Sermon Illustrations on presidential elections

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 ...

The ascension of Jesus was the supreme political event of world history. He ascended not so much to a place as to an office. He departed from the arena of humiliation and suffering to enter into his g...

“Good work! You did your job well” (Matt. 25:23 MSG). That phrase reminds me of a story Joe Stowell told me about a time he met the president at the White House. Joe was president of Moody Bible Insti...

Angela Merkel breaks almost every stereotype we have about world leaders. Her appearances and actions are plain and modest.  She's humble. She couldn't care less about showmanship or fancy dis...

In many Christian lands Epiphany is the most important feast of Christmas. Especially in Latin countries the arrival of the Wise Men, the Three Kings, looms large in the imagination. My native city, N...

If we lack money and power, we can still feel successful if we have the respect of our peers. As a young minister without wealth or power, I loved being called “Reverend.” It was an ego trip for me wh...

Did you know that ever since 1811 (when someone who had defrauded the government anonymously sent $5 to Washington D.C.) the U.S. Treasury has operated a Conscience Fund? Since that time almost $3.5 m...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the sobering truth of what happens to many leaders when they climb the “ladder of success”: The ground at the foot of the ladde...

While I don’t agree with late professor and scholar Marcus Borg on significant theological positions, I appreciate how he described the context surrounding Jesus’ new paradigm of kingdom living: In hi...

There was a story going around about the Special Olympics. For the hundred-yard dash, there were nine contestants, all of them so-called physically or mentally disabled. All nine of them assembled at ...

In any polarized situation, the overriding human tendency is to draw a line with oneself and one’s allies on the good side and the opposing party on the wicked side, with very little attempt made by e...

We must continue to affirm the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ. For he is unique in his incarnation (the one and only God-man), unique in his atonement (only he has died for the sins of the wo...

The way most of us serve keeps us in control. We choose whom, when, where and how we will serve. We stay in charge. Jesus is calling for something else. He is calling us to be servants. When we make t...

When I was in Moscow in 1990 preaching at the Moscow Baptist Church, just blocks from the Kremlin, I told a packed crowd of worshipers that all through human history, as far back as recorded time and ...

In a speech given at his father’s (former Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau) funeral, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shares this story about an experience he had with his father when he was a young b...

Athletes come up with creative portrayals of Jesus that elude modern scholarship. Norm Evans, former Miami Dolphins lineman, wrote in his book On God’s Squad, “I guarantee you Christ would be the to...

T. S. Eliot once described the current human endeavor as that of finding a system of order so perfect that we will not have to be good. The way of Jesus tells us, by contrast, that any number of syste...

During each full moon, believing himself equal to the Roman gods, the Roman emperor Caligula would summon the moon goddess to share his bedchamber. When he asked Aulus Vitellius—a member of the Roman ...

Seek not in courts, nor palaces, Nor royal curtains draw; But search the stable, see your God, Extended on the straw.

The great American statesman and president Thomas Jefferson was a man of science who did not believe in miracles but really liked Jesus. Unfortunately, right next to Jesus’ ethical teachings are stori...

Writer Philip Yancey notes that toward the end of his life, Albert Einstein removed the portraits of two scientists–Newton and Maxwell–from his wall. He replaced those with portraits of Gandhi and Sch...

In the ancient world, a place where the veil between the earthly and spiritual was easily pierced, rumors and gossip about great leaders being born of the gods, especially amongst royals, was somewhat...

Mr. Sam Rayburn was Speaker of the United States House of Representatives longer than any other man in our history. There is a story about him that reveals the kind of man he really was. The teenage ...

The saints of the church flicker like candles along a dark corridor. They are not 1400-watt LED floodlights to blind you with their brilliance; those are the celebrities. A celebrity is a flashbulb st...

The Protestant Reformer John Calvin (1509-1564) arrived in Geneva to lead the city’s church in 1536, but not, as we might imagine, to universal acceptance. Rather, there was significant resistance and...

One of the best stories of humility is that of a man who arrived in 1953 at the Chicago railroad station to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He stepped off the train, a tall man with bushy hair and a bi...

Tradition has it that Jennie Jerome, who would eventually become Winston Churchill’s mother, once had dinner with the British politician William Gladstone. She left the meal thinking Gladstone was the...

“Casey at the Bat” has got to be the most well-known sports poem in American history. The “Mudville nine” are down four to two, with one inning left with two outs. Two men wait at second and third bas...

On Monday morning, February 2008, every sports page in the world heralded the New York Giants’ astonishing Super Bowl upset over the undefeated New England Patriots. And the big story within the story...

H.G. Wells, himself an atheist, makes this point about the nature of greatness as it relates to Jesus: A historian like myself, who doesn’t even call himself a Christian, finds the picture centering...