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447 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use
On a spring afternoon in 1855, Edward Kimball paced the sidewalk outside Holton's Shoe Store in Boston, nearly talking himself out of going inside. He...
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with John.
In 1968, construction workers in the Givat HaMivtar neighborhood of Jerusalem uncovered an ancient burial site. Among the limestone ossuaries, archaeologists found the remains of...
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...
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,...
In 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was dragged from the front lines of World War II and sentenced to eight years in Soviet labor camps for privately...
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...
In 362 AD, Emperor Julian — whom history remembers as "Julian the Apostate" — sat in his palace writing a frustrated letter to a pagan...
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...
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...
In 2019, visitors to a historic cathedral in Europe discovered that the gift shop had quietly expanded — again. What had once been a small...
For fourteen months, the Reyes family in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, lived on letters. Staff Sergeant Marco Reyes wrote home every week from his deployment...
When Chaplain David Rivera arrived at Memorial Hospital in San Antonio, he found the chapel wedged between a supply closet and the billing office. Someone...
In April 1855, Edward Kimball paced the sidewalk outside Holton's Shoe Store in Boston, nearly talking himself out of going inside. His Sunday school student,...
Walk into any forest in October and pick up an acorn. Hold it in your palm — it weighs almost nothing. Yet inside that small,...
When Marcus Rivera's wife collapsed at a grocery store in El Paso, the doctors told him the brain bleed was catastrophic. For four days, Marcus...
Midway through rehearsal at Carnegie Hall, the musicians expected the composer to stay on the podium. He had written every note — the thunder of...
In 1725, a young Scottish craftsman named James Short began grinding lenses in Edinburgh, unknown to anyone beyond his small parish. He had no patron,...
At the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, technicians carefully milk venom from pit vipers and coral snakes — drop by deadly drop. That venom,...
When Martin Luther King Jr. arrived at Morehouse College in 1944, he was just fifteen years old — a skinny kid from Atlanta who had...
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...
In 250 AD, a devastating plague swept through the Roman Empire. The illness — likely smallpox or measles — killed as many as five thousand...
Marcus Washington had been building furniture in his garage workshop in Durham, North Carolina, for seven years — nights and weekends, after his shift at...
In 2019, a high school point guard named Marcus Davis from Gary, Indiana, showed up uninvited to a basketball camp at Valparaiso University. He had...
On Christmas Day, 1909, twenty-one-year-old Toyohiko Kagawa walked out of his comfortable seminary dormitory in Kobe, Japan, and moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack in the...