Loading...
Search, filter, and discover the perfect illustration for your sermon
Free to browse · Sign up free to unlock most illustrations · Premium ($9.95/mo) for the full library of 50,000+ illustrations
Life is not blind accident but the deliberate operation of the great Workman, and perceiving Elohim's purpose becomes our shield against sorrow, doubt, despondency, and fear.
This phrase unveils three profound truths about the Divine nature.
This protection operates across five dimensions of divine care.
The winepress figure denotes supreme contempt—the Mighty Conqueror compares His victory over enemies to the crushing of grapes beneath His feet.
The Hebrew exclamation *hoy* (הוי) — often translated "Ah" — expresses God's judicial anger, not mere regret.
2:13), where every meat-offering required salt as a preservative, Christ establishes a profound contrast between two destinies.
The original word *El* — meaning 'the Mighty One' — establishes God's supreme power and authority.
The gospel of Jesus Christ inaugurates what all Scripture converges toward and radiates from.
What we ought to do, we owe to do; what we ought to be, we owe to be.
Exell's Victorian homily traces how humanity perpetually distorts the divine nature through carnal reasoning.
In his helplessness, he cast himself upon the Lord's hands, beseeching Adonai to deliver him from this destructive passion that marred his Christian witness.
The pedigree of true believers consists of two movements: first, they were once *in* the world, characterized by practical atheism (living without God in spirit and conduct), imperial materialism (recognizing no spiritual universe), and dominant selfishness (each governed by selfish...
The particle "therefore" (*dio*) anchors judgment in three ascending causes: first, their impiety itself; second, their refusal to repent despite God's discipline ("they turned not to Him that smote them"); and third, their continued obstinacy in refusing to seek the...
Solomon observes from wide experience that extremes in appearance and reality create spiritual peril—we must strive to *be* what we *seem*.
Capernaum, meaning "field of repentance" or "city of comfort," sat on the western shore of the Galilean Lake, a prosperous junction where the Damascus-to-Accho highway brought commerce and wealth.
The inner life must be sustained by God alone.
The distinction between "lively" and "living" reveals Scripture's nature: where *lively* denotes mere animation, *living* (*zōē*) signifies life as an operative principle—comprehensive, generative, self-perpetuating.
Eight ancient stone steps descend to waters that supplied Jerusalem's citizens for millennia.
The psalmist declares wonder not merely that kindness exists, but that it arrives in such a way—precisely suited to the specific need at hand, not generic or distant but intimately fitted to the situation.
Matthew 24:27 compares our Lord's return to lightning flashing across the sky. Joseph S. Exell's Victorian exposition unpacks two essential truths. First, Christ's advent shall be sudden. The masses will be unprepared, as unsuspecting as a city when lightning leaps...
It represents a change from ignorance to knowledge, from bondage to self-control, from temporal relationship to eternal covenant.
The Hebrew rendering cuts deeper than arbitrary punishment: "He that despiseth the Word shall bring ruin on himself." This reveals a foundational law of Biblical revelation—that destruction is not merely God's external penalty imposed from above, but rather self-ruin, a...
Exell, in his 1887 *Biblical Illustrator*, unpacks this summons with Victorian precision: we must arouse the bodily powers first.
Yet four men dared to dismantle one where Jesus taught, lowering their paralyzed neighbor through the opening on ropes while rabbis from all the schools gathered below.