Sermon Illustrations

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In 2014, researchers at Northwestern University, Boston College, and the University of Melbourne published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , a prestigious academ...

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The Fourth Option to Dealing with Contempt

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In his book Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt , author and professor Arthur C. Brooks charts the rise of anger — and more importantly, contempt — ...

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Chess and Surrender to God: The King is Infinity Points

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Exodus 6:33, Exodus 20:3, Deuteronomy 6:5, 1 Corinthians 10:31, James 1:17, 1 Timothy 6:17, Luke 14:26-27, Philippians 3:8

We sometimes imagine surrender to God as emotional starvation. Every pleasure feels suspicious, and every passion feels in competition with our love of God. We think that the more miserable we are in ...

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The Deepwater Horizon Crisis and Our Need for a Savior

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Romans 3:21-31, 1 John 1:7, Philippians 1:6, Ephesians 2:8-9, Colossians 2:13-14

In 2010, an oil rig named “Deepwater Horizon” suffered a catastrophic failure. Due to improper installation of the cement seal, a malfunctioning blowout preventer, and cost-cutting decisions by corpor...

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Statistics on Religion in America: The Rise of the None's

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Matthew 7:13-14, 2 Timothy 4:3-4, Luke 18:8, 2 Corinthians 4:3-4, Matthew 24:12-13

In March 2009, we received the results from the widest religious survey conducted in the United States, the ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) study. There is much to gain from this repor...

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The Medium is the Message

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James 3:5-6, Matthew 6:22-23, Proverbs 18:21, Nehemiah 8:, Isaiah 44:

Culture is shaped by the primary medium of an era. Marshall McLuhan is widely known as the father of media studies. He coined the famous phrase “the medium is the message” in 1965. And while some to...

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What is the Internet? Yesterday's Confusion is Today's Assumption

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Isaiah 40:8, Hebrews 13:8, James 1:17, Matthew 24:35, Colossians 2:8

A YouTube video from the Today Show in 1994 shows Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric asking each other “What is the Internet?” and debating if the “@” symbol means “at” or “about.” The world is very diffe...

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God the Artist: Crafted to Make a Statement

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Ephesians 2:10, Isaiah 64:8, 1 Peter 2:9, 2 Corinthians 3:2-3, John 17:18

When I think of masterpieces, I think of art. But what is art? I like the way that Thomas Hoving, who was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, put it: “Art happens when anyon...

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Invention Begins With Inventory

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John 14:26, 2 Peter 1:12-13, Philippians 4:8, Luke 2:19, Proverbs 2:1-5

Memory researchers reveal that memory and creativity are linked historically. The Latin root inventio is the basis for two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to ...

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Faith and Feelings Can Go Together

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Psalm 42:5, Romans 12:15, Ephesians 4:26, Lamentations 3:19-23, James 4:8-9

Too often we are given a choice—emotions or faith and belief. Yet as Dan Allender and Tremper Longman observe, Emotion links our internal and external worlds. To be aware of what we feel can open ...

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Memories and Trauma Can be Inherited

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Deuteronomy 6:20-23, Exodus 12:26-27, Joel 1:3, Psalm 78:4-7, Romans 5:12

Some stories, however, have been handed down to us. For some, we were not yet cognizant, and for others, we weren’t even born when experiences, memories, and stories affected our family and communitie...

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Where is God? Hanging From the Gallows

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Jonathan Cornell

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Matthew 27:46, Hebrews 4:15, 1 Peter 3:18, John 19:30, 1 Peter 4:13

In Elie Wiesel’s Night , Eliezer is a Jewish teenager, a devoted student of the Talmud from Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Increasingly repress...

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Seeing is Metamorphosis, Not Mechanism

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Matthew 6:22-23, 2 Corinthians 3:18, Luke 11:34, Matthew 13:13, 1 John 2:16

James Elkins talks about how even the sense of sight is more complicated than we might believe: “Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where ...

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Christianity Refuses Cynicism

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Andrew Greeley

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Genesis 1:31, Habakkuk 2:14, Isaiah 25:8, Revelation 21:1-4, Revelation 22:3-4

Reject Christianity, if you will, out of motives of cynicism; turn away from it because you believe. Reality is malign and punitive; choose a God that is cantankerous, vindictive, or forgetful, or det...

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The Two Marooned Men

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David Peterson

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Malachi 3:10, Deuteronomy 8:18, Matthew 13:45-46, Isaiah 55:1-2, Haggai 2:8

Two men were marooned on a deserted island. One man was pacing back and forth, terrified that no one would ever rescue them. The other man was sitting against a tree, shading himself comfortably and r...

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Vladimir the Great: Choosing Christianity for All the Wrong Reasons

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1 Corinthians 1:27-29, John 6:44, 1 Corinthians 1:21, 2 Kings 5:, Joshua 2:

The Grand Prince of Kiev (now called Russia), Vladimir the Great, was under intense pressure to choose a national religion. The year was 987 AD, and paganism was quickly going out of fashion. More and...

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When a Muslim is Welcomed Before She is Converted

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Matthew 9:10-11, James 2:1, Romans 12:18, Ephesians 2:14, 2 Corinthians 5:20

A number of women at Kairos Los Angeles have at times assisted a local ministry that helps women who are in transition. They provide housing and often help these women find jobs. Some of these women s...

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Our Unworthy Cornerstones

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Ephesians 2:20, Isaiah 28:16, 1 Peter 2:6-8, 1 Corinthians 3:11, Hebrews 12:27-28, Psalm 118:22, Matthew 21:42, Mark 12:10-11, Luke 20:17

The cornerstone was a critical element of ancient architecture, the anchor that the rest of the building relied on. The cornerstone was the stone that set the alignment of the entire building. Every o...

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Without Applause, I die

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Ryan P. Tinetti

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James 3:16, 1 John 2:16, John 5:44, Matthew 6:1, Philippians 2:3

There’s undeniably a dark side to restless ambition, however. You can see it in dramatic fashion in the documentary Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop , which follows the comedian on tour after he left the To...

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Restlessnes Keeps the Pedal to the Metal

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Ryan P. Tinetti

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Habakkuk 2:5, James 3:16, Mark 8:36, Luke 12:15, Isaiah 57:20, 1 Timothy 6:9, 1 John 2:16

Restlessness keeps the pedal to the metal. To offer a suggestive analogy in this vein: several years ago there was a recall on some Toyota vehicles. Evidently the cars would be given to sudden and unc...

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Blaming Creation Instead of Sin

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Albert Wolters

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Genesis 1:31, Romans 8:20-21, 1 Timothy 4:1-5, Colossians 1:20, Psalm 24:1

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

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The Meaning of Rituals

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Exodus 12:14, Exodus 13:8-9, Joshua 4:6-7, Acts 2:42, Joel 2:15-16

Rituals are procedures or routines that are fused with meaning. Ritual actions include various rites of passage (birth, marriage, death) or calendrical rites (religious holy days, national holidays), ...

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Hodja, Daddy

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John Ortberg

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A soul without a center is like a house built over a sinkhole. “How collapsed you are my soul , and how you sigh over me.” On the other hand, the soul comes alive when it is centered on God. “Let...

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The Soul Stream

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John Ortberg

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There once was a town high in the Alps that straddled the banks of a beautiful stream. The stream was fed by springs that were old as the earth and deep as the sea. The water was clear like crysta...

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Christians Can Cultivate Culture

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Titus 2:7-8, Jeremiah 2:4-9, Romans 12:21, Matthew 5:13-16, Genesis 41:

While there is a place for condemning, critiquing, consuming and copying culture, the primary posture Christ followers are to have in the world is as culture makers. In regard to history, the word cul...

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Wasting Time with Thoreau

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The other afternoon, in an effort to avoid doing my work, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. It turned out to be a fitting choice, as Thoreau has quite a bit to say about wasting time. “The cos...

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Getting the Right Goals May be the Key to Success

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Worthy goals are generally motivated by something deeper than success. In her conversations with Nobel laureates, [researcher Xiaodong D.] Lin said she has found that “they all have insatiable passion...

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Study Your Own Failures

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