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225 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use
In 1�788, a nine-year-old boy named William was living in a cramped London orphanage, scrubbing floors and mending shoes for his supper. He had no...
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with Ephesians.
In 2019, a woman named Clara Mendes from Porto, Portugal, discovered a sealed envelope tucked inside her late grandmother's Bible. The letter, written in her...
In 2019, Maria and Carlos Espinoza spent four months transforming a spare bedroom in their San Antonio home into a nursery. Carlos sanded and painted...
A few months ago, I found myself in a quaint little café downtown, the kind where the aroma of freshly brewed coffee mingles with the sweet scent of pastries. I noticed an elderly gentleman seated alone at the corner table,...
Catholics affirm: salvation is by grace through faith. The Council of Trent declared that nothing we do PRECEDES grace or EARNS salvation. But grace then works IN us, producing good works as fruit. The sacraments are channels of this grace—baptism,...
In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, mathematics' highest honor. Her work explored hyperbolic surfaces — shapes so complex...
Enslaved African Americans heard Ephesians 2:8-9 and understood something powerful: if salvation is by grace, not works, then the master had no spiritual advantage. The enslaver couldn't earn heaven by owning people; the enslaved couldn't be denied heaven by their condition.
Fanny Crosby lost her sight at six weeks old due to a doctor's mistake. She never saw a sunset, never read a printed page, never...
In 2019, a team of astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at what appeared to be an empty patch of sky — a dark sliver...
In 1888, Lilias Trotter stood at a crossroads in London. John Ruskin, the most influential art critic in England, had told her she could become...
In 1836, George Müller opened a rented house on Wilson Street in Bristol, England, with room for thirty orphans. He had no salary, no fundraising...
In 1844, Casper ten Boom began a weekly prayer meeting in his Haarlem watch shop, interceding for the Jewish people. His neighbors thought it eccentric....
In 45 BC, a sickly eighteen-year-old named Gaius Octavius was studying rhetoric in Apollonia, a small coastal town in modern-day Albania. He had no army,...
When Howard Carter pressed his face to a small hole chiseled through ancient stone on November 26, 1922, his patron Lord Carnarvon called out impatiently...
Imagine a small fishing boat, its paint peeling and worn by the salt and spray of the sea, battling the furious waves of a stormy ocean. The sky is a tapestry of dark clouds, and flashes of lightning illuminate the...
In 1930, Gladys Aylward was a parlor maid in London earning barely enough to survive. The China Inland Mission had rejected her — too old...
In 1823, a schoolboy named Johann planted an acorn in his family's garden outside Dresden, Germany. He wanted a climbing tree — something to swing...
When Florence Nightingale arrived at the British military hospital in Scutari, Turkey, in November 1854, she stepped into a darkness that had nothing to do...
In November 1854, Florence Nightingale arrived at the British military hospital in Scutari, Turkey, and found hell masquerading as medicine. Wounded soldiers from the Crimean...
In 1864, Confederate raiders kidnapped an infant slave named George from a Missouri farm. His mother vanished forever. Moses Carver, the farmer who legally owned...
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...
Maria Delgado worked the overnight shift at Mercy General in San Antonio for eleven years. She clocked in at ten and clocked out at six...
George Frideric Handel's father despised music. A respected barber-surgeon in Halle, Germany, he forbade instruments in the house and insisted his son would become a...
In 45 BC, Julius Caesar did something that would reshape the Roman Empire forever. He adopted his eighteen-year-old grandnephew, Octavian — a sickly young man...