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HomeIllustrations

10,079 Illustrations

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Top Rated Newest Oldest|All Sources Biblical Illustrator Spurgeon Maclaren

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Sermon Illustration

The File That Already Had Her Name

In 2019, a fourteen-year-old girl named Maya sat in a group home in Columbus, Ohio, convinced nobody was coming for her. She had aged out...

John 1:43-51Universal

240 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Boomerang on the Playground

In 1997, a fifth-grader named Marcus Torres stood at the edge of the blacktop at Jefferson Elementary in Tucson, Arizona, watching his classmate David trip...

Obadiah 1:15Universal

248 words

Sermon Illustration

The Parlor Maid Who Crossed the Mountains

In 1930, Gladys Aylward was a parlor maid in London — short, uneducated, and utterly unremarkable by the world's standards. When she applied to the...

Luke 1:26-38Universal

229 words

Sermon Illustration

When the River Jumped Its Banks

In the summer of 1993, the small farming community of Hardin, Montana, watched the Bighorn River swell past its banks after weeks of relentless rain....

Joel 2:28-29Universal

227 words

Sermon Illustration

The Night the Codes Fell Silent

For four years, the French Resistance survived on fragments. Coded messages crackled through BBC radio broadcasts — instructions hidden inside poetry readings, weather reports laced...

Hebrews 1:1-4Universal

224 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

Bonhoeffer's Prayers from a Distance

When the Gestapo shuttered his underground seminary at Finkenwalde in 1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not stop being a pastor to his students. Scattered across Germany,...

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13Universal

244 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

One Loaf, One Family

Every Sunday morning at Grace Community Church in Tupelo, Mississippi, eighty-three-year-old Martha Jenkins arrives early to bake communion bread. She has done this for thirty-seven...

1 Corinthians 10:16-17Universal

238 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 Nurse Who Wouldn't Stop Praying

In 2019, a hospice nurse named Margaret Ajagu in Birmingham, England, was called into her supervisor's office and handed a formal warning. A family had...

Acts 5:27-32Universal

219 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 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 Dancer Who Refused to Rent Her Gift

In 2019, Misty Copeland sat across from a reporter who asked why she had turned down a seven-figure endorsement deal from a major liquor brand....

1 Corinthians 6:12-20Universal

261 words

Sermon Illustration

The Heir Caesar Chose in Advance

In 45 BC, a sickly eighteen-year-old named Gaius Octavius was studying rhetoric in Apollonia, a small coastal town in modern-day Albania. He had no army,...

Ephesians 1:3-6, 11-12Universal

266 words

Sermon Illustration

The Architect Who Sketched a Room She Had Never Seen

In 2019, a young couple in Asheville, North Carolina, hired architect Dana Morales to design their first home. During the initial consultation, they handed over...

John 1:43-51Universal

247 words

Sermon Illustration

George Müller's Empty Pantry

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

Hebrews 13:5-6Universal

244 words

Sermon Illustration

The Seeker From Punjab Who Burned the Book

Sundar Singh was fifteen years old in 1904 when he tore a Bible apart and burned it page by page in his village courtyard in...

Matthew 2:1-12Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bulbs of Haarlem

In 1637, the Dutch city of Haarlem was gripped by tulip fever. Fortunes changed hands over small, wrinkled bulbs that looked like dried onions. A...

1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50Universal

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Prism on Dr. Nakamura's Desk

In a physics lab at the University of Chicago, Dr. Keiko Nakamura would begin each semester the same way. She held a glass prism up...

James 1:17Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

Written in the Whorls

In 1892, Francis Galton published his landmark study *Finger Prints*, mathematically demonstrating that no two people on earth share the same fingerprint pattern. The odds...

Universalidentity

239 words

Sermon Illustration

The Spring That Never Stopped

In 1888, a cholera outbreak swept through Hamburg, Germany, killing over eight thousand people in ten weeks. The city's water supply had been drawn from...

Zechariah 13:1Universal

246 words

Sermon Illustration

What Your Cells Know About Sacrifice

Every day, without your awareness or consent, somewhere between 50 and 70 billion of your own cells choose to die. Scientists call it *apoptosis* —...

Universalsacrifice

239 words

Sermon Illustration

George Müller's Ten Thousand

In 1836, George Müller opened a rented house on Wilson Street in Bristol, England, with room for thirty orphans. He had no salary, no fundraising...

Ephesians 3:20Universal

241 words