Loading...
353 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use
In December 1938, a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton canceled his ski holiday and traveled instead to Prague. What he found in the refugee...
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with Isaiah.
On the morning of May 5, 1945, a young Dutch resistance courier named Ada pedaled her battered bicycle through the streets of Leidschendam, a town...
Charles Spurgeon, one of history's greatest preachers, battled severe depression his entire ministry. He sometimes couldn't preach for weeks. Yet he returned—again and again. "I have learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages," he wrote.
In 1977, Wangari Maathai knelt in the red dirt outside Nairobi, Kenya, and pressed nine seedlings into the earth. The hills around her told a...
Orthodox monks practice hesychasm—stillness, silence, waiting before God. They repeat the Jesus Prayer for hours: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me." This isn't productivity; it's presence. Seraphim of Sarov spent 1,000 days praying on a rock.
After Mother Teresa's death, her letters revealed something shocking: for nearly 50 years, she experienced spiritual darkness—feeling abandoned by God, unable to sense His presence. Yet she kept serving, kept praying, kept waiting. She called it a gift, a sharing...
On August 6, 1945, a single bomb turned Hiroshima into a wasteland. Scientists predicted nothing would grow there for seventy-five years. The soil was poison....
George Herbert gave up a promising career at Cambridge to become a country parson in tiny Bemerton. Some saw it as a waste of his talents. For three years until his death at 39, he served an obscure flock, visited the sick, wrote poems.
In 2017, a young Somali woman named Sahro walked into a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, after three weeks on foot. She carried almost nothing...
On the evening of May 4, 1945, a BBC announcer read a single sentence that changed everything for the people of Denmark: "The German forces...
In 1997, two years after the Bosnian War ended, a blacksmith named Zajko Hadzimuratovic returned to his shop in Gornji Vakuf, a town split between...
In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Damien de Veuster stepped off a boat onto the rocky shore of Molokai, Hawaii. He had volunteered to...
For eleven years, Denise Watkins ran a free tutoring program from her apartment on East 71st Street in Chicago. Every Tuesday and Thursday, twelve neighborhood...
On the morning of November 15, 1940, the people of Coventry, England woke to find their beloved cathedral reduced to a smoldering shell. German bombers...
Every Sunday morning, Dr. Raj Patel sat in the third row at Grace Community Church in Harlan County, Kentucky. He sang the hymns, bowed his...
In a quiet corner of a bustling park, there stood a young sapling, its fragile branches stretching toward the sky. It was surrounded by towering oak trees, their stately trunks a testament to decades of growth. Day after day, the...
Enslaved African Americans sang "My Lord, What a Morning" and "Soon and Very Soon"—songs of waiting. They waited for freedom that didn't come in their lifetimes. But the waiting wasn't resignation; it was resistance. Each song renewed strength for another day.
Susanna Wesley had 19 children; nine died in infancy. Her husband was often absent, sometimes imprisoned for debt. Her home burned down twice. Through it all, she spent two hours daily in prayer and personally educated each child. She waited...
In the heart of California, a church community has taken a bold step forward in environmental stewardship, transforming their building into a beacon of hope. Imagine a once-ordinary structure, now adorned with gleaming solar panels that catch the sunlight like...
In 2018, photographers from around the world descended on Chile's Atacama Desert — the driest place on Earth, where some weather stations have never recorded...
In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a New York apartment, safe from the gathering storm in Germany. Friends had arranged his escape — a...
In 1964, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island, a windswept rock off the coast of Cape Town. The anti-apartheid movement appeared...
The Amish practice "Gelassenheit"—a German word meaning surrender, yieldedness, letting go. It's waiting on God by releasing control. When technology offers faster solutions, they wait. When culture pushes individual achievement, they submit to community. When conflict arises, they wait for reconciliation rather than forcing resolution.
On the night of July 31, 1838, thousands of formerly enslaved men and women packed into churches across Jamaica. For four years they had endured...