

Sermon Illustration

Buying a House in Detroit

In 2009, Detroit was a city the world had written off. Factories stood hollow. Entire neighborhoods lay abandoned, with houses selling for a dollar. Financial...

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

228 words

Sermon Illustration

The Lung Transplant on the Fourth Floor

In 2019, a thirty-one-year-old teacher named Marcus Reed received a double lung transplant at Duke University Hospital. The donor was a nineteen-year-old college sophomore who...

1 Corinthians 6:12-20Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Cobbler's Trickle That Became a Flood

In 1793, a Northamptonshire cobbler named William Carey stepped off a ship in Calcutta with little more than a printing press and a stubborn conviction...

Ezekiel 47:1-2, 8-9, 12Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Monument That Had to Start Over Underground

In 1848, workers broke ground on the Washington Monument in the nation's capital. The marble obelisk rose steadily to 156 feet before political turmoil and...

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

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Emergency Room at 3 A.M.

Sarah Chen had never run so fast in her life. Her four-year-old son, Marcus, was burning with fever, limp in her arms, and she burst...

Hebrews 4:16Universal

252 words

Sermon Illustration

The Stockbroker Who Became a Father to 669

In December 1938, a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton canceled his skiing holiday and traveled to Prague instead. What he found in the refugee...

Matthew 1:16, 18-21, 24aUniversal

245 words

Sermon Illustration

The Surgeon Who Operated Without Lights

In 2010, Dr. Evan Atar Adaha stood in a makeshift surgical tent in Kurmuk, a dusty border town in Sudan's Blue Nile region. Ethiopian militias...

1 Samuel 17:45Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

The Lawyer Who Stood Alone

In 1963, a young civil rights attorney named Constance Baker Motley walked into a Mississippi courtroom to argue for the admission of James Meredith to...

Romans 8:31Universal

220 words

Sermon Illustration

The Couple Who Planted an Orchard in Detroit

In 2009, Mark and Olivia Covington stood on Hobart Street in Detroit's east side, surrounded by abandoned lots choked with waist-high weeds and crumbling foundations....

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

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Nets Left Behind on Lake Victoria

In 2014, a young fisherman named David Ochieng worked the pre-dawn waters of Lake Victoria near Kisumu, Kenya. Fishing was all he knew — his...

Matthew 4:12-23Universal

242 words

Sermon Illustration

The Hands That Stayed on the Keys

Margaret Ellington taught piano in her living room in Savannah for forty-one years. She never once slapped a student's hand for hitting a wrong note....

Titus 2:11-12Universal

213 words

Sermon Illustration

The Coats She Left Behind

When Miss Rosa Lee Patterson died in 2019, the members of her small church in Albany, Georgia, expected a modest funeral. Rosa had never held...

Acts 9:36-43Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bare Tree That Spoke to a Soldier

In the winter of 1632, an eighteen-year-old French soldier named Nicholas Herman stood staring at a leafless tree in the frozen countryside of Lorraine. The...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

When Sound Shapes the Dust

In 1787, German physicist Ernst Chladni scattered fine sand across a metal plate and drew a violin bow along its edge. What happened next still...

Genesis 1:1-3Universal

224 words

Sermon Illustration

Hallelujah from the Ruins

In 1741, George Frideric Handel was a broken man. Four years earlier, a stroke had left his right hand partially paralyzed. His London operas were...

Universalhope

254 words

Sermon Illustration

Glory and the Internment Camp

In 1924, Eric Liddell stood on the Olympic podium in Paris, a gold medal around his neck, the world cheering his name. The moment shimmered...

Mark 1:9-15Universal

252 words

Sermon Illustration

The Mutiny on the Bounty

In April 1789, HMS Bounty sailed through the South Pacific under Captain William Bligh. The crew had spent five months in Tahiti, living in paradise...

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7Universal

245 words

Sermon Illustration

Wedgwood's Hammer and the Potter's Second Chance

In 1769, Josiah Wedgwood limped through his pottery works in Burslem, Staffordshire, leaning on his wooden leg, inspecting every piece that came off the wheels....

Jeremiah 18:1-11Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Olympic Champion in the Prison Camp

Eric Liddell won Olympic gold in Paris in 1924, his story later immortalized in *Chariots of Fire*. But his greatest race was run behind barbed...

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7Universal

228 words