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HomeIllustrations

10,079 Illustrations

Browse Sermon Illustrations

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Sermon Illustration

The Woman Who Thanks God for Tuesdays

Margaret Chen was fifty-three when the oncologist in Portland gave her eight months. That was six years ago. She'll tell you about the morning she...

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24Universal

249 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Bones That Were Never Broken

In 1968, construction workers in the Givat HaMivtar neighborhood of Jerusalem uncovered an ancient burial site. Among the limestone ossuaries, archaeologists found the remains of...

John 19:31-37Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Fortune Poured Out in Cairo

In 1912, William Borden walked away from a fortune worth roughly sixteen million dollars. The twenty-five-year-old heir to the Borden dairy empire had graduated from...

John 12:1-8Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

The Teacher Who Stayed at Garfield Elementary

When budget cuts gutted the arts program at Garfield Elementary in East Cleveland, most of the experienced teachers transferred to suburban districts where the pay...

Matthew 5:13-20Universal

225 words

Sermon Illustration

The Voyage Back Into the Wilderness

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood on the deck of a ship bound for New York. Friends in America had arranged everything — a teaching...

Luke 4:1-13Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

Easter Eve at the Baptistery

On the night before Easter, 387 AD, a thirty-two-year-old rhetoric professor stepped into the octagonal baptistery beside Milan Cathedral. His name was Augustine, and he...

Mark 1:4-11Universal

226 words

Sermon Illustration

The Blacksmith's First Commission

The first time twelve-year-old Samuel Whitfield stepped into his grandfather's forge in rural Tennessee, the heat nearly drove him back through the door. The furnace...

Isaiah 6:1-8Universal

273 words

Sermon Illustration

The Symphony That Almost Wasn't

In 2012, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra nearly cut its percussion section during budget negotiations. The logic seemed sound — why pay four musicians who sometimes...

1 Corinthians 12:12-31aUniversal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Untrained Preacher Who Shook London

In 1854, a nineteen-year-old with no seminary degree and no formal ordination stepped into the pulpit of London's New Park Street Chapel. The deacons who...

1 Corinthians 1:18-31Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration

The Cartographer Who Burned His Maps

In 1947, a retired cartographer named Edwin Hargreaves sat in his cluttered study in Bath, England, surrounded by forty years of hand-drawn maps. He had...

Ecclesiastes 12:13Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Small Woman Who Carried No Credentials

In 1930, the China Inland Mission rejected Gladys Aylward. She was a parlor maid from Edmonton, north London — no university degree, no seminary training,...

1 Corinthians 2:1-16Universal

249 words

Sermon Illustration

Gold in the Furnace of Kobe

In January 2023, Vanessa Bryant stood at the podium in Springfield, Massachusetts, inducting her late husband Kobe into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Three years...

Wisdom 3:1-9Universal

229 words

Sermon Illustration

The Commissioning Before the Storm

When Sarah Chen graduated from seminary in May 2019, her parents drove twelve hours from Sacramento to watch her walk across the stage. Her father,...

Mark 1:9-15Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Table That Forgot What It Was For

Margaret Chen's farmhouse kitchen table had been in her family for four generations. Her grandmother had kneaded bread on it. Her mother had taught six...

John 2:13-22Universal

252 words

Sermon Illustration

Where the Mississippi Begins

At Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, you can do something that feels almost impossible — walk across the Mississippi River. At its headwaters, the mightiest...

Ezekiel 47:1-2, 8-9, 12Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

The Murmur Only a Trained Ear Can Catch

In her first week of clinical rotations at Johns Hopkins, medical student Priya Anand pressed a stethoscope to a patient's chest and heard nothing unusual....

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Weight You Were Never Meant to Hold

Maria Hernandez sat in a hospital cardiac unit for eleven days while her husband, Ernesto, waited for a donor heart. She later said the worst...

1 Peter 5:7Universalanxiety

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Manuscript Room at Chester Beatty

In 1950, a fire broke out in a small library near Dublin where the Chester Beatty collection of biblical papyri was stored. A young curator...

Jude 1:3Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

The Word That Walked Through the Door

When Dr. Margaret Chen arrived in the remote Hmong village of Ban Nam Hia in northern Laos, she had already spent three years studying the...

John 1:1-14Universal

256 words

Sermon Illustration

The Judge Who Asked to Listen

In 1961, when Learned Hand retired from the United States Court of Appeals after fifty-two years on the bench, a young clerk asked him what...

1 Kings 3:9Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

The Night Shift Nurse Who Started Over

Maria Gonzalez spent fourteen years as a corporate attorney in Chicago, climbing every rung, collecting every accolade. Partner by forty-one. Corner office on the thirty-second...

John 3:1-17Universal

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Reluctant Convert Who Was Already Pursued

In 1929, C.S. Lewis sat in his rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, convinced that God was closing in on him. He had spent years building...

John 1:43-51Universal

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bishop Who Heard It From John

In the year 155 AD, an elderly bishop named Polycarp stood before a Roman proconsul who demanded he renounce Christ. "Eighty-six years I have served...

2 Peter 1:16-21Universal

230 words

Sermon Illustration

The Farmer Who Slept Through the Storm

A hiring committee in rural Iowa once asked each candidate the same question: "Why should we hire you as our farmhand?" One man listed his...

Hebrews 13:5-6Universal

241 words