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Home›Traditions›Anabaptist

Anabaptist Illustrations

Radical discipleship, pacifism, and the church as a distinct counter-cultural community.

Key question: “How does this text call the community of faith to live as a distinct, counter-cultural witness to the Kingdom?”

23,515 sermon illustrations through the Anabaptist lens

Sermon Illustration

A Thousand Finish Lines

When Rick Hoyt was born in 1962 with cerebral palsy, doctors told his parents to institutionalize him. Dick and Judy Hoyt refused. They saw a...

Universallove

235 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Prisoner Who Kept Saying No

In 1661, John Bunyan sat in a cold Bedford jail cell with a simple offer on the table: stop preaching, and walk free. The magistrates...

James 4:7Universal

229 words

Historical

A Season for Every Page

For six years, Leo Tolstoy sat at his desk in the estate house at Yasnaya Polyana, a hundred and twenty miles south of Moscow, writing...

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8Universalmeaningprovidence

239 words

Sermon Illustration

The Judge Who Kept an Empty Chair

In 1962, Judge Learned Hand retired from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals after fifty-two years on the bench. When a young clerk asked what...

1 Kings 3:9Universal

239 words

Movie Analogy

The Blind Side: Protecting the Blind Side (Psalm 82:3-4)

In the heart of a bustling city, where the stark contrast between wealth and poverty often feels insurmountable, a young man named Michael Oher found himself wandering the streets, invisible to most. His journey was marked by pain—a homeless teenager,...

Psalm 82:3-4Universaladoptionprotection

341 words

Historical

Where the Light Falls

In the final year of his life, Rembrandt van Rijn stood before a massive canvas in his modest Amsterdam studio — a far cry from...

Psalm 103:10-12Universalgraceforgiveness

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Fingerprints on the Window

When Margaret Chen moved into her first house in Boise in 1987, she spent an entire Saturday cleaning the picture window in the living room...

Psalm 127:3Universalparenting

254 words

Sermon Illustration

George Müller's Empty Table

George Müller sat at the head of a long breakfast table in his Bristol orphanage in 1842, three hundred hungry children waiting in silence. The...

Matthew 7:7-8Universal

252 words

Historical

Complete Surrender

On February 21, 1945, Eric Liddell died on a thin mattress in Weihsien internment camp in Weifang, China. He was forty-three years old. A brain...

Matthew 16:25Universalsacrificecalling

274 words

Sermon Illustration

The News That Changed Everything

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In the days that followed, rescue teams from around the world dug through collapsed...

Luke 2:10-11Universal

246 words

Sermon Illustration

Written for One Audience

Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the most prolific composers in Western history — over a thousand works, from sweeping cantatas to simple keyboard exercises...

Universalidentity

230 words

Historical

A Gift She Refused to Return

In 1873, Phoebe Knapp sat at her piano in Brooklyn and played a new melody for her friend Fanny Crosby. "What does this tune say?"...

2 Corinthians 4:16-18Universalperseveranceworship

260 words

Sermon Illustration

Twenty-Six Days

On the morning of October 31, 2003, thirteen-year-old Bethany Hamilton was lying on her surfboard off the north shore of Kauai when a fourteen-foot tiger...

Universalfaith

234 words

Sermon Illustration

The Garden Behind the Locked Door

In Frances Hodgson Burnett's *The Secret Garden*, ten-year-old Mary Lennox arrives at Misselthwaite Manor as a sour, neglected child — unloved and, by her own...

Universaltransformation

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Gardener on Montague Street

In the spring of 1987, Ruth Caldwell knelt in the cracked soil behind her rowhouse in Baltimore and planted twelve tomato seedlings. She was sixty-three,...

Ephesians 3:20Universal

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Father Who Never Stopped Writing

During World War II, a British father named Ernest Gordon watched his teenage son walk away from everything the family stood for. The young man...

Hosea 11:1, 3-4, 8c-9Universal

252 words

Historical

The Priest Who Stepped Out of Line

In late July 1941, a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz. As retribution, deputy commander Karl Fritzsch lined up the men of Block 14 and selected ten...

1 John 3:16Universalsacrificelove

225 words

Sermon Illustration

The Farmer Who Sang Before Sunrise

Marcus Okafor rose every morning at 4:30 on his small plot outside Enugu, Nigeria, and before his hands ever touched the soil, he sang. Not...

Psalm 100Universal

237 words

Contemporary

The Saint of the Gutters

On a September morning in 1948, a thirty-eight-year-old Albanian nun stepped through the gates of the Loreto convent in Calcutta and walked into the Motijhil...

Matthew 25:40Universalcompassioncalling

237 words

Sermon Illustration

The Cellist at the Crumbling Wall

On November 11, 1989, two days after the Berlin Wall began to fall, Mstislav Rostropovich — the great Russian cellist who had been exiled from...

Psalm 98:1-4Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

One Signature Changed Everything

In 2008, a single mortgage broker in a Southern California office falsified income documents on a subprime loan application. He never met the families who...

Romans 5:12-19Universal

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Signature of Humility

At the end of nearly every manuscript he completed — cantatas, fugues, the *Mass in B Minor* — Johann Sebastian Bach wrote three small letters...

Universalhumility

246 words

Sermon Illustration

Luther's Stand at the Diet of Worms

In April 1521, Martin Luther stood before Emperor Charles V in the great hall at Worms, Germany. Stacked on a table beside him lay his...

James 4:7Universal

247 words

Sermon Illustration

The Hymn Written in Famine

In 1637, the German pastor Martin Rinkart looked out over his walled city of Eilenburg and saw a community stripped of everything. The Thirty Years'...

Habakkuk 3:17-19Universal

227 words