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HomeIllustrations

10,079 Illustrations

Browse Sermon Illustrations

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Sermon Illustration

The Hymns That Couldn't Drown Out the Chains

In 1787, the churches of Bristol, England, were magnificent. Their choirs sang anthems that echoed off vaulted stone ceilings. Their congregations filled polished pews every...

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20Universal

239 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Boy Who Copied Music by Moonlight

Johann Sebastian Bach was ten years old and newly orphaned when his older brother Johann Christoph took him in at Ohrdruf in 1695. The brother...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

250 words

Sermon Illustration

The Dragon's Skin

In C.S. Lewis's *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader*, a disagreeable boy named Eustace Scrubb falls asleep on a dragon's treasure hoard and wakes to...

Universaltransformation

249 words

Sermon Illustration

The Woman in the Tower of Constance

In 1730, French authorities locked nineteen-year-old Marie Durand inside the Tower of Constance in Aigues-Mortes, a circular stone fortress rising from the marshlands of southern...

Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10abUniversal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Skin Eustace Could Not Shed

In C.S. Lewis's *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader*, a selfish boy named Eustace Scrubb wanders into a dragon's cave, falls asleep on the treasure...

Universalrestoration

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Restoration of the Sistine Chapel

In 1980, a team of restorers began the painstaking work of cleaning Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling in Vatican City. For nearly five centuries, candle soot,...

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2Universal

237 words

Sermon Illustration

When Sound Became Light

In 1934, two researchers at the University of Cologne noticed something that seemed impossible. When they directed sound waves through a flask of water, tiny...

Genesis 1:1-3Universal

209 words

Sermon Illustration

The Quiet Table

A few years ago, chef and restaurant owner Marcus Samuelsson told an interviewer about a lesson he learned from his grandmother in Ethiopia. She would...

Luke 10:38-42Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Hallelujah He Could Not Hold Back

In the autumn of 1741, George Frideric Handel was a broken man. His health had failed him — a stroke years earlier had briefly paralyzed...

Universaltrust

232 words

Sermon Illustration

From Provincial Nobody to Heir of an Empire

In 44 BC, a sickly eighteen-year-old named Gaius Octavius was studying in Apollonia, a backwater town on the Adriatic coast. He had no army, no...

Galatians 4:4-7Universal

244 words

Sermon Illustration

When God Renames the Future

In 1843, a woman born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree stunned everyone who knew her. After decades of answering to a name given by masters,...

Luke 1:57-66, 80Universal

223 words

Sermon Illustration

The Remedy They Refused to See

In 1847, a young Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis stood in the maternity ward of Vienna General Hospital, haunted by a devastating pattern. Mothers were...

Numbers 21:4b-9Universal

229 words

Sermon Illustration

Pandita Ramabai and the Courage of a Convert

In 1883, Pandita Ramabai was the most celebrated Hindu woman in India. Scholars had given her the title "Pandita" — learned one — an honor...

Romans 1:16Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

The Coach Who Wouldn't Back Down

Marcus Thompson had coached football at Eastside High for eleven years, and every Friday night brought the same unwelcome visitors. By the fourth quarter, a...

James 4:7Universal

244 words

Sermon Illustration

The Dawn Chorus at Muir Woods

Every morning, about forty minutes before sunrise, something remarkable happens in the ancient redwood groves of Muir Woods, California. A single bird — usually a...

Psalm 100Universal

240 words

Sermon Illustration

The Water Pump at Ivy Green

For nearly seven years, Helen Keller lived in a world of fragments. After losing her sight and hearing at nineteen months old, she grasped at...

Hebrews 1:1-4Universal

246 words

Sermon Illustration

The Coach Who Had Already Watched the Game Film

In 2019, a high school point guard named Marcus Davis from Gary, Indiana, showed up uninvited to a basketball camp at Valparaiso University. He had...

John 1:43-51Universal

243 words

Sermon Illustration

Corrie ten Boom's Hidden Manna

When the Nazis imprisoned Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944, they were stripped of nearly everything — warmth,...

Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16aUniversal

242 words

Sermon Illustration

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Costly Yes

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer boarded a ship back to Germany in July 1939, he was walking away from safety. He had just arrived in New York,...

Matthew 1:16, 18-21, 24aUniversal

248 words

Sermon Illustration

The Question That Changed Everything

In 2018, a journalism student named Marcus Chen sat in a Chicago diner across from his grandfather, a man who had survived China's Cultural Revolution...

Matthew 16:13-19Universal

253 words

Sermon Illustration

The Quakers Who Fed a Starving Nation

In 1846, as the Irish Potato Famine tightened its grip, Parliament debated policy and churches held solemn days of prayer and fasting. Meanwhile, a tiny...

Isaiah 58:1-12Universal

219 words

Sermon Illustration

The Lighthouse Keeper Who Improved the Light

In 1916, a lighthouse keeper named Amos Holbrook at Point Reyes, California, grew dissatisfied with the old Fresnel lens that had guided ships safely through...

2 John 1:9Universal

223 words

Sermon Illustration

The Beekeeper of Appalachia

In the misty hollows of eastern Kentucky, a third-generation beekeeper named Earl Combs tends forty-seven hives scattered across his family's land. Ask him about any...

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

The First Harvest

For seven years, Maria Nguyen's family ate from white cardboard boxes. Every Tuesday at the resettlement center in Portland, Oregon, volunteers handed out canned vegetables,...

Joshua 5:9-12Universal

252 words