Illustrations from 1 Corinthians

1 Corinthians 1:10-18Universal

Wesley's Funeral Sermon

In 1770, George Whitefield died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and the question arose: who would preach his funeral sermon in London? The answer surprised nearly everyone....

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Sermon Illustration

The Bible That Took a Hundred Hands

In 1525, William Tyndale hunched over a desk in Cologne, Germany, translating the New Testament into English for the first time from the original Greek....

1 Corinthians 3:1-9Universal

1 Corinthians 1:3-9Universal

The Hundred-Year Prayer of Herrnhut

In 1727, a small community of Moravian refugees living on Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf's estate in Herrnhut, Germany, was fracturing. Czechs, Germans, and Poles —...

The Kidney That Changed Everything

In 2019, Marcus Rivera of San Antonio nearly died waiting for a kidney. When his coworker, a single mother named Dana Wilkins, quietly got tested...

1 Corinthians 3:9c-11, 16-17Universal

Forty Feet Beneath the East River

When engineer Washington Roebling began constructing the Brooklyn Bridge in 1870, the most critical work happened where no one could see it. Workers descended into...

The Graves That Face the Morning

Walk through the old churchyard at First Presbyterian in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where tombstones date back to 1664. Notice something peculiar: nearly every grave faces...

The Lung Transplant on the Fourth Floor

In 2019, a thirty-one-year-old teacher named Marcus Reed received a double lung transplant at Duke University Hospital. The donor was a nineteen-year-old college sophomore who...

1 Corinthians 3:9c-11, 16-17Universal

The Monument That Had to Start Over Underground

In 1848, workers broke ground on the Washington Monument in the nation's capital. The marble obelisk rose steadily to 156 feet before political turmoil and...

The Uneducated Shoe Salesman Who Shook Two Continents

Dwight L. Moody never graduated from the fifth grade. When he first applied to join Mount Vernon Congregational Church in Boston in 1855, the deacons...

1 Corinthians 15:20-27Universal

The Lead Climber's Rope

In 2013, mountaineer Conrad Anker led a team up the treacherous southwest face of Lunag Ri in the Himalayas. The route had never been completed....

1 Corinthians 15:12-20Universal

The Load-Bearing Wall

In 2019, a couple in Charlotte, North Carolina, hired a contractor to open up their cramped kitchen. They wanted the wall between the kitchen and...

The Restored Brownstone on Halsey Street

In 2019, a young couple in Brooklyn purchased a neglected brownstone on Halsey Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant for a price that stretched every dollar they had....

The Pastor Who Knelt at the Gallows

On April 9, 1945, just two weeks before Allied forces liberated Flossenbürg concentration camp, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was led to the gallows. The camp doctor who...

Pandita Ramabai and the Temples That Breathe

In 1889, Pandita Ramabai opened the doors of Sharada Sadan in Pune, India, a refuge for child widows and girls rescued from temple prostitution. Ramabai,...

The Night Blaise Pascal Stopped Thinking and Started Knowing

On November 23, 1654, the brilliant French mathematician Blaise Pascal — a man who had already revolutionized geometry, invented the mechanical calculator, and dazzled the...

1 Corinthians 15:20-27Universal

The First Victory That Promised the Last

In May 1796, Edward Jenner made a daring wager against humanity's deadliest scourge. In a cottage garden in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, he took fluid from a...

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...

The Carpenter's Daughter at the Lecture Hall

In 2014, Yale University hosted a panel on suffering and meaning. Three philosophers debated theodicy with precision — quoting Leibniz, referencing modal logic, parsing the...

1 Corinthians 12:12-31aUniversal

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...

The Sadhu Who Silenced the Theologians

When Sundar Singh arrived at Cambridge University in 1920, the faculty expected little. Here was an Indian sadhu in a saffron robe and bare feet...

The Bee That Lost Its Sting

Margaret Chen had been terrified of bees since she was seven years old — the summer a yellow jacket crawled into her Kool-Aid and introduced...

The Telescope at Griffith Observatory

On a Friday evening in Los Angeles, a line of visitors snakes up the steps of Griffith Observatory to peer through the Zeiss telescope. A...

1 Corinthians 1:3-9Universal

The Letter in Margaret Chen's Mailbox

Every Tuesday for eleven years, a letter arrived at Margaret Chen's apartment in Seattle — handwritten on cream stationery, postmarked from Topeka, Kansas. Her college...

The Sting That Killed the Stinger

Every beekeeper knows the peculiar vulnerability of the honeybee. Unlike wasps or hornets, a honeybee can only sting once. Its barbed stinger lodges deep in...