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28 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use
In 1637, the German pastor Martin Rinkart looked out over his walled city of Eilenburg and saw a community stripped of everything. The Thirty Years'...
Scientists who study the Nubian ibex — the wild mountain goat of the Sinai Peninsula — have spent years puzzling over how the animal navigates...
In 2010, Haitian worship leader Dieumème Noelliste lost everything in the Port-au-Prince earthquake — his home, his church building, three members of his congregation. For...
In 1857, Frederick Law Olmsted stood before New York's city commissioners with plans to transform 843 acres of swampland, pig farms, and squatter shanties into...
In 2012, Tom Neuhaus watched his corn wither across 1,200 acres outside Lincoln, Nebraska. The worst drought in fifty years had turned his fields to...
In 1787, William Wilberforce sat in his garden at Holwood House in Kent, weeping over Thomas Clarkson's evidence of the slave trade — iron shackles...
On May 22, 2011, a mile-wide tornado carved through Joplin, Missouri, killing 158 people and leveling entire neighborhoods in minutes. Among the wreckage stood what...
High in the White Mountains of eastern California, bristlecone pines cling to limestone ridges where almost nothing else survives. One of them, named Methuselah, has...
In March 2019, floodwaters from the Missouri River swallowed Don Heger's farm near Craig, Missouri — 1,200 acres buried under silt and debris. Neighbors lost...
Marcus Briggs had farmed the same 340 acres outside Lubbock, Texas that his grandfather had broken ground on in 1948. In the spring of 2011,...
In April 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was led into a concrete cell at Tegel Prison in Berlin, surrounded by the very injustice Habakkuk had lamented three...
High in California's White Mountains, at nearly 12,000 feet, stands a bristlecone pine named Methuselah. It has endured for over 4,800 years in conditions that...
High in California's White Mountains, at nearly 10,000 feet, the bristlecone pines cling to slopes of bare dolomite rock. The soil is almost powder. Rainfall...
High in the White Mountains of eastern California, where the soil is almost pure limestone and rainfall barely reaches ten inches a year, stands a...
In 1955, Chinese pastor Wang Mingdao stood in a Beijing courtroom and watched everything stripped away. His church on Shi Cha Hai hutong — shuttered....
In Italy's Gran Paradiso National Park, Alpine ibex scale the nearly vertical face of the Cingino Dam — a smooth concrete wall rising 160 feet...
Margaret Ellison walked her withered soybean fields outside Decatur, Illinois, in the summer of 2012. The worst drought in fifty years had turned her 200...
In 1988, the worst drought in fifty years scorched the plains of central Kansas. Creek beds turned to cracked mud. Cattle stood listless under cloudless...
During the siege of Sarajevo in 1993, mortar shells had reduced the city's beloved National Library to a smoldering skeleton. Bread lines became killing fields....
In 1847, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that should have changed medicine overnight. Working in a Vienna maternity ward where one...
Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian pastor, spent fourteen years in communist prisons — three of them in solitary confinement thirty feet beneath Bucharest. He had no...
On November 22, 1873, Horatio Spafford stood at a telegraph office in New York and read a message from his wife that began with two...
Martin Edsel planted his last seeds in April 1988 with borrowed money and a prayer. By August, the Iowa fields that had fed his family...
In November 1873, Horatio Spafford stood on the deck of a ship crossing the Atlantic. Days earlier, he had received a telegram from his wife...
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