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221 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use
In 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan made a decision that seemed pragmatic at the time. For decades, Flint had received clean, tested water from...
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with Jeremiah.
During the 872-day Siege of Leningrad, as Nazi forces strangled the city and nearly a million civilians starved, a small group of Soviet scientists faced...
In 1960, the Aral Sea stretched across 26,000 square miles of Central Asia — the fourth-largest lake on earth. Fed by two mighty rivers, the...
In 2009, Mark and Olivia Covington stood on Hobart Street in Detroit's east side, surrounded by abandoned lots choked with waist-high weeds and crumbling foundations....
In 2009, a Detroit schoolteacher named John George did something his neighbors called foolish. While families fled the city by the thousands, while foreclosure signs...
Eric Liddell won Olympic gold in Paris in 1924, his story later immortalized in *Chariots of Fire*. But his greatest race was run behind barbed...
In 2019, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina planted two identical red oak saplings along Maple Street, just three blocks apart. Same species, same nursery,...
In 2019, the city of Detroit planted two identical red maple saplings on either side of Woodward Avenue as part of an urban regreening project....
There once was a small fishing village nestled along a rugged coastline, where storms frequently battered the shores. The fishermen of this village had learned to respect the power of the sea, and every evening as the sun dipped below...
In 2019, a grandmother in Louisville, Kentucky named Dorothy Carter sat at her kitchen table teaching her six-year-old grandson, Marcus, to read. Every afternoon, she...
When Mithat Isik arrived in Altenburg, Germany, as a Syrian refugee in 2015, he had every reason to hold back. He was a trained pharmacist...
For forty-three years, Maria Cristina Alvarez made her mother's tamales every Christmas Eve in her small kitchen in San Antonio. In the early years, she...
In 1722, a small band of Moravian Christians stumbled across the border into Saxony, driven from their homeland in modern-day Czech Republic by relentless persecution....
In 1941, as German forces encircled Leningrad, the scientists at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry faced an unthinkable test. Inside their walls sat one...
In 312 AD, Roman engineers completed the Aqua Claudia, one of the most magnificent aqueducts ever built — forty-six miles of precisely graded channels carrying...
When Hawa Abdi arrived in Clarkston, Georgia, in 2016, she wanted to go home. The Somali Bantu refugee missed the red soil of her village,...
In 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan switched its water source from the Detroit system — clean, treated, reliable — to the Flint River, a...
In September 1666, the Great Fire of London consumed thirteen thousand houses, eighty-seven churches, and the medieval St. Paul's Cathedral. The city smoldered for days....
In 1739, the Anglican clergy of Bristol, England, had largely abandoned the coal miners of Kingswood. These workers — their faces blackened with soot, their...
When Toyota closed its assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, in 2020 for pandemic retooling, hundreds of temporary workers found themselves relocated to a facility in...
The exiles' hope and future ultimately pointed to Christ. Seventy years later, they returned to rebuild—but the real fulfillment came centuries after, when the One who IS our hope and future arrived. Jesus is God's plan for prospering humanity. He...
God told the exiles to "seek the peace of the city where I have sent you." Sent—even exile was mission. The exiles were to bless Babylon, pray for their captors, work for the city's good. Jeremiah 29:11's hope included missional vocation.
Karol Wojtyła lost his mother at 9, his brother at 12, and his father at 20. The Nazis occupied his country; he worked in a quarry while secretly studying for the priesthood. He could not have imagined becoming Pope John Paul II.
In charismatic circles, Jeremiah 29:11 is often spoken prophetically: "God says to you today: I have PLANS for you!" It's declaration, not just information. The Spirit makes ancient promises present and personal.