Sermon Illustrations on living life

Our family is radical, but we are definitely not Amish—although we love to eat the fruit, vegetables, meat, and cheese produced by our Amish neighbors forty miles away in Lancaster County, Pennsylvani...

We can learn a thing or two about discipleship and the discipline required of a disciple from our fourth-century monastic brothers and sisters. Like them, we do basic, ordinary activities every day. W...

[T]he old adage “it’s the journey, not the destination that matters most” is particularly true of modern pilgrimage. If the destination is the point, I can get to Santiago from anywhere in the world i...

[Speaking about art] As you climb the stairs of quality, you’ll meet individual works that you’ll need for the rest of your life, works that will thrill you, energize you, lift your soul, soothe you, ...

If there’s one thing I know for sure in the kingdom of God it’s this: the thing we often think is The Thing is often not the thing but is, in fact, only a thing. We come forward with a Huge Life Decis...

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...

During a retreat at the Taizé compound in France, a young American shared a remarkable discovery. He said: “Back home, surrounded by all my possessions, I often feel uncertain about many things. Here,...

The award-winning and now venerable filmmaker Wim Wenders recently put out a new movie called “Perfect Days.” It was filmed in Japan and follows the daily life of Hirayama, a cleaner of public t...

But hope is hard to come by. I should know. I remember the time when I was once busy dying. It wasn’t long after I had broken my neck in a diving accident that I spent one particularly hopeless week 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...

Philip Yancey writes of a spiritual seeker who interrupted his busy, acquisitive life to spend a few days in a monastery. “I hope your stay is a blessed one,” said the monk who showed him to his simpl...

When I think of the way God allows His servants to suffer, I can’t help but remember the classic story of poor Jack, who was out jogging. As he passed a cliff, he got a little too close to the edge, a...

In his highly book, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the importance of finding balance, even as life seems to pull us in different directions: Overextending yourself is stretching your physic...

Compassion is expressed in gentleness. When I think of persons I know who model for me the depths of spiritual life, I am struck by their gentleness. Their eyes communicate the residue of solitary bat...

I have tried to serve God faithfully all my life. Though I have not been perfect, I have tried to passionately follow Him. And now this God whom I have been following has given me this disease because...

As a study assistant to the Anglican pastor and writer John Stott during my early years as a believer, I witnessed John’s faithfulness in public and private, as a highly visible speaker and as a nearl...

James Stockdale and what is now known as the Stockdale Paradox comes from his experience as a prisoner of war for seven years during the Vietnam War. The Stockdale Paradox, made famous in Jim Collins’...

Reading the Bible without applying it to your life can be downright dangerous. On August 3, 1996, Melvin Hitchens, sat on his front porch and read the Bible. After his Bible reading, this 66 year old ...

Roman imprisonments were brutal. There was no concern for prisoner comfort, no plan for meals or for medical care, and no concern for a just and speedy trial. Paul’s imprisonment in Caesarea went on f...

The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, “Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can...

First Chronicles 4:9-10 could be forgiven for being called the text that roared, once Bruce Wilkinson got his hands on it and wrote a little book called The Prayer of Jabez. This book, which was relea...

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. . ....

You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental ...

Many years ago a senior executive of the then Standard Oil Company made a wrong decision that cost the company more than $2 million. John D. Rockefeller was then running the firm. On the day the news ...

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...

There is a tendency among readers and scholars of Genesis 2:16-17 to focus on the prohibition of verse 17: “but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” …I want to pause to cons...

Steve Jobs was one of the biggest somebodies of our time. He said, "Most people never pick up the phone and ask, and that's what separates the people who do things from the people who just dr...

A blind father, proud of his son who played Rugby at its namesake school, would listen intently to the roar of the crowd and the cheers for the winning team. Though he never saw his son in action, he ...

A student of mine called me late one evening after worship. He was really excited on the other end, and I had to ask him to slow down. So, he says, “Mother Kim, this strange thing happened to me today...

In one of the classic scenes from Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, the misfortunate young orphan, Oliver, is stuck in a workhouse, laboring for long hours and getting barely enough gruel to keep h...