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HomeIllustrations

9,108 Illustrations

Browse Sermon Illustrations

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Sermon Illustration

What the Webb Telescope Cannot Show You

The James Webb Space Telescope peers thirteen billion years into the past, capturing light from the earliest galaxies. When it launched from French Guiana in...

Colossians 1:15-17Universal

244 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Emperor Who Could Not Outrun Their Love

In 362 AD, the Roman Emperor Julian set out to destroy Christianity — not with lions or fire, but by trying to out-love the church....

John 13:34-35Universal

245 words

Sermon Illustration

The Detour That Built a Church

In 2014, Pastor Marcus Rivera planned a mission trip to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. His team of twelve from a small church in Durham, North Carolina, had...

Acts 16:9-15Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

Wonderful Things

When Howard Carter pressed his face to a small hole chiseled through ancient stone on November 26, 1922, his patron Lord Carnarvon called out impatiently...

Ephesians 3:8-12, 14-19Universal

230 words

Sermon Illustration

The Surgeon Who Almost Wasn't

When Ben Carson was thirteen years old, he was the worst student in his fifth-grade class at Higgins Elementary in Detroit. His classmates called him...

Jeremiah 1:4-10Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

The Water They Chose in Flint

In 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan made a decision that seemed pragmatic at the time. For decades, Flint had received clean, tested water from...

Jeremiah 2:4-13Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Sonar Operator on Her First Watch

In the summer of 2018, Petty Officer Third Class Maria Sandoval sat in the sonar room of the USS Bainbridge, two weeks into her first...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

270 words

Sermon Illustration

The Priest Who Chose the Colony

In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Damien de Veuster stepped off a cargo ship onto the rocky shore of Kalaupapa, a leper colony on...

Isaiah 42:1-9Universal

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bakery That Wouldn't Close on Sundays

For twenty-three years, Maria Gonzalez ran a small panaderia on East Cesar Chavez Street in Austin, Texas. When a massive commercial development went up across...

Matthew 5:13-20Universal

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Stone That Didn't Look Like Much

Dr. Helen Pratt spent forty-one years at the Gemological Institute of America in Carlsbad, California, examining stones. Over a hundred thousand passed through her hands....

Luke 2:22-40Universal

259 words

Sermon Illustration

The King Who Stayed in the Ruins

In September 1940, German bombs struck Buckingham Palace while King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were inside. Advisors urged the royal family to evacuate to...

Matthew 3:13-17Universal

255 words

Sermon Illustration

The Playwright Who Believed in a City Reborn

In 1979, Václav Havel sat in a Prague prison cell, convicted for the crime of speaking truth under communist rule. Czechoslovakia had endured decades of...

Jeremiah 33:14-16Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Doctor Who Drank the Evidence

In 1984, Australian gastroenterologist Barry Marshall had a theory no one would believe. He was convinced that most stomach ulcers were caused by a spiral-shaped...

Universalcourage

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Love That Stopped a Plague

In 251 AD, a devastating epidemic swept through the Roman Empire. Historians call it the Plague of Cyprian, and at its peak, it killed five...

John 13:34-35Universal

230 words

Sermon Illustration

The Song Beneath the Live Oaks

On New Year's Day, 1863, thousands of formerly enslaved men, women, and children gathered at Camp Saxton near Beaufort, South Carolina. Ancient live oaks trailed...

Isaiah 52:7-10Universal

242 words

Sermon Illustration

The Politician Who Stayed

In October 1785, William Wilberforce sat in a carriage crossing the French countryside, reading Philip Doddridge's *The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul*....

Mark 1:9-15Universal

259 words

Sermon Illustration

The Night the Floodwaters Rose

In June of 2008, Linda Crawley stood on the front porch of her Cedar Rapids home and watched the Iowa River swallow her street. Water...

Exodus 14:13-14Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

The One-Eyed Preacher Who Saw the Future

In April 1906, a one-eyed son of former slaves named William Seymour stood in a crumbling former stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles and...

Revelation 7:9-17Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Rain That Didn't Check the Property Lines

In the summer of 1993, a drought gripped the farmland outside Broken Bow, Nebraska. For eleven weeks, the fields cracked and the cattle grew thin....

Joel 2:28-29Universal

225 words

Sermon Illustration

The Condemned Man Who Found Life

In 1918, Tokichi Ishii sat in a Tokyo prison cell awaiting execution. He had murdered multiple people without remorse, and the Japanese courts had pronounced...

Genesis 3:9-15, 20Universal

281 words

Sermon Illustration

Seeds for a City That Was Starving

During the 872-day Siege of Leningrad, as Nazi forces strangled the city and nearly a million civilians starved, a small group of Soviet scientists faced...

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

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Women Who Ran First

On Easter morning 1945, Corrie ten Boom sat in a displaced persons camp near the German border, recently freed from Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her sister...

Matthew 28:1-10Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

More Than a Voice on the Phone

For two years, six-year-old Emma Reyes knew her father only as a voice on a satellite phone. Staff Sergeant David Reyes had deployed to Afghanistan...

John 1:1-14Universal

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