Sermon Illustrations on message of the bible

The central vision of world history in the Bible is that all of creation is one, every creature in community with every other, living in harmony and security toward the joy and well-being of every oth...

If I am asked to break the gospel and a gospel culture down into simple statements, I would borrow imagery from the man from Northern Ireland, from Belfast, C. S. Lewis. From The Lion, the Witch and t...

Billy Graham had a weekly radio show titled The Hour of Decision. Normally it was a tape recording of the service and message he’d given at a recent evangelistic rally. And at the conclusion of every ...

The story is told of a man who had gone to church for several years but suddenly stopped attending. His pastor dropped by one evening unannounced. The man answered the door and invited him in. Of cour...

Writing to his parents while imprisoned on the day of Pentecost, the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this: At the tower of Babel all the tongues were confounded, and as a result men could no longe...

If we are honest with ourselves, for many of us who celebrate the sacraments on a regular basis, at times we take them for granted. We lose sight of their nature to inspire and remind us of our covena...

There’s a quote by H. Richard Niebuhr that I believe is absolutely true.  “The great Christian revolutions,” he argued, “come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen w...

Now of course, none of us is perfect, and all of us fail in all kinds of ways. That is why we often protect ourselves a bit when we say things like, “Don’t look at me, or don’t look at Christians; loo...

For us, Jesus instituted two ongoing signs to confirm our confidence in the gospel of his grace, the first of which is baptism. Though simpler and less obviously supernatural than the ten plagues on E...

Editor’s Note: The following illustration came from one of my own sermons, as I was trying to help a congregation see itself not as a building, but the body of Christ. It has been adapted for TPW. No...

In Francis Chan’s latest book “Letters to the Church,” he shares about his first year after leaving his large church in suburban Los Angeles to start something new. It was something Francis himself wa...

‘Salvation’ is a wonderfully wide-ranging word and it would be a great mistake to think that it refers only to the forgiveness of our sins. God is as much concerned with our present and future as with...

N. T. Wright relates a story from Josephus that illustrates the meaning of "repent and believe" in the first century. Around AD 66, Josephus made a military expedition to Galilee to put dow...

In Silence, Shusaku Endo writes of the journey of Portuguese Jesuits journeying to Japan. It is a conversation about those who intend to take the path of Jesus, only to find they are on the path of Ju...

One key difference between much of the early church vs. the church of today (at least in the West) was the belief in, and regular experience of, miracles. As Joel Green, the noted professor and writer...

Max Lucado likens the coming of the Spirit to a dramatic rescue. Recall the twelve boys trapped in the Tham Luang cave in Thailand in 2018 for eighteen days? Imagine how they felt when the first rescu...

Pastor Bob Beasley recounts this story: Our three-year-old daughter, Rena, sat with us during the baptismal service last Sunday night, which was a new experience for her. She exclaimed in surprise, ...

Please know that when I take up my cross every day I am not talking about my wheelchair. My wheelchair is not my cross to bear. Neither is your cane or walker your cross. Neither is your dead-end job ...

If birds could write books, their story of creation would no doubt read quite differently than ours. In the first place, I expect they would make quite a lot out of that wind of God that swept over th...

The story goes about a young man (or woman!) with dreams of growing a small church nestled in rural Oklahoma. Despite his relentless efforts, the church continued to teeter on the edge of extinction a...

The ministry of Jesus does not end with his resurrection. In his ascension, he does not abandon his humanity. He is not the ascended Lord apart from everything that has happened between his incarnatio...

For Christians, to share in the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, means to live as people who know that they are always guests – that they have been welcomed and that they are wanted. It is, perhaps, the...

What is meant by fellowship in this verse? Gossip? Cups of tea? Tours? No. What is being referred to is something of a quite different order and on a quite different level. “They met constantly to hea...

Paul talks about “the table of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 10:21. We are hosted by Jesus. In Roman Catholicism the bread itself is effectively the host, because it hosts the physical presence of Christ...

One development of the exile was an additional language for the Jewish people. The Babylonians and Persians spoke Aramaic, and out of necessity the Jews learned it. Some even became more conversant in...

A passage often referred to in order to describe the sacrificial, countercultural quality of the early church comes to us interestingly enough, from one of its strongest critics, known later to histor...

From the outside Calvary Church in Holland, Michigan, looks like a typical large church that many Americans attend. The church developed the typical way: it started small and then began to grow. As th...

We are meant to be part of the flow of abundance: to open our hands to receive what we need and share what we have with others. Jesus taught his followers to be radically generous when he said: “Sell ...

I grew up in church. However, this church was part of a denomination that avoided mentioning the Holy Spirit whenever possible. Our denominational leaders treated Him a bit like the crazy uncle who sh...

We become who we are in the environment of home. We are shaped by our families. Home is formative. Sociologist Cody C. Delistraty explored the most recent scientific literature for Atlantic Monthly an...