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447 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use
In 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer watched as the Deutsche Christen movement draped swastika banners beside the cross in German churches. They rewrote hymns to honor the...
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with John.
In 1937, a drawbridge operator named J.P. worked along a rail line in New Jersey, bringing his young son to work on quiet summer days....
Last summer, a close-knit community in our parish rallied around a local family facing the unimaginable: their son, a vibrant, young athlete, was diagnosed with a terminal illness. As the news spread, you could feel the weight of despair settle...
In 2019, a young couple in Asheville, North Carolina, hired architect Dana Morales to design their first home. During the initial consultation, they handed over...
For two years, six-year-old Emma Reyes knew her father only as a voice on a satellite phone. Staff Sergeant David Reyes had deployed to Afghanistan...
In June 1849, seventeen-year-old Hudson Taylor wandered into his father's library in Barnsley, England, looking for something to pass the time. He picked up a...
In 1858, a young Charles Blondin stretched a tightrope across Niagara Falls and asked his manager, Harry Colcord, to ride on his back. Colcord agreed,...
In 1785, a twenty-five-year-old member of Parliament named William Wilberforce sat in the parlor of John Newton, the aging rector of St. Mary Woolnoth in...
In 2018, a trauma surgeon named Dr. Liz Scarlett gave a talk at a medical conference in Nashville. She rolled up her sleeve and showed...
For twenty-three years, Maria Gutierrez carried a sealed envelope in the bottom of her jewelry box. Inside was a letter from her birth mother —...
In the autumn of 1871, Dwight L. Moody was already filling auditoriums across America. Yet two women in his Chicago congregation — Sarah Anne Cooke...
For three years, Marcus Chen wrote letters to his estranged daughter, Lily, after she moved to Osaka to teach English. He poured his heart onto...
In 2014, a young woman named Priya Chandran walked into a community college writing class in Fresno, California, convinced she had nothing worth saying. She...
In 2018, a video went viral of a four-year-old boy named Archer Coyle from Melbourne, Australia, who had been profoundly deaf since birth. Doctors had...
In 2018, engineers drilling a water well in Coober Pedy, Australia — a remote opal mining town where summer temperatures reach 120 degrees — struck...
In 1855, Edward Kimball walked into a Boston shoe store with a single purpose: to speak to a teenage stock boy about Jesus. The young...
In 1930, Gladys Aylward was a parlor maid in London — small in stature, plain in education, with no theological degree and no mission board...
In 2019, Marcus Thompson was a lanky fifteen-year-old shooting free throws alone at a cracked outdoor court in Flint, Michigan. He had no AAU team,...
In the autumn of 1785, a young Member of Parliament named William Wilberforce was in spiritual crisis. His recent conversion had left him torn —...
When Dr. Amara Osei arrived in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 2019, the whispers started immediately. A physician from Ghana, practicing in a coal town of...
When Marcus Chen was diagnosed with ALS in 2019, his neighbors in a small subdivision outside Raleigh, North Carolina, didn't organize a single grand fundraiser...
In 2019, a young woman named Lucia drove her sputtering Civic into a small repair shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She had never been there...
In June 1849, seventeen-year-old Hudson Taylor wandered into his father's library in Barnsley, Yorkshire, looking for something to pass the time. He picked up a...
In the autumn of 1904, twenty-six-year-old Evan Roberts trudged out of the Welsh coal mines each evening with lungs full of dust and a soul...