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353 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use
In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Damien De Veuster stepped off a cargo ship onto the shores of Molokai, Hawaii. He had volunteered for...
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with Isaiah.
Every Sunday morning for thirty years, Margaret Chen arrived early at her church in Knoxville, Tennessee, polishing the communion table and arranging the hymnals with...
Every January, First Community Church in Decatur, Georgia, held a three-day prayer and fasting retreat. Members gathered in the fellowship hall, sang worship songs, journaled,...
In the 1750s, a prosperous New Jersey shopkeeper named John Woolman closed his ledger book, stepped out from behind his counter, and began walking away...
In 1909, twenty-one-year-old Toyohiko Kagawa walked out of his seminary dormitory in Kobe, Japan, and moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack in the Shinkawa slums —...
When Earl Thibodaux retired from thirty-two years of commercial construction in Baton Rouge, his wife expected him to finally sit still. Instead, Earl loaded his...
Every Sunday morning, Becca Stevens preached from the pulpit at St. Augustine's Chapel in Nashville. Every Monday morning, she unlocked the doors of Thistle Farms,...
Marcus DeLeon had been a faithful church member for twenty years — never missed a Sunday, tithed to the dollar, fasted every Lent. Then one...
Father Gregory Boyle didn't march into East Los Angeles with a megaphone. He opened a bakery. For over thirty years now, Homeboy Industries has quietly...
For three consecutive Januarys, New Hope Community Church organized a twenty-one-day corporate fast. Members posted devotionals on Instagram, gathered for nightly prayer meetings, and journaled...
Sarah was a single mother, a quiet presence in our community, often overlooked as she juggled her two young children while working long hours at a local diner. Life had been a relentless uphill climb for her, and it seemed...
On the morning of November 15, 1940, Provost Richard Howard picked his way through the smoldering skeleton of Coventry Cathedral. German bombers had reduced six...
Sarah had always dreamed of running a marathon. Each year, she would watch the race from the sidelines, cheering for the runners, feeling a spark of longing ignite within her. But fear and self-doubt held her back. “I could never...
On a quiet Sunday afternoon, I found myself sitting on a weathered bench in a local park, watching a young boy flying a bright red kite. It danced and twirled against the azure sky, a vibrant splash of color against...
In competitive freediving, athletes descend hundreds of feet into the ocean on a single breath — no tanks, no second chances. At the point of...
Every January, the congregation at Redeemer Fellowship in southeast Portland held a twenty-one-day fast. They printed devotional booklets, organized prayer chains, posted their progress on...
Elena Vasquez spent three days waiting for a biopsy result. She described those seventy-two hours to her pastor as "living inside a fog you can't...
On November 11, 1918, at 5:10 in the morning, the Armistice was signed in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiegne. But the cease-fire...
During the devastating Indian famine of 1896, Pandita Ramabai — a Sanskrit scholar turned Christian — threw open the gates of her mission compound in...
On July 2, 2018, twelve boys from the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach vanished into the Tham Luang cave system in northern Thailand....
In 1993, shelling destroyed the Stari Most, a sixteenth-century Ottoman bridge arching over the Neretva River in Mostar, Bosnia. The bridge had connected the city's...
On April 8, 2024, thousands gathered in Carbondale, Illinois, to witness a total solar eclipse. Scientists had spent years preparing. Photographers had calibrated their equipment....
On a January evening in 1863, Robert Gould Shaw sat at his family's dinner table in Boston when a letter arrived from Governor Andrew offering...
In August 2020, firefighters in Northern California watched the SCU Lightning Complex burn across 400,000 acres of drought-parched land. Ranchers wept as flames consumed what...