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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 Heir of Caesar

In 45 BC, a sickly eighteen-year-old named Gaius Octavius received staggering news: Julius Caesar, the most powerful man in the world, had named him son...

Romans 8:14-17Universal

229 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Heart Murmur No One Else Could Hear

Dr. Rachel Nguyen still remembers her third week of clinical rotations at Johns Hopkins. Her attending physician, Dr. Owens, pressed a stethoscope to a patient's...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

249 words

Sermon Illustration

The Sanskrit Scholar Who Had Nothing

In 1882, Pandita Ramabai stood in a Pune courtyard with nothing but a white widow's sari and a reputation for brilliance. She was twenty-three. Her...

Luke 1:26-38Universal

244 words

Sermon Illustration

The Weight of the Listening Heart

In 1987, Dr. Paul Farmer was a twenty-seven-year-old medical student who walked into a squatter settlement outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and realized that every diagnosis he...

1 Kings 3:9Universal

230 words

Sermon Illustration

The Recipe Card Collection That Never Fed Anyone

Margaret Chen kept a wooden box on her kitchen counter in Portland, Oregon, filled with over two hundred recipe cards written in her grandmother's careful...

James 1:22Universal

250 words

Sermon Illustration

The Seminarian Who Almost Skipped Harlem

In 1930, a young German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, largely unimpressed. He found the academic theology...

John 1:43-51Universal

246 words

Sermon Illustration

The Choir That Shouldn't Have Sung Together

In December 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbled, conductor Daniel Barenboim gathered musicians from East and West Berlin to perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. For twenty-eight...

Romans 15:4-13Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

The Wisdom Hidden in Simple Rules

In 2010, researchers at Hokkaido University published a study in *Science* that stunned the engineering world. They placed a slime mold — a single-celled organism...

Universalobedience

246 words

Sermon Illustration

The Name on the Nursery Door

When Marcus and Elena Torres of San Antonio learned they were expecting their first child in 2019, everyone assumed the boy would be Marcus Antonio...

Luke 1:57-66, 80Universal

248 words

Sermon Illustration

The Ballet Dancer's Discipline

Misty Copeland, the first African American principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, once described how she guards her body with an almost sacred attentiveness. She...

1 Corinthians 6:12-20Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Monarch's Last Crawl

Every September, researchers at the University of Kansas tag thousands of monarch butterflies migrating through the Great Plains. Dr. Orley "Chip" Taylor has led this...

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

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Throne That Outlasted Rome

In August of 410 AD, the unthinkable happened. Alaric and his Visigoths breached the walls of Rome — the city that had ruled the known...

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

When Courage Has a Name

In Harper Lee's *To Kill a Mockingbird*, there is a scene that stops the neighborhood cold. A rabid dog staggers down a quiet Alabama street,...

Universalcourage

249 words

Sermon Illustration

The Watchmaker's Home That Was Ready Before the Storm

In the Dutch city of Haarlem, Casper ten Boom ran a small watch shop called the Beje. For decades before the Second World War, the...

Ephesians 1:3-6, 11-12Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Audacity to Ask for More

In 1948, a young Baptist preacher named Howard Thurman sat across from Mahatma Gandhi in his sparse ashram in Sevagram, India. Gandhi had spent decades...

2 Kings 2:9Universal

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bessemer Converter at Sheffield

In 1856, Henry Bessemer stood before a crowd of skeptical ironworkers in Sheffield, England, and demonstrated something they had never seen. He poured molten pig...

Malachi 3:1-4Universal

226 words

Sermon Illustration

The Fingerprints That Even Twins Cannot Share

In 2013, forensic scientists at the University of Oxford confirmed what detectives had long observed: identical twins, who share every strand of DNA, still have...

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Fingerprint That No One Chose

In 2004, forensic scientist Dr. Kasey Wertheim testified before a congressional committee that no two fingerprints have ever been found to match — not in...

Psalm 139:1-3, 13-15Universal

245 words

Sermon Illustration

The Laundromat on Cypress Avenue

For eleven years, Maria Gutierrez ran a laundromat in East Oakland that should have gone under twice. The margins were razor-thin. A bigger chain opened...

Matthew 5:13-20Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

Light That Learned to Be Warm

Sunlight travels ninety-three million miles through the vacuum of space, and for every one of those miles, it is invisible. No color. No warmth. No...

John 1:1-14Universal

239 words

Sermon Illustration

Bartolomé de las Casas and the Sermon He Could Not Preach

In 1514, a Spanish priest named Bartolomé de las Casas sat in his study on the island of Cuba, preparing a Pentecost sermon for his...

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20Universal

245 words

Sermon Illustration

What Bonhoeffer Heard in Harlem

In 1930, a twenty-four-year-old German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He was already brilliant — two doctoral...

1 Samuel 3:1-10Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Coffee Shop on Martin Luther King Boulevard

Every morning for three years, Maria Gonzalez walked into the same coffee shop on MLK Boulevard in Memphis and ordered the same black coffee. She...

John 4:5-42Universal

264 words

Sermon Illustration

Corrie ten Boom and the Yielded Body

In 1944, Corrie ten Boom stood inside the delousing shower at Ravensbrück concentration camp, stripped bare alongside her sister Betsie and hundreds of other women....

1 Corinthians 6:12-20Universal

233 words