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HomeIllustrations

9,139 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 Composer Who Heard Heaven in His Darkest Season

In 1741, George Frideric Handel was a man the world had written off. His health was failing — a stroke had partially paralyzed his right...

Universalhope

243 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Hand That Rewires the Brain

In 2006, neuroscientist Dr. James Coan at the University of Virginia conducted a remarkable experiment. He placed married women inside an fMRI machine and warned...

Universallove

263 words

Sermon Illustration

The Hymn Written at the Water's Edge

In 1882, Louisa Stead took her husband and young daughter Lily to the beach for a picnic. What began as a quiet afternoon shattered in...

Universaltrust

250 words

Sermon Illustration

Connected at the Roots

In 1997, ecologist Suzanne Simard made a discovery that stunned the scientific world. She found that trees in a forest are not competing individuals but...

Universalcommunity

239 words

Sermon Illustration

The Hymn Written at Midnight After Everyone Said Yes

In February 1874, English hymn writer Frances Ridley Havergal arrived at a friend's home where ten people were gathered for a visit. Some were believers...

Universalobedience

248 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bishop Who Was Once Cargo

In 1821, slave traders raided a Yoruba village in what is now Nigeria and dragged a twelve-year-old boy named Ajayi onto a Portuguese slave ship....

Acts 10:34-43Universal

244 words

Sermon Illustration

The Marble Everyone Else Abandoned

For nearly forty years, a massive block of Carrara marble sat neglected in a cathedral workshop yard in Florence. Two sculptors had already tried and...

Universalidentity

229 words

Sermon Illustration

The Marble Two Sculptors Refused

In 1464, the Opera del Duomo in Florence commissioned a massive block of Carrara marble to become a sculpture of David for the cathedral. Agostino...

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24Universal

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Stockbroker Who Kept Silent for Fifty Years

In the autumn of 1938, Nicholas Winton canceled a skiing holiday and traveled instead to Prague, where thousands of Jewish refugee families were living in...

Isaiah 42:1-9Universal

226 words

Sermon Illustration

The Hymn Born from Feeling Useless

In 1835, Charlotte Elliott sat alone in her room in Brighton, England, while her family bustled downstairs organizing a charity bazaar for a local school....

Universalidentity

267 words

Sermon Illustration

The Painter Who Refused to Stop Seeing

In the final decade of his life, Claude Monet was going blind. Cataracts clouded his vision so severely that the world became a muddy blur...

Universalperseverance

238 words

Sermon Illustration

What the Deep Water Holds

In March 2012, filmmaker James Cameron descended nearly seven miles to the floor of the Challenger Deep, the lowest point on Earth. At that depth,...

Micah 7:18-19Universal

218 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bishop's Silver

In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean emerges from nineteen years in prison a hardened, bitter man. No inn will shelter him. No family will...

Universalrestoration

253 words

Sermon Illustration

The Second Life of Henri Matisse

In 1941, Henri Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer. The surgery saved his life but left him largely confined to a wheelchair, unable to stand...

Universalhealing

245 words

Sermon Illustration

When Peace Like a River Was Born from Grief

In November 1873, Horatio Spafford stood at the railing of a ship crossing the Atlantic, staring into cold, dark water. Weeks earlier, he had put...

Universalfaith

245 words

Sermon Illustration

The Courage Circuit

In 2010, neuroscientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel made a remarkable discovery about the human brain. Dr. Yadin Dudai and his team...

Universalcourage

238 words

Sermon Illustration

The Voice in the Ravine

In March of 2019, search and rescue volunteer Dale Hitchens spent fourteen hours combing the hills outside Gatlinburg, Tennessee, looking for a seventy-three-year-old woman named...

Luke 15:3-7Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

The Editors Written Into Your Bones

In 2015, three scientists — Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar — received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping how cells repair damaged...

Universalredemption

238 words

Sermon Illustration

The God Who Doesn't Buffer

Every one of us knows the frustration of a spinning loading wheel. You click, you wait, you wonder if the whole thing has frozen. We...

Universalpatience

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The One-Eyed Preacher on Azusa Street

In April 1906, a one-eyed Black preacher named William Joseph Seymour stood in a converted stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles and watched the...

Joel 2:28-29Universal

222 words

Sermon Illustration

The Hymn That Was Never Meant to Be Heard

In 1844, a young Irishman named Joseph Scriven stood at the edge of the water where his fiancee had drowned — the evening before their...

Universalhealing

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Path Her Feet Already Knew

In 1987, Margaret Ellison lost her sight to macular degeneration at sixty-three. Her husband Harold worried she would never walk their half-mile gravel lane to...

2 John 1:6Universal

227 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bridge That Held for a Hundred Years

In 1883, when the Brooklyn Bridge finally opened after fourteen years of construction, skeptics filled the newspapers with predictions of collapse. Engineer John Roebling had...

Psalm 89:2-5, 27, 29Universal

253 words

Sermon Illustration

What the Seedlings Cannot See

In 1997, ecologist Suzanne Simard published a groundbreaking discovery in the journal *Nature*. She found that trees in a forest are not competing loners but...

Universaltrust

238 words