Sermon Illustrations on courage

St. Columba was an Irish monk and abbot, who is largely responsible for the evangelization of Scotland. He founded the monastery at Iona, which became a training ground and launching point for further...

The following story by professor and author A. J. Swoboda is a vivid example of how shame works in our lives, often causing us to hide and run away from the pain and embarrassment: One of the greate...

On May 1, 2023, a small aircraft carrying seven passengers crashed deep in the Amazon rainforest, one of the most remote regions on Earth. The Cessna had been flying between two villages in southern C...

In a quiet hospital room in North Carolina, an eager young doctor with a bright future evaluates his elderly patient with not much future left at all. She has a terminal heart condition, inoperable. A...

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence…. Faith, being belief that isn...

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...

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 ...

There are few Christian authors more respected than C. S. Lewis. After his conversion to Christ at age 33, he would spend the rest of his life writing iconic Christian works. However, his relationship...

Have you ever noticed that the phrases in our culture favor doubt over faith? The famed missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin pointed this out when we speak of “Honest doubts” and “blind faith”. ...

I missed that confession is not just a commandment, not just one of the “steps to salvation”—it is a means of God’s grace. The word confess, which means to assent or agree, is the English translation ...

The heart is used in Scripture as the most comprehensive term for the authentic person. It is the part of our being where we desire, deliberate, and decide. It has been described as “the place of cons...

A missionary was preaching in the village market, and some of the people were laughing at him because he was not a very handsome man. He took it for a time, and then he said to the crowd, “It is true ...

From his start in life, you would not have expected Andrei Borisovich Bloom to have ended up Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, founder of the Russian Orthodox diocese for Great Britain and Ireland. Bo...

We must tune our ears to hear God’s voice. It’s like the child who was told by his father during a symphony orchestra concert, “Listen for the flutes in this song. Don’t they sound beautiful?” The chi...

A Frontier Fellowship mobilizer once met a Chinese monk while leading a vision trip. Through a translator she said to him, “We are all followers of Jesus. Do you know Jesus?” The friendly monk replie...

I don’t know what I did wrong. But he had that “calmer than calm” look that hid a rage inside. I picked up the phone and saw her name. Not now. I can’t handle her right now. I scanned the room, lookin...

I’ve been reading Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What . Miller took this point to an even further extreme. In his book, he tells a story about one occasion when he was speaking to a class at...

There’s a story of a young girl on a plane who was reading her Bible, and there was a businessman sitting next to her. He looked over to her and he said, you don’t really believe that do you?” And she...

The Gospel as such has no native country. He who goes out humbly with Christ in the world of all races will perpetually discover the multiple, but constant, relevance of what he takes. It takes a whol...

What’s the worst good news you’ve ever received? Here are a few that come to mind for me. “Mr. Halter, this is Bill from the Ford service department. I’ve got some good news for you. All the smoke yo...