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168 illustrations for sermon preparation
On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and read aloud General Orders No. 3. Two hundred and fifty thousand...
When Ernest Shackleton's ship *Endurance* was crushed by Antarctic ice in 1915, he left twenty-two men stranded on desolate Elephant Island while he sailed eight...
On August 5, 2010, the San Jose copper mine in Chile's Atacama Desert collapsed, trapping thirty-three miners half a mile beneath the earth. For seventeen...
On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Concrete buildings pancaked. Rubble buried entire neighborhoods. Rescue teams told families the math was brutal...
One evening, I sat on my porch, watching the sunset paint the sky in hues of orange and purple. As I sipped my tea, I remembered a story shared by a dear friend. She had recently reconciled with her estranged...
In October 2001, a recovery worker at Ground Zero noticed something impossible in the rubble. Buried beneath twisted steel and concrete dust stood a Callery...
The Azusa Street Revival (1906-1915) started in a rundown building in Los Angeles. Within years, missionaries had gone from there to over 25 countries. They had almost no money, little education, but they had power.
The Great Commission ends not with a task but with a presence: "I am with you always, to the end of the age." This isn't Jesus sending us away; it's Jesus going WITH us.
Early Anabaptists were hunted across Europe. Wherever they fled, they shared their faith. Persecution became mission; scattering became sending. They called it "missionary through martyrdom"—the blood of the witnesses planted churches. They had no mission agencies, no training programs, no budgets.
John Stott, the influential Anglican leader, spoke of mission requiring "double listening"—listening to the Word AND listening to the world. The Great Commission sends us to "all nations," which means understanding those nations. "Teaching them to observe all I have...
In just 10 years, Francis Xavier baptized an estimated 30,000 people across India, Southeast Asia, and Japan—often preaching through translators in languages he barely knew. He wore out his body, sleeping little, eating less, constantly moving.
When NASA selected Mae Jemison for the crew of Space Shuttle *Endeavour* in 1992, she wasn't fearless. She'd grown up on the South Side of...
On the evening of November 9, 1989, Angelika Weiss stood in a crowd of East Berliners pressing toward the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint. For twenty-eight years,...
In Latin America, base ecclesial communities took the Great Commission to the margins. They didn't wait for missionaries from outside; the poor evangelized the poor. Campesinos read Scripture together, discovered their dignity, and shared the gospel with neighboring villages.
Jesus said, "This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and THEN the end will come" (Matthew 24:14). The Great Commission has eschatological urgency—it's connected to Christ's return.
A Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany secretly baptized Jewish children to save them from the Holocaust, giving them Christian identities that protected them. Was it right? The questions are complex, but notice: he saw baptism as powerful, real, consequential.
On October 6, 1536, William Tyndale was led to a stake outside Brussels. His crime: translating the Bible into English so that common plowboys could...
On July 2, 2018, British diver John Volanthen surfaced inside a flooded chamber deep within Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand. For nine days, the...
On Easter morning 1945, Corrie ten Boom sat in a displaced persons camp near the German border, recently freed from Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her sister...
In 2019, basketball coach Dawn Staley stood before her South Carolina Gamecocks at the end of a grueling practice. She didn't hand them a playbook...
On the Norwegian island of Svalbard, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, a concrete portal juts from a frozen mountainside. The Svalbard Global...
In 1732, two young men from a tiny Christian community in Herrnhut, Germany, did something the established church considered insane. Johann Leonhard Dober and David...
In August 1732, two young Moravian men — Johann Leonhard Dober, a potter, and David Nitschmann, a carpenter — stood on a dock in Copenhagen,...
When John Wesley was criticized for preaching outside his assigned parish, he replied: "The world is my parish." He wasn't being arrogant; he was being obedient. The Great Commission knows no geographical boundaries. Wesley traveled constantly, preached wherever there were...
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