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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

When You Know You're Licked Before You Begin

In Harper Lee's *To Kill a Mockingbird*, Atticus Finch offers his son Jem a definition of courage that every believer should carry in their heart....

Universalcourage

244 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Colors Hidden Beneath the Soot

For nearly five centuries, the world assumed Michelangelo painted in somber, muted tones. The Sistine Chapel ceiling — that breathtaking expanse of biblical narrative —...

Universalforgiveness

230 words

Sermon Illustration

The Musician Who Refused His Own Royalties

In the early 1990s, Rich Mullins was one of the biggest names in Christian music. His song *Awesome God* had become an anthem sung in...

Universalsacrifice

258 words

Sermon Illustration

Following the Thread in the Dark

In George MacDonald's children's novel *The Princess and the Goblin*, young Princess Irene receives a gift from her mysterious great-great-grandmother — a thread, invisible to...

Universalobedience

236 words

Sermon Illustration

The Hollow Square

In the hills of Appalachia, a musical tradition has survived for over two hundred years that most people have never heard of. It is called...

Universalcommunity

220 words

Sermon Illustration

The Lighthouse Keeper of Cape Bonavista

For thirty-seven years, Gerald Howell climbed the spiral stairs of the Cape Bonavista Lighthouse in Newfoundland every evening at dusk. Even after the Canadian government...

Matthew 5:13-20Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bishop's Wager on a Thief

In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean arrives at Bishop Myriel's door as a man without purpose. Nineteen years in prison for stealing bread have...

Universalpurpose

261 words

Sermon Illustration

Three Letters at the Bottom of the Page

Johann Sebastian Bach is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music. His works — from the Brandenburg Concertos...

Universalhumility

248 words

Sermon Illustration

The Thread Through the Mountain

In George MacDonald's *The Princess and the Goblin*, young Princess Irene receives a gift from her mysterious great-great-grandmother who lives in a hidden tower room:...

Universalobedience

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Murderer Who Knelt Before Lazarus

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's *Crime and Punishment*, a young intellectual named Raskolnikov commits murder, convinced he stands above ordinary moral law. He believes some men are...

Universalredemption

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Moravian Lots

In 1732, two young Moravian men — Leonard Dober and David Nitschmann — stood on a dock in Copenhagen with almost nothing. They had volunteered...

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Murmur in Room 4B

In her third week of clinical rotations at Johns Hopkins, medical student Priya Anand pressed her stethoscope to an elderly patient's chest and heard something...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Antivenom

Every year at the Australian Reptile Park in Gosford, New South Wales, handlers carefully grip the heads of eastern brown snakes and taipans — two...

1 Corinthians 15:55-57Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bishop's Silver

In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean stumbles out of prison after nineteen years — hardened, bitter, and convinced no one could ever see him...

Universallove

218 words

Sermon Illustration

The Dragon Who Needed New Skin

In C.S. Lewis's *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader*, the boy Eustace Scrubb is selfish, greedy, and thoroughly unpleasant. After falling asleep on a dragon's...

Universalrestoration

230 words

Sermon Illustration

The Last Lucid Moment on Maple Street

For eleven years, Dorothy Ainsworth bathed her husband, tied his shoes, and answered the same question — "Do I know you?" — sometimes forty times...

Revelation 21:1-4Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Composer Who Found His Voice Again

In April 1737, George Frideric Handel collapsed in his London home. A stroke paralyzed his right side and, by some accounts, temporarily clouded his mind....

Luke 1:57-66, 80Universal

223 words

Sermon Illustration

The Candlesticks That Renamed Him

In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean is a man defined by a number. Nineteen years in prison for stealing bread have reduced him to...

Universalidentity

226 words

Sermon Illustration

The Milkmaid's Hands and the End of Variolation

For centuries, smallpox terrorized the world. In eighteenth-century England, doctors practiced variolation — deliberately infecting patients with a mild strain of the disease, hoping to...

Hebrews 10:4-10Universal

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Organ Nobody Needed

For over a century, the human appendix was medicine's favorite punchline. Surgeons removed it without a second thought. Textbooks called it vestigial — a leftover...

Universalpurpose

234 words

Sermon Illustration

The Magnetic Memory of Home

A loggerhead sea turtle hatches on a dark beach, scrambles to the surf, and disappears into the Atlantic. She will spend the next twenty to...

Universaltrust

244 words

Sermon Illustration

The Sculptor Who Was Called to Paint

When Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1508, the artist protested. He was a sculptor, not a...

Universalpurpose

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Name That Outweighed the Arsenal

In 1944, a young French nurse named Geneviève de Galard walked into a field hospital in Indochina carrying nothing but a medical bag and a...

1 Samuel 17:45Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bread on the Hillside

In the summer of 1680, Scottish Covenanters gathered in secret on the windswept slopes of the Ayrshire moors, risking imprisonment and death for the simple...

John 6:51-58Universal

227 words