Loading...
447 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use
In 2019, a woman named Grace Chen walked into a tiny coffee shop on Magnolia Street in Waco, Texas, three days after moving from Portland....
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with John.
In the autumn of 1785, William Wilberforce sat in a carriage traveling through the French countryside with Isaac Milner, a Cambridge professor and old friend....
A woman walked into a Vineyard church service skeptical and guarded. She didn't come for theology—her life was falling apart, and a friend had dragged her there. During worship, she felt something she couldn't explain: warmth, presence, overwhelming love. She started crying and couldn't stop.
In 1774, French revolutionaries broke into the royal crypt at Saint-Denis to exhume the body of Henry IV, the beloved king who had been assassinated...
In Utah's Fishlake National Forest, there is a grove that looks like 47,000 separate aspen trees. Hikers walk through it every summer, admiring the white...
A farmer doesn't plant an apple tree and expect fruit the next day. There's soil preparation, planting, watering, pruning, waiting—years of waiting. Fruit is organic result, not manufactured product.
In the autumn of 1517, a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel rolled into the towns near Wittenberg with a sales pitch that would have made...
When the tornado tore through Tuscaloosa, Alabama in April 2011, it left a mile-wide scar across the city. Houses flattened. Lives shattered. In the days...
On July 3, 2012, Tomas Lopez was working as a lifeguard at Hallandale Beach, Florida, when someone pointed to a swimmer struggling beyond the roped...
In 2019, a young Marine named Jake Torres was deployed to Afghanistan for his first tour. Thousands of miles from his family in San Antonio,...
Karl Barth, arguably the 20th century's greatest theologian, was once asked to summarize his massive Church Dogmatics—thousands of pages of dense theology. He paused, then replied: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." The scholars laughed; Barth was serious.
In 1963, John Profumo stood before the British House of Commons and lied. The Secretary of State for War denied his affair with Christine Keeler,...
In 2018, a woman named Elena Vasquez sat in a San Antonio hospital room, clutching her phone, staring at the door. Her seventeen-year-old son Marco...
In 1905, William Seymour sat outside a classroom in Houston, Texas. The Bible school's founder, Charles Parham, refused to allow a Black student inside, so...
When William Wilberforce was a young member of Parliament in 1785, he found himself in spiritual crisis. Ambitious but restless, he secretly began reading the...
In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Damien de Veuster stepped off a boat onto Molokai, a Hawaiian island that had become a colony of...
At the core of the sun, hydrogen atoms fuse at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit — a violence so extreme that no human eye could witness...
For eleven years, Margaret Chen wrote letters to her sponsored child, Amara, in a small village outside Kigali, Rwanda. She sent photographs, birthday cards, handwritten...
In 2014, Dr. Rachel Villanueva was performing a routine fellowship interview at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York when a young medical student named Marcus...
In December 1904, fifteen-year-old Sundar Singh of Rampur, Punjab, was consumed with rage against Christianity. Grieving his mother's death and furious at the missionaries who...
In 2018, Dr. Sarah Shin left her tenured position at Georgetown University to move into a refugee apartment complex in Clarkston, Georgia — a town...
Martin Luther spent years terrified of God. He fasted, confessed for hours, punished his body—trying to earn divine favor. Nothing worked; he only felt more condemned. Then, studying Romans in the tower of the Wittenberg monastery, it struck him: righteousness is GIVEN, not achieved.
In 1807, a British missionary society published a Bible for Caribbean slaves—but they cut out the Exodus, most of the prophets, and Revelation. They removed any passage that might inspire hope for freedom. But they couldn't cut John 3:16.
In 1569, Dutch Anabaptist Dirk Willems was fleeing authorities who would execute him for his faith. He crossed a frozen pond; the ice held his slight frame. His pursuer, heavier, broke through and began drowning. Willems turned back and saved the man's life.