John Stories &amp; Illustrations

John 14:6Progressive/Social Justice

The Example of Self-control - Story

A few years back, I had the privilege of attending a local charity event where a talented artist was showcasing her work. As I walked around, one painting caught my eye—it was a breathtaking landscape. The colors danced across the...

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Sermon Illustration

No Reserves, No Retreats, No Regrets

In 1904, sixteen-year-old William Borden graduated from a prestigious Chicago prep school as heir to the Borden dairy fortune. His family sent him on a...

John 12:1-8Universal

The Parlor Maid Who Was Expected in Yangcheng

In 1930, Gladys Aylward was a parlor maid in London — small in stature, plain in education, with no theological degree and no mission board...

The Skeptic in the Milan Garden

In the summer of 386 AD, a restless rhetoric professor named Augustine sat weeping beneath a fig tree in a Milan garden. For years, he...

The Language She Finally Understood

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...

The Weight She Finally Set Down

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 —...

John 8:32Universal

The Scar That Opened the Door

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...

John 20:19-31Universal

The Cure Hidden in a Lemon

In 1747, aboard the HMS Salisbury, Scottish physician James Lind watched sailors die slow, agonizing deaths from scurvy. Their gums blackened, their teeth fell out,...

John 8:32Universal

The Coach Who Called Her Name Before Tryouts

In 2019, a high school volleyball coach in Cedar Rapids, Iowa named Dana Sexton showed up at a middle school tournament she had no reason...

The Seminarian Who Almost Skipped Harlem

In 1930, a young German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, largely unimpressed. He found the academic theology...

The Well That Feeds a Thousand Taps

In 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, counted down to what officials called "Day Zero" — the day the city's reservoirs would run dry. Four million...

John 7:37-39Universal

The Mathematician Nobody Expected from Madras

In 1913, G.H. Hardy, the most distinguished mathematician at Cambridge, received a letter from an unknown clerk in Madras, India. The envelope contained page after...

The Missionary Who Became Chinese

In 1855, twenty-two-year-old Hudson Taylor arrived in Shanghai wearing a black English suit and speaking not a word of Mandarin. The Chinese people regarded him...

The Parlour Maid Nobody Thought Fit for China

In 1930, Gladys Aylward stood before the China Inland Mission board in London and heard words that stung like a slap: she was too old...

The Grip That Never Loosened

In 1915, Ernest Shackleton watched the Antarctic ice slowly crush his ship, the *Endurance*, like a walnut in a vise. Stranded on frozen pack ice...

John 10:22-30Universal

The Casserole Nobody Asked For

Margaret Ellison hadn't spoken to her neighbor Deb in three years — not since the property line dispute, the lawyers, the cold silence that settled...

John 13:34-35Universal

The Letter That Arrived Before She Applied

In 2019, a high school senior named Destiny Williams in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, opened her mailbox to find a handwritten note from a college admissions...

The Word That Walked Through the Door

When Dr. Margaret Chen arrived in the remote Hmong village of Ban Nam Hia in northern Laos, she had already spent three years studying the...

When the Gift Shop Swallowed the Sanctuary

In 2019, visitors to a historic cathedral in Europe discovered that the gift shop had quietly expanded — again. What had once been a small...

John 2:13-22Universal

The Peanut Farmer Nobody Thought Worth Teaching

In 1885, a young Black man named George Washington Carver applied to Highland College in Kansas. He was accepted by mail, but when he arrived...

The Night Shift at St. Luke's

Dr. Amara Osei had delivered over three thousand babies in her twenty-two years at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City. She thought she understood birth....

John 3:1-17Universal

The College President Who Saw the Fifteen-Year-Old Preacher

When Martin Luther King Jr. arrived at Morehouse College in 1944, he was just fifteen years old — a skinny kid from Atlanta who had...

The Table He Built With His Hands

For eleven months, Robert Callahan worked in his garage in Asheville, North Carolina, hand-planing black walnut boards for a dining table. He joined each piece...

John 2:13-22Universal

The Night the Composer Sat Among the Cellos

Midway through rehearsal at Carnegie Hall, the musicians expected the composer to stay on the podium. He had written every note — the thunder of...