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491 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use
1 Corinthians 13 describes covenant love—love that binds despite circumstances.
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with Romans.
In 1943, Japanese soldiers marched Eric Liddell through the gates of the Weihsien internment camp in Shandong, China. The Scottish Olympic champion who had electrified...
In 2018, a young paramedic named Marcus Cole responded to a stabbing in Memphis. The victim was a teenager named Darius, bleeding out on the...
In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham for leading nonviolent protests. From his jail cell, he wrote a letter that would become one of history's most important documents on justice.
Someone once observed: "The problem with a living sacrifice is it keeps crawling off the altar." Dead sacrifices stay put; living ones squirm. Paul's image is provocative—offer your BODY as a LIVING sacrifice. Not just intentions or feelings but actual flesh-and-blood living.
When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, it seemed like the end of Orthodox Christianity's heart. Scholars fled west, carrying manuscripts that sparked the Renaissance. Others went north, strengthening the Russian church. What looked like catastrophe became dispersion that spread Orthodoxy wider.
There is a quaint little community garden at the edge of our town, a patch of earth where neighbors gather, not just to grow vegetables but to grow relationships. One spring day, I watched as a group of children, armed...
When Idi Amin expelled all missionaries from Uganda in 1972, many feared the Ugandan church would collapse. Instead, it exploded. Without foreign leadership, local believers stepped up. The church grew from 2 million to over 10 million in the following decades.
In 155 AD, the Roman proconsul gave Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna a simple way out. The elderly pastor, eighty-six years old, stood in a packed...
In 1836, George Müller opened an orphanage in Bristol, England, with exactly two shillings in his pocket. He had no wealthy donors, no fundraising committee,...
In 1944, Corrie ten Boom stood shivering in the delousing shower at Ravensbrück concentration camp, stripped of everything — her home in Haarlem, her watchmaking...
In October 1536, William Tyndale was led from his prison cell in Vilvoorde Castle near Brussels to a stake surrounded by bundled sticks. His crime...
In 1960, Dr. Peter Safar demonstrated at Baltimore City Hospital that effective CPR requires two distinct actions working together. Chest compressions alone are not enough....
Dr. Elena Vasquez had every reason to keep quiet. At the 2014 medical conference in Vienna, surrounded by Europe's most prestigious neurosurgeons, she was the...
In 1963, a young civil rights attorney named Constance Baker Motley walked into a Mississippi courtroom to argue for the admission of James Meredith to...
In 1569, a Dutch Anabaptist named Dirk Willems sat locked in a prison tower in Asperen, Holland, awaiting execution for the crime of being rebaptized...
In the year 155 AD, the Roman proconsul in Smyrna dragged an elderly bishop named Polycarp into a packed arena. The crowd howled for blood....
There was a small, struggling community garden in the heart of our town. At first glance, it seemed like a patch of weeds and broken dreams. But within this garden, a group of neighbors began to gather each week. They...
In 1906, health inspector George Soper traced a mysterious outbreak of typhoid fever across several wealthy New York households to a single source: their cook,...
In March 2012, landscape architect Emily Sullivan walked through the grounds of a Joplin, Missouri, church that had been leveled by an EF5 tornado ten...
Marcus planted his boots at the lip of a sixty-foot sandstone cliff in Red River Gorge, Kentucky, rope threaded through his harness, hands white-knuckled on...
In 2018, a stranger in Pittsburgh named Angela Clark walked into a hospital and donated a kidney to a man she had never met. The...
In 1787, a frail young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce stood before the British House of Commons and introduced his first bill to abolish...
In the summer of 386 AD, a thirty-one-year-old rhetoric professor sat weeping in a garden in Milan. Augustine of Hippo had spent years chasing ambition,...