Sermon Illustrations on faith in the dark

I remember once near Interlaken waiting for days to see the Jungfrau which was hidden in mists. People told me it was there, and I should have been a fool to doubt their word, for those who told me li...

And I was reminded of an event from my father’s childhood: He was in a Sunday school class, listening to his teacher expound on Genesis 1 and a young earth, and asked his teacher how to make sense o...

While global flights and online booking have made travel easier in many ways, other aspects, often related to safety and security, still create challenges. As often as I fly, I could tell you plenty o...

Triumph and failure always go together in the wait of faith. They are the head and tail of the same coin. Show me a person who has had no struggle with waiting, whose faith has known no swings between...

The foundation of faith is a firm conviction regarding three things about God—his perfect love, wisdom and power. Like a three-legged stool, no combination of two will do. There must be all three for ...

Everyone wants it. It’s the thing that fuels what we do. It’s the thing that stimulates courage and perseverance. It’s what gets you through the tough times and keeps you from quitting. It’s hard to b...

Brother Lawrence, a 16th-century Carmelite monk, spent his days scrubbing pots and mending shoes. Largely uneducated, he filled his free time writing letters and notes that, after his death, friends g...

Lauren F. Winner tells a story about her friend Julian. When she was 12 and going to be confirmed, she had a crisis. She told her father, the pastor, that she wasn’t sure she could tell the church tha...

Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to w...

Doubt is really the felt tension that exists between a belief you have and a contrary claim you do not yet believe…Simply put, doubt is that experience of one of our beliefs seeming like it might be f...

Survival requires more than the basic biological necessities we readily acknowledge—oxygen, food, and water. It also demands something less tangible but equally vital: hope. When hope vanishes, the hu...

With the global coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, life stopped. Overwhelmed by the threat of a disease we couldn’t stop and for which we didn’t have the hospital capacity, everyone moved work and s...

The Danish philosopher and contrarian Soren Kierkegaard once compared Christians of his time to a flock of geese in a barnyard. Every week, they listened to an eloquent speaker who recounted the stori...

An Irish Catholic priest, returning to his old parish in the warmth of spring, was delighted to spot an elderly man he had long known. “Pat!” he called out cheerfully. “You’re still with us—I’m glad t...

We all live between two worlds. We are planted here on earth while our hope is in heaven. We are given work to do in temporary soil that, we’re told, has the potential to spring up into unending fruit...

God stretches our faith in order to prepare us to receive his promises. That often requires painful rewiring. We need updating, just as an old house may need rewiring. The old electrical wires might b...

Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a co...

In grad school, although I was studying to become a clinical psychologist, I started working at a Baptist church. I discovered then that I loved to preach . . . until one weekend when the sermon wasn’...

When J. K. Rowling created the Harry Potter universe, she naturally drew on her own experiences to flesh it out. This is true even for such alarming creatures as ‘dementors’. These are soulless beings...

Again and again in China I talked to people who had never heard of Christianity, never heard of Jesus, never heard a single word from the Bible. Yet through nature and their God-given conscience, many...

Almost as important as oxygen for human survival is hope. According to Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, “Since my early years as a physician, I learned that taking away hope is, to most people, like pronounci...

I have a photo of one of my children: on a day of pure sunshine, he is running down the hillside, leading with his chest, his smile and stride wide as his speed picks up. Running is pure delight. Agai...

Sabbath honors the necessary wisdom of dormancy. If certain plant species, for example, do not lie dormant for winter, they will not bear fruit in the spring. If this continues for more than a season,...

In the desert outside of Tucson, scientists dreamed up an experiment to re-create the conditions of earth for space, when and if the earth could not be made great again. The biosphere was a little wor...

In his book The Grand Essentials , Ben Patterson recounts the story of an S-4 submarine that sank off the coast of Massachusetts, leaving its entire crew trapped inside. Despite numerous rescue a...

David Letterman’s old late-night segment “Will It Float?” once inspired our staff to fill a huge water tank, place it at the front of an auditorium, and ask three thousand people to vote which of a se...

We delude ourselves into believing that if we can just get everything done, if we can only tie up all the loose ends, if we can even once get ahead of the crush, we will prove our worth and establish ...

Elisabeth Elliot once stayed in the farmhouse of a Welsh shepherd and his family high in the mountains of North Wales. She stood watching one misty summer morning as the shepherd on horseback herded t...

In Circle of Quiet , Madeleine L’Engle describes how her young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time was dismissed by eight publishers before it eventually landed with the publishing house of Farrar, Str...

One Christmas Eve in Vermont when my children were small, we did the things you do when your children are small on Christmas Eve. We stuffed and hung their stockings. We put out a draught of cider and...