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HomeIllustrations

9,108 Illustrations

Browse Sermon Illustrations

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Sermon Illustration

The Face That Death Could Not Touch

In December 1944, Betsie ten Boom died on the cold floor of Ravensbrück concentration camp. She and her sister Corrie had been arrested for hiding...

Wisdom 3:1-9Universal

237 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Morning the Floodwaters Surrounded the Farm

In March of 2019, the Missouri River swallowed David Hagen's soybean fields outside Hamburg, Iowa. He stood on the second-floor landing of his farmhouse at...

Exodus 14:13-14Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

What the Judge Declared

Every November, courtrooms across America host National Adoption Day. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, families line up in their Sunday best while children clutch stuffed animals...

Mark 1:9-15Universal

218 words

Sermon Illustration

The Trophy Room He Emptied

In 2012, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Paul Kalanithi was 36 years old and standing at the summit of everything he had worked for. Stanford residency. Published...

Philippians 3:4b-14Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

The Brain That Obedience Builds

In 2000, neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire at University College London published a remarkable study. She scanned the brains of London taxi drivers who had spent years...

Universalobedience

222 words

Sermon Illustration

The Apprentice Who Learned to Hear the Beats

In 1987, a sixteen-year-old named Marcus Chen began apprenticing under piano tuner Walter Kraus in Portland, Oregon. Walter would strike two notes simultaneously and ask,...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Garden in Milan Where a Restless Man Finally Listened

In the summer of 386 AD, a thirty-one-year-old rhetoric professor sat weeping beneath a fig tree in a Milan garden. Augustine of Hippo had spent...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Father Who Caught Her Every Time

In 2011, a four-year-old named Ellie Farmer stood at the edge of the community pool in Bend, Oregon, trembling. Her father, waist-deep in the water,...

Jude 1:24-25Universal

251 words

Sermon Illustration

The Volunteer Who Spoke for Child Number 4617

In the family courthouse of Jefferson County, Alabama, a retired schoolteacher named Dorothy Vance sits on a wooden bench every Tuesday morning. She is a...

Isaiah 42:1-9Universal

253 words

Sermon Illustration

The Telegram That Saved the Condemned

On a bitter January morning in 1830, George Wilson sat in a Philadelphia jail cell awaiting execution for robbery and endangering a mail carrier's life....

1 Peter 3:18-22Universal

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Scholar Who Gathered the Forgotten Girls

In 1889, Pandita Ramabai opened the doors of Sharada Sadan in Bombay — a shelter for child widows whom Indian society had discarded. These were...

Isaiah 42:1-9Universal

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Last Hymn of Maximilian Kolbe

In August 1941, a Polish Franciscan priest named Maximilian Kolbe stood in the selection line at Auschwitz. When a prisoner was chosen for the starvation...

Wisdom 3:1-9Universal

225 words

Sermon Illustration

The Surgeon Who Put Down the Scalpel

In 2003, Dr. Elena Vasquez stood in an operating room at Johns Hopkins, her hands trembling over a seven-year-old boy whose tumor had wrapped itself...

2 Chronicles 20:12Universal

254 words

Sermon Illustration

The Priest Who Became "We

In 1873, a young Belgian priest named Father Damien arrived on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, home to a leper colony where the government had...

John 13:34-35Universal

251 words

Sermon Illustration

The Trellis and the Vine

In California's Napa Valley, vintners know that a grapevine left to itself will sprawl across the ground. The branches tangle. The fruit touches the soil,...

Titus 2:11-12Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

Written Over the Wreckage

In November 1873, Horatio Spafford stood on a ship crossing the Atlantic, knowing that somewhere beneath those cold waters, his four daughters had drowned weeks...

Universalperseverance

226 words

Sermon Illustration

The Name That Changed Everything

George Washington Carver never knew his parents. Born into slavery in Diamond, Missouri, around 1864, he was stolen as an infant by Confederate raiders and...

1 John 3:1-3Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

When the Heavens Split Over Wales

In the autumn of 1904, a twenty-six-year-old Welsh coal miner named Evan Roberts could barely sleep. For thirteen years he had prayed the same desperate...

Isaiah 64:1-9Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

Bonhoeffer and the Church That Split in Two

In May 1934, a young German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer helped draft the Barmen Declaration, a document that drew a sharp line through the heart...

Luke 12:49-56Universal

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Empty Prison on Robben Island

In Cape Town, South Africa, tourists file through the narrow corridors of Robben Island's maximum-security block. They stand before Cell 5, where Nelson Mandela spent...

1 Corinthians 15:55-57Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

The Telescope That Stared Into Nothing

In 1995, astronomer Robert Williams made one of the boldest decisions in the history of science. As director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he...

Universaltrust

248 words

Sermon Illustration

The Runner Who Wouldn't Leave the Camp

Eric Liddell won Olympic gold in the 400 meters at the 1924 Paris Games, becoming one of Britain's most celebrated athletes. The world offered him...

Philippians 3:17-4:1Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

The Happiness Nobody Wanted

In 2018, a Finnish documentary crew followed Heikki Nousiainen, a retired bus driver in Helsinki, as part of a study on contentment. Finland had just...

Matthew 5:1-12aUniversal

244 words

Sermon Illustration

The Threshold of Everything

In the 1950s, British scientists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley inserted tiny electrodes into squid nerve fibers to study how electrical signals travel through the...

Universalcourage

245 words