Sermon Illustrations on psychology

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

Anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress are all ways of describing natural human responses to adversity and the experiences of life. And we all face adversity in many different ways: challengin...

A mind is more like a pile of millions of little rocks than a single big boulder. To change a mind, we need to carry thousands of little rocks from one pile to another, one at a time. This is because ...

Now, in our lifetime, scientists are finding ever newer evidence for what some religious people called presence in the very organizing energy of the universe—from fractals, to holograms, to electro-ma...

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 ...

What is kindness, then? What sort of behavior do we have in mind when we say that someone has been kind to us or to others? I think the essence of kindness is being thoughtful for others more than for...

In the Greco-Roman world of Paul’s day, humility was a despised trait. They viewed it as a sign of weakness. And our culture today is no different from that world of two thousand years ago. Maybe it’s...

Everything significant starts with relationship. At the end of the day, your faith, your family, your work, and your leadership are all based on who you relate to and how you relate. Your life is moti...

While taking a flight in a small plane in Washington state, marriage counselors Les and Leslie Parrot were given some interesting information from their pilot: We crossed over the islands of Puget S...

I remember playing a game as a child in which we would bend one knee and grab our foot behind us and then try to race—limping, stumbling and falling over as we struggled across the grass toward a fini...

There is no better exercise for strengthening the heart than reaching down and lifting people up. Think about it; most of your best friends are those who encourage you. You don’t have many strong rela...

There was once a sculptor who worked hard with hammer and chisel on a large block of marble. A little child who was watching him saw nothing more than large and small pieces of stone falling away left...

Where do you turn for marriage advice when you aren’t religious? This is becoming an ever-increasing question as western cultures become more and more secular. One option is to turn to the London-base...

One lazy afternoon day a turtle was swimming happily along a lake. As the turtle was nearing land he heard a scorpion hail it from the muddy shore. A scorpion, being a very poor swimmer, asked the tur...

Our bodies, created in the image of the Triune God, have much to teach us about the virtues of conversation. The human body is a wondrous symphony of diverse parts: 206 bones and over 600 muscles, con...

In a statement created by Christian leaders across the world, the Lausanne Willowbank Report calls for church leaders to return to the humility and servanthood that Jesus manifested in His earthly min...

When Tara and I learned we were pregnant for the first time, we went right out and bought a crib. You might have done the same. The act of selecting, purchasing, and assembling a crib is deeply cathar...

One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.

In The God-Shaped Brain , Timothy R. Jennings tells a well-attested story about how belief can affect the body. Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local...

Our first president, George Washington, refused to run as a member of any political party. He wanted to be a president to all Americans. Washington firmly believed that political parties would divide ...

Perhaps the most intense place to experience drifting is commonly known as the EAC, the East Australian Current. If you’ve ever seen the Disney Pixar film Finding Nemo, you’ve been exposed to the EAC,...

My transition into my 40’s came with the obligatory hip surgery. The only way to stop the cycle of hip pain was to literally carve out some bone. Those parts had to be removed. But recovering my funct...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

The last time someone said to you, “I need to talk to you,” how did that strike you? Did you think, Maybe she needs to tell me how much she appreciates me. More likely you thought, I’m in trouble. Whe...

In their excellent book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien share the importance of recognizing the lens through which see the world: We speak as insi...

According to a study performed in 2010 by the Fetzer Institute: Sixty-seven percent of Americans agree that the US population is composed of generally forgiving people, but 58% also agree that ther...

I can lose my job; I might be released from a position. My career can come to an end when I retire from the organization I work in. But my vocation comes from God; it remains and is not in the end som...

A young lady named Sally took a seminary class taught by Professor Smith, who was known for his elaborate object lessons. One day Sally walked into class to find a large target placed on the wall, wit...

There is a story—likely apocryphal—of Alexander the Great discovering a soldier asleep at his post, a grave offense. When the guard was brought before him, the king asked his name. “Alexander,” the yo...

To become peacemakers, then, we must begin with ourselves. We must ask ourselves, “Why do I make cutting remarks to another person? Why do I make demeaning remarks about them?” We must also ask oursel...