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HomeIllustrations

10,079 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 Kingdom That Lasted Twelve Years

In 1934, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl released *Triumph of the Will*, a propaganda film designed to immortalize the Third Reich. The footage showed endless columns of...

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14Universal

218 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Diary She Kept in the Dark

In the year 203 AD, a young noblewoman named Vibia Perpetua sat in a Carthaginian prison, nursing her infant son through iron bars. She was...

1 Peter 1:3-9Universal

223 words

Sermon Illustration

A Parent's Perfect Temperature

In neonatal intensive care units, doctors have long prescribed something remarkably low-tech for premature babies: kangaroo care — holding the infant skin-to-skin against a parent's...

James 1:17Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Priest Who Tipped His Hat

When Desmond Tutu was nine years old, he was walking with his mother down a street in Johannesburg. Under apartheid, Black South Africans were routinely...

1 John 3:1-3Universal

256 words

Sermon Illustration

The Architecture of Sacrifice

In 2002, scientists Sydney Brenner, John Sulston, and H. Robert Horvitz won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering something remarkable inside every...

Universalsacrifice

276 words

Sermon Illustration

The Carpenter's Hands

In 1987, a young furniture maker named Tomás Herrera walked into a workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico, and apprenticed himself to master woodworker Don Refugio. For...

3 John 1:11Universal

226 words

Sermon Illustration

The Couple Who Said Yes to Someone Else's Baby

In 2019, a nurse named Marcus and his wife Elaine in Memphis, Tennessee, were finishing a quiet dinner when a social worker called. A newborn...

Matthew 1:16, 18-21, 24aUniversal

246 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

Sermon Illustration

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Body in the Prison Cell

In the winter of 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a cramped cell at Tegel military prison in Berlin. Guards expected the imprisoned pastor to wither...

1 Corinthians 6:12-20Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Noblewoman and the Slave Who Walked Together

In the spring of 203 AD, two women sat in a Carthage prison cell waiting to die. Vibia Perpetua was twenty-two, educated, from a respected...

Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14Universal

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Last Grove Standing in the Mountains of Lebanon

In the mountains above Bsharri, Lebanon, there stands a grove of cedars that the locals call the Cedars of God. Some of these trees are...

Psalm 29Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

When the Desert Remembers How to Bloom

In Chile's Atacama Desert — one of the driest places on earth — seeds lie buried beneath cracked, barren soil for years, sometimes decades. They...

Joel 2:28-29Universal

219 words

Sermon Illustration

The Crossing Guard on Maple Street

For eleven years, Dorothy Chen stood at the corner of Maple and Third in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, guiding children safely across the street. She knew...

Matthew 5:13-20Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

The Cure Hidden in a Lemon

In 1747, aboard the HMS Salisbury, Scottish physician James Lind watched sailors die slow, agonizing deaths from scurvy. Their gums blackened, their teeth fell out,...

John 8:32Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

Uncovering What Was Always There

In 1980, restorer Gianluigi Colalucci climbed the scaffolding inside the Sistine Chapel and pressed a small solvent-soaked sponge against Michelangelo's ceiling. Beneath five centuries of...

Malachi 3:1-4Universal

201 words

Sermon Illustration

Chosen Before the Envelope Was Opened

In 2019, a woman named Lisa Goich-Andreadis from Detroit published a memoir about discovering, at age forty-three, that she had been adopted. Her parents had...

Ephesians 1:3-6, 11-12Universal

255 words

Sermon Illustration

The Signature on the Blueprint

In 1943, a small congregation in Birmingham, Alabama gathered in a borrowed basement to plan their first church building. They had no architect, no contractor,...

Nehemiah 2:20Universal

216 words

Sermon Illustration

The Christ Hymn in Aisle Seven

In 2019, a young woman named Sarah walked into a Walmart in Hartsville, South Carolina, and started singing "Way Maker" in the middle of the...

Romans 1:16Universal

248 words

Sermon Illustration

The Choir of the Ordinary

In 2019, a video went viral of a young cashier at a Walmart in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, quietly singing hymns while scanning groceries. She wasn't performing....

Luke 1:39-56Universal

218 words

Sermon Illustration

The Village That Refused to Go Dark

In the winter of 1941, Pastor André Trocmé stood before his congregation in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small village in the mountains of southern France, and...

Matthew 5:13-20Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

The Moonlight Manuscripts

In the German town of Ohrdruf around 1696, eleven-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach lived with his older brother Johann Christoph, who kept a cabinet of advanced...

Luke 2:41-51aUniversal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

George Washington Carver and the 4 A.M. Garden

Long before the laboratory lights flickered on at Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver was already awake. Every morning at four o'clock, the agricultural scientist walked...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration