Sermon Illustrations on pain and joy

I think the mistake most of us make about beauty is that we expect it to be pretty—to please us with its proportions, its balance, its harmony, its rhyme. If those are your requirements, I doubt I wil...

I am spellbound by the intensity of Jesus’ emotions: Not a twinge of pity, but heartbroken compassion; not a passing irritation, but terrifying anger; not a silent tear, but groans of anguish; not a w...

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...

Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death. That is natural and normal, a proper reaction to the Last Enemy. Our culture is afraid because it seems to be afraid of the ...

The incarnation means that for whatever reason God chose to let us fall . . . to suffer, to be subject to sorrows and death—he has nonetheless had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine....

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer describes a surprising dynamic that sometimes occurs in the life of a Christian: believing so strongly in a loving God that one cannot fathom th...

I don’t have the nerve to stand up on Christmas Eve and preach about the choreography of childbirth, but I wish I did. I wish I had the nerve to preach about Mary’s increased estrogen production, a...

The cross, Martin Luther wrote, was the devil’s mousetrap. The devil smelled cheese, and wham, felt steel. Thus, we see a little baby lying defenseless in a crib at Bethlehem, and a tortured man hangi...

In this excerpt, the French monastic leader Frere Pierre Marie, shares an interpretation of Jesus as the true prodigal son—bringing all of us home with him: He, who is born not from human stock, or ...

In 1998, Nick Cave, an Australian rock/pop artist, was asked by the Vienna Poetry Academy to give a series of talks on the nature of song-writing. A year later he gave a slightly revised version of th...

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...

In George Bernard Shaw’s play about Joan of Arc , as Joan faces her execution by burning, she addresses those in power who have condemned her: “I will now go to the common people and find comfort in ...

Why should I, who have been living from all eternity in the enjoyment of the Father’s love, go to cast myself into such a furnace for them that never can requite me for it? Why should I yield myself t...

There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control o...

Ann Voskamp, in her book The Broken Way, describes what it was like to have mental illness trivialized from the pulpit, as someone who identified with similar struggles: I was eighteen, with scars a...

In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci journeyed to China, bringing religious art to share the Christian story with those unfamiliar with it. The Chinese readily embraced images of t...

A little girl came home from a neighbor’s house where her little friend had died. “Why did you go?” questioned her father. “To comfort her mother,” said the child. “What could you do to comfort her?” ...

I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? . . . The point is that he felt huma...

A Chinese Christian who heard me speak once asked me if I would write a tract about suffering for his fellow believers in the Orient. I told him I would think about it. But when I did, I realized that...

An American businessman went to Oberammergau to witness the famous passion play, just before the outbreak of World War II. Enthralled by this great drama that depicts the story of the cross, he went b...

Our church has a large open field next to it, with a tall wooden cross in the middle– perhaps 15-feet high or so.  I love that cross. I’m always struck by its isolation, abrupt in the midst of land wi...

Another example struck me forcibly during the 2014 season of Promenade Concerts in the Albert Hall in London. (The “Proms,” as they are known, make up a major annual festival, offering world-class mus...

Humble. Before Jesus, almost no pagan author had used “humble” as a compliment. Yet the events of Christmas point inescapably to what seems like an oxymoron: a humble God. The God who came to earth ca...

A few years ago, a vicious stomach bug swept through our community. (When you live in a religious community and one person gets sick, it’s just a matter of time before everyone else does too.) And one...

Brenda Peterson is an author whose work crosses multiple genres, including fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books. In an essay entitled In Praise of Skin, Peterson shares a true story from her own ...

The symbol of judgment and death, the serpent, is lifted up as Israel’s symbol of life. Jesus draws this parallel for us in John, hinting toward the way the tool of Roman execution, the cross, will be...

How does the theme of glory that predominates in Epiphany fit with the large amount of space devoted to the Sermon on the Mount during the season? It all depends on what one means by glory. The “g...

One of the fascinating features of the Gospel writers’ accounts of the trial of Jesus is this blending of the legal and moral factors. They all indicate that in both Jewish and Roman courts a certain ...

For those of us who live in the shadow of self-doubt, who may wonder what meaning a life of relative anonymity may have in a society filled with the cult of celebrity in which likes, reposts, and digi...

My husband, Jeff, is an excellent driver. He has never had an accident, excepting two incidents in high school which hardly bear mentioning— Several years ago, I was driving across town to get to a sp...