Sermon Illustrations on the christian faith

The Oxford scholar and apologist C. S. Lewis... once closed a lecture to a group of apologists like this:  I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologis...

We artful dodgers act as if we do not understand the New Testament, because we realize full well that [if we let on that we did] we should have to change our way of life drastically. That is why we in...

Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. . ....

In this excerpt from his book Faith in the Shadows, pastor and author Austin Fischer shares a surprising truth about the need to be vulnerable with our own faith if we are likely to have a positive im...

Think of an ancient icon of Christ. Imagine that a thousand-year-old Christ Pantocrator painted on a wooden panel is discovered in some forgotten monastery. The image of Christ is there, but it’s cove...

In a journal entry by the Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the great existentialist philosopher describes the importance not simply of grasping the truth of the Christian faith, but having the tr...

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 ...

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...

When people are asked what they believe in, they give, not merely different answers, but different sorts of answers. Someone might say, “I believe in UFOs”—that means, I think UFOs are real. “I believ...

The man behind the unlikely tradition of Christmas stockings is usually thought to have been Nikolaos of Myra. He was a Greek Christian who became bishop of Myra, a city of Asia Minor. Nikolaos, or Sa...

Like a scene straight out of Gladiator, Polycarp was dragged into the Roman Colosseum. Discipled by the apostle John himself, the aged bishop faithfully and selflessly led the church at Smyrna through...

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...

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...

Frank Laubach recounts the profound shift in his life that came when he wholeheartedly committed to following God’s will: Before that moment, I was barely alive—like a tree rotting from within. Bu...

There is an iconic scene in the cult classic The Matrix that makes for a great metaphor. Morpheus gives Neo a choice between two pills: You can take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake up in y...

Becoming a teachable person has two prerequisites: There must be a teacher and a person willing to be taught. Increasingly, Western culture has become an environment that celebrates and platforms the ...

There is a Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy and Charlie Brown are walking home from school. Charlie Brown tells Lucy that he got straight As. Lucy responds, “I won’t believe it unless I see the report ...

Brandon and Faith Lee, who started Bird and Branch Coffee, are what faithful witnesses look like. When they sat down across from my wife and me, they had a dream to start a coffee shop that would serv...

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...

[M]y husband, Nick, tells a story of when he was a teenager riding his bike with his friends, and his chain came off his bike. Nick took the bike to his dad, who said, “I'll fix it, you watch”. Hi...

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments. I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it…Taking your children to school and ki...

Practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christianity. That is not to say that Judaism doesn’t have dogma or doctrine. It is rather to say that for Jews, the essence of the thing is a doing, an action...

One of the great leaders of the first generation after the apostles was a man named Polycarp. Polycarp, it is believed, was discipled by the apostle John and carried out a long and fruitful ministry i...

Gratitude has a ripple effect, spreading warmth and positivity to those around us. It is nearly impossible to hold onto resentment or self-pity while maintaining a grateful heart. John Kavanaugh share...

Joseph exhibited the true spirit of adoption. It is a vivid picture both of God’s adoption of us as His children in Christ, but also the call every believer has in welcoming into our homes and communi...

I know a woman who, after her diagnosis of cancer, prayed twice every day for God to heal her. A year later, as she entered her third round of chemotherapy, she said, “Well, it looks like once again, ...

In his thoughtful book, Unquestioned Answers, Jeff Myers attempts to uproot some of the widely-held clichès that keep Christians from engaging difficult topics. Here are his top ten “Unquestioned Answ...

On a cold January day, a forty-three-year-old man was sworn in as the chief executive of his country. By his side stood his predecessor, a famous general who, fifteen years earlier, had commanded his ...

Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great , interviewed Admiral Jim Stockdale, the highest-ranking officer in the Hanoi Hilton prisoner of war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Regarding the ...

We ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love . . . [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us...